Navy Lt. Joy Bright Hancock carried both sorrow and pride when she christened a destroyer named for Navy Lt. Cmdr. Lewis Hancock, her second husband to die in a crash aboard a Navy rigid airship. The 1943 ceremony marked another historic step in her remarkable naval career.

Lewis Hancock was executive officer of the 680 foot Navy dirigible Shenandoah. He was among 14 people killed when the airship encountered a violent storm and crashed near Caldwell, Ohio, on Sept. 3, 1925, little more than a year after the couple married.

At the Federal Shipbuilding & Drydock Company in Kearny, New Jersey, Hancock gripped the traditional bottle of champagne and selected a smudge on the hull as her target. She swung the bottle and declared, “I christen thee Lewis Hancock,” before saluting as the Fletcher class destroyer entered the water on Aug. 1, 1943.

Hancock thereby became the first Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service officer to christen a United States combatant ship. She was also the first woman serving on active duty to christen an American combatant vessel.

In her autobiography, “Lady in the Navy,” Hancock called the christening “a really grand affair but my deepest feeling was not about the pride of sponsorship but the clear joy of knowing that Lewis Hancock had again gone to sea.”

The loss was painfully familiar. While enlisted during World War I, Hancock advanced from Yeoman to Chief Yeoman at the U.S. Naval Air Station in Cape May, New Jersey, where she met Navy Lt. Charles Gray Little.

“Never shall I forget his arrival in a gray Packard roadster, a dashingly tall blond young man with a New England accent,” she later wrote. Little served during World War I as a senior flight commander and chief pilot of dirigibles in France, then continued piloting large airships after the war.

Image Credit: DoW

Hancock and Little married in October 1920. Less than a year later, the 26 year old Little died when the rigid airship USS ZR-2 suffered structural failure and crashed into the Humber River near Hull, England, during an Aug. 24, 1921, test flight.

“Of the 52 persons aboard, only one American and five British survived. My husband was not one of them,” Hancock wrote.

Hancock experienced nearly disabling periods of mourning following the deaths of both husbands, but each time she returned to civilian work with the Navy. “Deep as was my sorrow,” she wrote, “I welcomed the return, even though slow, of a sense of reality and the renewal of a desire to do something.”

That determination eventually became an effort to secure a lasting military role for women. Between the wars, Hancock attended the Foreign Service School, earned a private pilot’s license and became head of the Editorial and Research section within the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics.

After Pearl Harbor, the Navy confronted a shortage of men needed to carry out missions in the Atlantic and Pacific. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Navy Women’s Reserve Act on July 30, 1942, officially establishing the WAVES as part of the Navy.

Hancock was sworn in as a lieutenant and said she helped devise the “E” portion of the WAVES name. She believed the word “Emergency” would reassure older admirals who viewed women’s military service as a temporary response to the crisis.

The women quickly demonstrated their wartime value. On July 30, 1943, Roosevelt marked the WAVES’ first anniversary by declaring, “Thousands of fighting men are now at battle stations because they were released from vital shore jobs by women.”

Image Credit: Naval History and Heritage Command

Hancock advised WAVES members that they had entered what had previously been considered a man’s world and would need to prove themselves step by step. She also observed among Navy men “a sincere feeling that we were worth shipmates.”

Promoted to captain after the war, Hancock became the third director of the WAVES in July 1946. She joined WAC Army Col. Mary Hallaren in lobbying Congress for legislation granting women permanent military status and gained support from Adm. Chester Nimitz and Army Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Eisenhower testified that he had initially been “like most old soldiers, violently against it,” but later supported permanent status for women for a direct reason: “We need them.” President Harry S Truman signed the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act on July 12, 1948.

The law authorized women to serve as permanent regular and reserve members across every military branch, though restrictions remained on direct combat roles and combat aircraft. Hancock continued as WAVES director and Assistant Chief of Naval Personnel for Women until retiring from the Navy in 1953.

Near the end of her service, Navy Capt. Frederick Wolsieffer introduced Hancock at a graduation exercise in Bainbridge, Maryland, as “my esteemed friend and colleague, the Assistant Chief of Naval Personnel for Women, the First Lady of the Navy, Capt. Joy Bright Hancock.”