Having once waged a battle with the Navy over its refusal to let me join male reporters in taking a submarine ride from Seattle to Everett, I feel entitled, if not qualified, to comment on the current push to let women sailors serve aboard subs.

    My application to make the cruise aboard the Nautilus was rejected because I was a woman, the Navy said. Submarines are not built or equipped to accommodate females, it said. There were no separate heads aboard for women to use in case they had to go during the trip, it said.

    I responded that we had only one bathroom at my house that was used by both sexes with no problems. And that I would do my best to hold it throughout the trip if that would help but the Navy said no. It said no when U.S. Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson spoke up on my behalf along with a number of other prominent folk. No, no, no, said the Navy, and the Nautilus left without me.

    I wrote a newspaper story about it which appeared in newspapers all over the world and made the Navy, I was told, the laughingstock of the Pentagon. A year or so later when the Nautilus came back through Washington again, I was invited to ride from Everett to Seattle and they treated me very well. I was tempted during the trip to write “Adele was here” behind the plumbing in one of the heads but I resisted the urge.

    Anyway, somebody, I’m not sure who but I suspect it was one of those women who insist on really equal equal rights and has friends in high places, is pushing for a review of the Navy’s policy banning women from serving on subs.

    Navy Secretary Ray Mabus is willing. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead says he’s willing, and Joint Chiefs Chair Adm. Mike Mullen has written to the Senate Armed Services Committee saying he’d like to see the policy changed. Any disagreement, apparently, is with the men who serve on the subs.

    We went through the first phase of this back in the 1990s when the push was to let women serve on combat ships, a ban which the Navy repealed in 1994. Barbara Bush said at the time that it would be fine with her “If I thought a woman physically could pick up someone who was wounded and carry them to safety, or if I thought they could throw a hand grenade as far as a man.”

    I wrote that it was a bum idea because men were more powerful than women so they couldn’t necessarily do equal things, an example being that women tennis players and golfers still don’t play in matches with men because they are outmuscled.

    Chiefly, however, the drawback on women in combat that nobody wants to talk about was that they had menstruation to contend with, not to mention PMS. Drugs to halt menses for periods of time were not very successful, and had many bad side effects. I subsequently heard from a supply officer that four times as much toilet paper had to be ordered for women in the service as for the men. Where are they going to put four times as much toilet paper on a submarine?

    Submarines are the most compact vessel in the Navy with every inch of space spoken for. Putting men and women into the same sleeping compartments risks a little too much familiarity so I doubt the wives of submariners think much of the idea. If they have to have separate sleeping quarters, they have to build bigger subs.

    I wish the women’s libbers would cool it on trying to break up the all-male camaraderie aboard submarines. I know their theme song is “Anything you can do, I can do better,” but in this case I doubt that very much.

    Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, WA 98340.