The Officer's Wife
Fifty years ago, feminism was raging. But on a military base, social change required hats, gloves, a keen knowledge of the command structure, and an appreciation for incremental progress
This is women’s history month—and it’s hard to celebrate that and also know that the nation is at war. But perhaps this is a time to remember that the United States military is made up of people, every individual in the service has a family, and those families serve too. This is why, when my friend Murph Kinney shared some thoughts about her mother’s decades as an Air Force chaplain’s life, I asked her to share some memories about her mother—and what she did to sustain a military community, even as that community was in transition to today’s force where women serve in so many roles.
Murph is a retired history professor and Army officer living in western Massachusetts with her wife, Leah, a coonhound mix named Ernie, twelve hens, and Mr. Roo. She is currently completing her memoir about growing up on Air Force bases, “The Chaplain's Daughter: A Field Guide to Sacred Spaces.”
Family Service volunteers in the 1970s; Lois Kinney is seated on right. Image courtesy of Murph Kinney
My mother never called herself a feminist. She would have bristled at the word. She was a chaplain’s wife, an officer’s wife, a woman who owned hats—plural—and wore them to church. She knew exactly which fork to use and how to address a general’s wife at a reception. She had a uniform, too: navy blue, fitted shirt, smart A-line skirt, a nametag reading “Mrs. Kinney,” and a metal bar hanging from her ribbon rack tallying her volunteer hours to the nearest hundred for her work at the base Family Services office. She understood institutional hierarchy the way a chess player understands the board—not as an obstacle, but as the very medium through which things get done.
In the United States Air Force of the early 1970s, an officer’s wife was, functionally, an unpaid extension of her husband’s career. If she caused a scene at the Officers’ Club, he was spoken to, not her. If their child shoplifted at the Base Exchange, the incident appeared in his annual efficiency report. A wife’s behavior was his record, her status was his rank, and her world was bound by whatever the institution had decided women needed, which did not, as it turned out, include access to the base gym.
In 1972, at Blytheville Air Force Base in northeastern Arkansas, my mother decided it was time for that to change.
Janie Barnett, wife of the installation command chaplain—my father’s boss—was my mother’s closest friend and mentor at Blytheville. She was an interested, curious woman, well-spoken, with two teen-aged daughters. My mother looked up to Janie. After all, my mom had been a chaplain’s wife for only four years, but Janie had 15 years of experience. And Janie liked Mom’s flair and style; my mother helped her plan her daughter’s wedding reception later that year.
Both women wanted to be fit. The boiled egg diet and the grapefruit diet each had its season in our house. It was the age of Jack LaLanne, and not yet the age of Jane Fonda. While dieting was fine, Janie and my mother wanted to go to the gym. The base sported a very good gymnasium, with all the latest equipment. In 1972, that meant dumbbells, barbells, squat racks, and an electric body shaper with a moving belt. The problem was that women were not allowed in the gym; there was only one locker room, and it was for men only. Even women in the Women Air Force (women in the military had their own command structure until 1976) were not allowed use of that gym.
My mother asked my father how she could gain access to that equipment, and he suggested making an appointment to speak with the base commander about the situation. So, she and Janie (after Janie also consulted her husband) booked an office call, not disclosing the nature of their visit. I suspect the commander thought they’d be discussing the upcoming “Up With People” concert sponsored by the chapel or the issue of more funding for the Protestant Women of the Chapel.
James and Lois Kinney at a formal military ball, 1972. Image courtesy of Murph Kinney.
The morning of their appointment, Janie drove her blue Chevy Impala to our house, picking up my mother on the way to the commander’s office. Both Janie and my mother wore patterned shift dresses and sensible heels. And they ambushed the commander, telling him that the women Air Force members needed access to the gym to adequately prepare for their annual fitness tests. Why have something on base that these Air Force members couldn’t use? Why restrict something that would enhance readiness of the local units and be instrumental in retention of these military women? I am sure that their tone was earnest—after all, the commander was their husbands’ boss. And I wonder if Janie and my mother didn’t place a surreptitious phone call to the commander’s wife to sound her out before making that office call.
Whatever the backstory, they persuaded the commander to open the gym to women, agreeing on two days a week, two hours each day. As long as locker rooms were open to military women, the commander agreed that female dependents could also use the facility.
My mother and Janie had their victory. And so, from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m., Tuesdays and Thursdays, women could make use of the gym. Janie and my mother went to that facility every time it was open—primarily using the iconic body shaper with its vibrating belt and then walking the perimeter of the gym’s interior, racking up two miles every visit. Inevitably, though, they ran into males who had to be reminded that this was women-only time. Those men loudly and begrudgingly exited the facility only after one woman or another enlisted the aid of the gym manager, not himself a fan of the female incursion, but who had orders to follow.
