Most of the history of women in the fire service is lost to us. It was not reported or gathered or preserved, and the names of the hundreds or thousands of women who served their communities on bucket brigades, fire watches, and volunteer fire companies from deep in the past until the 1970's will never be known.

The honor of being the first known woman firefighter goes to an African-American woman named Molly Williams. Held under slavery by a member of Oceanus Engine Company #11 in New York City. Williams made a distinguished presence in her calico dress and checked apron, and was said to be "as good a fire laddie as many of the boys." Her work was noted particularly during the blizzard of 1818. Male firefighters were scarce, but Molly took her place with the men on the dragropes and pulled the pumper to the fire through the deep snow.

In the 1820's, Marina Betts, a tall and impressive French-Indian woman from the Shinbone Alley district of Pittsburgh worked on the bucket brigades at fires. Her specialty, along with passing buckets, was recruiting "volunteers" from among the male spectators. Since she felt that "menfolks should be working" when there was a fire, those within reach of her bucket received a dousing of water; those more distant were intimidated by her imposing presence and sharp tongue. Betts remained a firefighter for ten years.

In 1859, at the opposite end of the country and social spectrum, the San Francisco heiress Lillie Hitchcock Coit became a fire buff at the age of fifteen. Seeing a fire on Telegraph Hill, she stepped into line with the short-handed Knickerbocker Engine Company #5, grabbed hold of the drag rope, and urged the fire crew on. After that, up until the time of her marriage, she attended every fire of the engine company, which made her an honorary member. For the rest of her life, she wore a gold "5" pinned to her dress, and signed her letters, "Lillie H. Coit, 5."

One October night in 1875, the Disston Lumber Mill in Atlantic City, New Jersey, caught fire. The resort town was protected by only one volunteer fire company, United States Fire Company No. 1. Pitching in to help out at the huge blaze was a 20-year-old woman named Adelheid von Buckow. She worked all night long, pumping water with the old hand pumper alongside the regular members of the company, who were amazed by her strength and endurance. Several years later, von Buckow married one of the members of the company, and before the company disbanded in 1904, they voted her into membership. Adelheid von Buckow Specht remains the only woman ever to be a member of the Atlantic City Fire Department.

In 1895, Carrie Rockefeller was chosen as a regular member of Engine Company #1 in West Haven, Connecticut, "for her valuable services in helping to pull the apparatus."

In Great Britain, the Girton College Fire Brigade was established in 1878 at this women's college just outside Cambridge. The idea for the brigade came to two students as they watched a fire in a haystack near the college. The college at the time had three small hand pumpers stored in the building's corridors, but no one ever practiced with them, and they were frequently left without water. The students designed a structure and a plan of action for the brigade, and weekly training for brigade members began, under the supervision of a London Fire Brigade captain. The Girton College Fire Brigade existed until 1932, when the advent of motorized fire equipment brought the college under the protection of the Cambridge Fire Brigade.

In the second decade of the twentieth century, fire protection for much of the Los Angeles area was provided by mixed companies of paid and volunteer firefighters; All-volunteer companies predominated in the outlying areas. In 1912, Chief Archibald Eley decided to encourage the formation of women's volunteer fire companies in residential areas that had a shortage of men in the daytime. The women were trained in the operation of hand-drawn, two-wheeled hose reels; a contemporary photo shows five women in long dresses pulling the rig down a suburban street.

Captain Marie Stack was put in charge of the LAFD's first all-woman company, which consisted of two other firefighters besides herself. Other women's companies included the Manhattan Place Volunteer Fire Brigade, made up of "socially prominent women" in the western outskirts of L.A.; it was later renamed the Society Fire Department. Because of the large size of the territory this company covered, the women attached a device to their hose reelthat allowed them to tow it to the fire behind one of their automobiles. Two years later, the Wilmington Park Fire Ladies, under the command of Chief Louise Leonardo, formed yet a third all-women's company. While these companies were short-lived, and certainly the women were never regarded as peers by male volunteer firefighters, we must believe that the women themselves took their responsibilities seriously, and that their efforts enhanced the level of fire protection in their communities.

