Maggie Gee

Maggie Gee in her WASP uniform.

Courtesy of Maggie Gee, Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) Collection.

Quick Facts

Significance:

One of two Chinese American women to serve as a WASP pilot; physicist and researcher; political activist

Place of Birth:

Berkeley, CA

Date of Birth:

August 5, 1923

Place of Death:

Oakland, CA

Date of Death:

February 1, 2013

Place of Burial:

Oakland, CA

Cemetery Name:

Mountain View Cemetery

Whatever the field, Maggie Gee never stopped pushing boundaries. During World War II, she was one of only three women to work as a drafter at Mare Island Naval Shipyard before becoming one of only two Chinese American women to serve in the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP). After the war, she gained recognition as a research physicist and for her devotion to political activism and public service.

Early Life in Berkeley, California

Margaret “Maggie” Gee was born Gee Mei Gue in Berkeley, California in 1923. She was one of six children. Gee’s mother, born in the U.S., lost her citizenship under the Cable Act of 1922 when she married Gee’s father, an Asian immigrant unable to naturalize. Congress began passing legislation restricting Chinese immigration in the late 1800s.[1]

Despite widespread segregation and discrimination during her youth, Gee fondly remembered her childhood in Berkeley for its racially integrated community and schools. Her mother, involved in the neighborhood community and local Chinese church, modeled a dedication to community service that Gee admired and later mirrored.[2]

When her father died in 1929, Gee’s mother survived through extended familial and community support but also through grit and hard work. She learned to drive when few women knew how. She also picked up whatever work she could, including sewing and housework. World War II offered her a unique opportunity: a well-paying job in the defense industry. Despite being older than most women entering the workforce, Gee’s mother became a “Rosie the Riveter.” She worked in the Richmond shipyards as a burner (light welding) throughout the war.[3] 

World War II: The Call to Service

World War II changed the demographic landscape of the Bay Area. This included Gee’s hometown of Berkeley, and particularly nearby Richmond, California, where her mother worked. Almost overnight, the need for workers at the Richmond shipyards attracted tens of thousands of migrants from all over the country. The city became a boomtown. Gee remembers how a sense of community grew during the war years. Neighbors banded together to take care of each other in a difficult time.[4]

When the war started, Gee was in her first year of college at UC Berkeley. She watched her male friends leave college to go fight, and often die, in the war. She felt moved “to do something” to contribute to the war effort. With her mother as a model, Gee sought a well-paying defense job. Mathematically inclined, she took a course to become a drafter, someone who makes detailed technical drawings.[5]

After passing the civil service exam, she worked at Mare Island Naval Shipyard for a year assisting an engineer in repairing ships. As one of only three women in the engineering department of a hundred, she grew close to the other women. While Gee found the work exciting, she and the other two draftswomen felt the pull to join one of the women’s services.[6]

Becoming a WASP

During her childhood, Gee spent many weekends with her family at the Oakland airfield watching the planes take off. One weekend, her idol, Amelia Earhart, waved at her. From then on, learning to fly became Gee’s dream, but she never thought she would learn since it was expensive.[7] The war changed everything. When the opportunity came for women to fly as part of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), Gee and her two fellow draftswomen used the wages they earned at Mare Island Naval Shipyard to attend flight school in Nevada. While the military trained men from scratch, the WASP only considered women with flight training.[8]

Out of twenty-five thousand women who applied to join the WASP, the program only selected a few thousand to train in Sweetwater, Texas. Of those selected, only 1,074 graduated. The program did not accept any African American pilots and only a handful of non-white pilots. Gee was one of only two Chinese American women to graduate – the other being Hazel Ying Lee – whom she never met. Together, the members of the WASP become the first group of women to fly American military aircraft.[9]

At the time, the WASP was considered a civilian organization assisting the U.S. military. This meant that despite undergoing the same military training as men, women did not receive military status. The WASP pilots performed vital, often risky, functions in order to free up male pilots for deployment. Gee explained, “We were pilots towing targets, doing mock gunnery missions, delivering planes, instructing, and test pilots.” For the thirty-eight WASPs who died in service, their families did not receive any benefits. They also had to pay the cost to transport their loved one’s bodies back home.[10]

WASP Service

Gee served as a WASP pilot for one year, stationed at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. During this time, she grew close with her fellow WASP pilots. They all shared a deep love for flying, as well as patriotism. She reflected, “Because you’re living with them day in day out, and you’re struggling with them, you bond with them. There’s a lot of bonding there.” In many cases, the bonds between the women lasted a lifetime.[11]

Gee and her fellow WASP comrades enjoyed the shock of proving women could fly, but many of their male counterparts resented seeing them fly. Besides hostility from some male instructors, Gee remembered, “There was a lot of sexual harassment, but we just accepted it.” At the time, sexual harassment was a normalized part of society. Gee and her fellow pilots had no recourse but to accept the harassment if they wished to continue flying.[12]

In addition to experiencing sexism, Gee recalled occasionally being mistaken as the Japanese enemy. In a war in which the American media depicted Japan as a “racial menace,” attacks on the Japanese enemy sometimes became a generalized hatred of all Asian peoples. Gee said having her identity mistaken made her feel “like an exhibit at a country fair, a two-headed cow, the amazing Chinese-American WASP.” She believed that a desire to differentiate herself from the enemy drove her to demonstrate her patriotism even more than she might have.[13]