Fitness was not the only barrier they breached. That same year, she and Janie organized something equally unlikely — a joint potluck between the Protestant Women of the Chapel and the Catholic Women of the Chapel. This was 1972. Vatican II had only recently suggested that Protestants were no longer heretics. The two groups brought their casseroles and Jell-O salads and sat, largely, on opposite sides of the room. The Catholic chaplain prayed; the women on that side crossed themselves. There was, my mother later admitted, considerable side-eye. But they were under the same roof, around the same tables, and that was not nothing. My mother spoke of that venture into ecumenism for years.
Later that summer, my mother occasionally took me with her to the gym. I was ten years old, and I relished being able to lift more than either Janie or my mother. Their purpose was clear — they wanted to tone their bodies, not to build visible muscles. I had other ideas.
But those ideas would never have occurred to me without the office call they made, the case they argued, and the orders that were issued in their wake.
What I’m reading:
Nicholas Boggs’s James Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2025): everything good you have heard about it is true. I am over 100 pages in (yes, it is 400+ pages long), almost 60 of which were read in one sitting yesterday because I couldn’t stop. It is an extraordinary portrait of perhaps the finest writer and essayist of the twentieth century, one that attends closely to Baldwin’s writing, but not in a way that weighs the book down. Most importantly, it tells a nuanced story about what it meant to be gay, Black, poor—and brilliant—in Cold War America.
What I’m doing when you aren’t looking:
Because I am working on a piece about the feminist who put herself on the map by asking women how they experienced sex, I watched “The Disappearance of Shere Hite” (Dir. Nicole Newnham, IFC Films: 2023) Part of what is mesmerizing about it is the extraordinary amount of images, particularly video, that was available to the filmmaker. Although it was made after Hite’s death in 2020, she speaks for herself a great deal of the time.
Hite was breathtakingly beautiful—and just as smart. Publicity for her first bestselling book, The Hite Report (Seven Stories Press, 2003; orig. 1976) tended to emphasize the former, not the latter, and as Hite’s critique of patriarchy grew more pronounced, criticism of her work intensified, to the point that by 2000, she could no longer get her books published in the United States. But this two-hour film not only emphasizes how interesting, complex, and determined she was, but gives her pride of place in the feminist movement that inspired her in the first place.
Short takes:
You heard it here at political Junkie first—but the MAGA splits over Israel are intensifying as the war goes into its third week. “For decades, conservatives were stalwart supporters of the Jewish state, but over the last few years, some have grown disenchanted with Israel and its role in American politics,” Richard Fausset and Ken Bensinger write at The New York Times. Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly, Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor Greene are in the mix. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson “has been selling ball caps, T-shirts and coffee mugs emblazoned with messages like, ‘Neocons are Gay For Israel’ and ‘AIPAC An Offer You Can’t Refuse,’ crude and unsubtle and attacks on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobbying group, and other defenders of Israel.” (March 17, 2026)
Over 1,000 women served in Air Force cockpits during World War II, and while they weren’t allowed in combat, the Women Airfare Service Pilots (WASPs) were a baby step towards women’s full service roles today—and a giant step away from female pilots not just being a novelty item. In 1942, “The war needed pilots, and men were dying quickly,” Ellen Cushing writes at The Atlantic. “By the time the program ended, the WASPs had risked—and in some cases given—their lives to save male pilots a cumulative 60 million miles of flying. But during the war, they were classified as civil servants, no different in the eyes of the government from the female federal employees who typed memos or cooked on bases.” Cushing’s grandmother was one of them. “After the war, they were ineligible for veterans’ benefits, and kept out of both the military and commercial cockpits. For decades, the WASPs lobbied to be recognized as service members.” (March 17, 2026)
Is there something we are missing about Donald Trump’s impulsive, destructive, and almost unexplained Iran venture? No, says New York Times writer Jamelle Bouie. “Even in the absence of a sound and capable executive, it might be possible for the military bureaucracy to handle this conflict if it could count on competent leadership within its own sphere,” Bouie explains, perhaps thinking about George W. Bush’s Iraq War, which went well until it didn’t. “But here again, the president is an obstacle. He is more concerned with promoting friendly faces than finding anyone equipped to handle the job in question. And so the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth—a former Fox News host who lobbied Trump, in his first term, to pardon an accused war criminal — is also ill-equipped, professionally and psychologically, to deal with the dangers, dilemmas and exigencies of conflict.” (March 14, 2026)
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