Early in this century, Silver Spring, Maryland, now a major suburb of Washington, D.C., was still a small country town. In May of 1915, the town formed an all-women's volunteer fire company. Twelve years later, the company was still in operation, and boasted of being "the only fire company manned by women."

Back in New Jersey, Emma Vernell at the age of 50 became a member of Westside Hose Company #1 (now part of the Red Bank Volunteer Fire Department) after her husband died in the line of duty in April of 1926. She was a fully qualified and active firefighter for many years, and was the first woman officially recognized as a firefighter by the State of New Jersey.

In 1936, also in New Jersey, the borough of Roosevelt formed a municipal government and chartered its first volunteer fire company. When the president of the fire company asked for volunteers, his wife, Augusta Chasan, was the first to volunteer. Chasan became known as the "Fire Lassie of Jersey Homesteads", and said that despite her small stature (5'1"), "I did my share of the work, and they respected me." When she was nearly 90 years old, Chasan was still making one "fire call" a year, riding the engine in the Fourth of July parade.

Nearly a decade later women became volunteer firefighters in New Jersey (and in many other parts of the country) during World War II, to take the place of men called to war. The first women members joined the Bradley Gardens Volunteer Fire Company in 1944; before becoming firefighters, the women had served in the department's ladies' auxiliary. In nearby Port Washington, New York, the fire department's ambulance service was turned over to women during the war. Mrs. Lee Warrender was given "an opportunity to prove herself capable of this kind of work...(S)he proved beyond doubt that she can replace the firemen who have gone to the front," and received the gold badge of the volunteer "fireman."

The fire departments at Scott Field and the Savanna Ordnance Depot, both in northern Illinois, were entirely staffed by women for part of the war years. Among the firefighters at Scott Field were Elsie Hollenkamp, Evelyn Peters, Arline Pressel and Leona Sprehn. At the Savanna Depot, a newspaper photograph of the period shows fourteen women firefighters with their engine. The accompanying article lists twelve additional women as members of the brigade, which was drawn from Hanover, Dubuque, Mt. Carroll, and the surrounding area.

Jo Carol Hamilton, the daughter and grand-daughter of firefighters and herself married to a firefighting instructor, began "helping at grass fires" in Shirley, Arkansas, in the mid-1960's. She later became a fire dispatcher, then an apparatus driver, and finally the chief of the Shirley Volunteer Fire Department, the first woman fire chief in Arkansas. She was also a fire instructor and wrote articles for national publications about women in the fire service. Hamilton learned from her own experiences the importance of proper technique in firefighting. At 5'3" and 105 pounds, she said, "I can normally handle an inch-and-a-half hose by myself. Yet I've seen it knock down big men who didn't know how to handle it. The difference is all in knowing how."

All-women fire companies developed in King County, California, and Woodbine, Texas, in the 1960's. The "Firettes," billed as "King County's fire-fightingest firefighters," were organized in 1962 to provide firefighting and first-aid services to King County Fire District #44 during the daylight hours when male volunteers were scarce. The Firettes attended a firefighters' conference in Yakima, Washington, and put on a demonstration where they extinguished flammable liquid fires, pit fires, and vehicle fires.

In 1967, several women in the small town of Woodbine, Texas, grew concerned about the risk posed by brush fires. The nearest fire department was ten miles away, and vegetation fires would often consume a building before fire equipment arrived. The women decided to form their own volunteer fire department. They held raffles and bake sales to raise $125 to buy a 1942 Ford pumper from a nearby department, and received training from neighboring jurisdictions and from the U.S. Forest Service. Undeterred by a lack of protective gear or a formal communications system, the Woodbine Ladies Fire Department grew to include 23 members and protected their community from fire for eleven years.