When the WASP pushed for military status in 1944, Congress disbanded the organization. According to Gee, men wanted their jobs and “just didn’t like to see the women fly.” Despite this abrupt ending, Gee believed her time as a WASP expanded her world and perspective, shaping the course of her life to come.[14]

Physicist and Political Activist

When Gee returned from her WASP service, she watched the opportunities women had gained in the workforce during WWII fade away. “[T]hings just kind of began to fall apart,” she explained, noting how the sense of community and common purpose defining the war years dispersed. For Gee, this return to a pre-war pattern sometimes expressed itself through racial discrimination. When attempting to rent a place in Berkeley, landlords would not rent to her because she was Chinese American.[15] 

While Gee felt “hurt, more than anything else” by the discrimination she experienced, she fought back. Many years later, she served on a commission on housing discrimination in Berkeley. Gee applied the same determination she showed during the war to local politics. Her desire to help her community eventually evolved into a long and fruitful career in state and Democratic party politics. Her influence landed her a spot on the 1992 Democratic Party Platform Committee.[16]

Gee also returned to U.C. Berkeley and completed a degree in physics. Beginning in the late 1950s, she earned success in another male-dominated field. For thirty years, she worked as a research physicist at Berkeley’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She worked on weapons systems and the lab’s nuclear and magnetic fusion programs.[17]

In 1977, after years of fighting for recognition, Public Law 95-202 granted former WASPs veteran status with limited benefits. In 2010, President Barack Obama presented Gee and the surviving WASPs with the Congressional Gold Medal. After a long and illustrious life, Maggie Gee died in 2013 at the age of 89.[18]
 

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Notes

[1] Maggie Gee, “Rosie the Riveter World War II American Homefront Oral History Project,” by Leah McGarrigle, Robin Li, and Kathryn Stine, University of California (2003), 6-8, 11-12. (“Gee interview” hereafter.)
[2] Gee interview, 16-17, 28.
[3] Ibid., 13, 18-24.  Gee’s mother was 47, ten years older than the likely average age of Rosies, when she began working in the shipyards. 
[4] On Richmond during the war, see Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1996). Gee interview, 41-43.
[5] Gee interview, 46-9. Drafter is the gender-neutral term for the work Gee performed during the war. In her interview, Gee used draftsman (the dominant term at the time) to describe her work and the interviewers also used draftswoman. All three terms are interchangeable. 
[6] Gee interview, 49-50, 61, 68.
[7] Marissa Moss, Sky High: The True Story of Maggie Gee (Berkeley, Calif.: Tricycle Press, 2009).
[8] Gee interview, 65, 68, 79, 94-5. Cindy Carpien, “Female WWII Pilots: The Original Fly Girls,” NPR, March 9, 2010.
[9] Maggie Gee, a virtual exhibition from the California Museum. Gee interview, 66, 68, 72, 81, 91.
[10] Gee interview, 74-5. Carpien, “Female WWII Pilots.”
[11] Gee interview, 73, 84.
[12] Ibid., 85-86. 
[13] Moss, Sky High. Gee interview, 23. For more on how the war in the Pacific was racialized, see John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986).
[14] Gee interview, 56, 74.
[15] Ibid., 51, 98-9. For an overview of the postwar home front, see Megan Springate, “The American Home Front After World War II: The End of the War and Its Legacies,” National Park Service. For more on housing segregation during and in the wake of World War II, see Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017); Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 
[16] Gee interview, 51, 105. See also Delaney Brewer, “Biographies: Margaret Gee,” National Museum of the United States Army.
[17] “Biographies: Margaret Gee.” See also Margaret Gee, “Stories of the Development of Large Scale Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,” by George Michael, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, February 11, 1998. 
[18] “Biographies: Margaret Gee.” “Maggie Gee Obituary,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 9-10, 2013. 

Sources

Brewer, Delaney. “Biographies: Margaret Gee.” National Museum of the United States Army. Margaret Gee
Carpien, Cindy. “Female WWII Pilots: The Original Fly Girls.” National Public Radio. March 9, 2010. Female WWII Pilots: The Original Fly Girls: NPR  
Dower, John W. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.
Gee, Maggie. Rosie the Riveter World War II American Homefront Oral History Project. By Leah McGarrigle, Robin Li, and Kathryn Stine. University of California, 2003. https://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/roho/ucb/text/gee_maggie.pdf 
Gee, Margaret. “Stories of the Development of Large Scale Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.” By George Michael. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, February 11, 1998. https://www.computer-history.info/Page1.dir/pages/Gee.html 
Lemke-Santangelo, Gretchen. Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community. Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1996.
Maggie Gee. A virtual exhibition from the California Museum. Maggie Gee - California Museum
“Maggie Gee.” Museum of Chinese in America. Maggie Gee 
“Maggie Gee Obituary.” San Francisco Chronicle. February 9 -10, 2013. Maggie Gee Obituary (2013) - Berkeley, CA - San Francisco Chronicle 
Moss, Marissa. Sky High: The True Story of Maggie Gee. Berkeley, Calif.: Tricycle Press, 2009.
Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017.
Sugrue, Thomas. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

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Article by Nicole Martin, PhD, Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation and Education. This article was funded by the National Council on Public History's cooperative agreement with the National Park Service.