Alene Duerk

The USS Constitution is a sacred vessel to the United States Navy. Old Ironsides, launched in 1797, rarely sails out of its home port in Boston Harbor. Until the 1970s, those few ceremonial sailings were male-only affairs.

But in September 1972, the first female flag officer in the Navy, Rear Adm. Alene Duerk, oversaw a ceremony swearing in nine new recruits on board.

Duerk, born in Defiance, Ohio, in 1920, enlisted in the Navy Nurse Corps in 1943. Two years later, she signed up to board the hospital ship Benevolence, headed for the Marshall Islands and expected to care for the wounded who would survive an Allied invasion of Japan.

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war in Japan, but not Duerk’s career.

She returned to active duty in 1951, training nurses who were headed overseas to the Korean War. Almost two decades later, she had risen to become chief of the Navy Nurse Corps at a time when the service was looking to promote a woman to flag officer status. 

At her swearing-in ceremony, administered by Navy Secretary John Warner, the admiral in charge of Naval Operations kissed Duerk on the cheek.

“When you are the first woman in any high-profile role everyone is watching you,” Duerk told an interviewer in 2016.

Duerk retired in 1975 and died in 2018.

“I didn’t go into the Navy for a lifetime,” she told an interviewer in 2016. “I went in for six months. But I had an amazing career and have a lot of good memories. I hope I did my duty.”

— Reid Wilson