Groundbreakers: Military gave opportunities to Meridian women

Published 12:31 pm Saturday, April 1, 2017

During the 1960s, a time when many women faced challenges in their professional lives, two Meridian women, Maude Earby Touchstone and Gene “Granny” Henley, began their careers in military service, paving the way for other women to join a male-dominated field. 

Touchstone, Harriet to her friends, said she joined the Army in 1962 after failing out of college. 

“There weren’t very many women in the Army, especially from Mississippi,” Touchstone, now 77,  said. “When you were going through the airport you’d just feel the eyes on you.”

Touchstone served as a switchboard operator, hiked through knee-high mud and keept her hair cut short to follow army regulations. 

“When I told my family that I was joining the Army my daddy turned pale white,” Touchstone said. “Women in the army had a bad reputation then.”

Touchstone said that people, at the time, believed women lost their innocence and purity in the Army.

“That’s the reason why they didn’t want me in there,” Touchstone said.

In 1977, she joined the Air National Guard and worked in communications, retiring in 1992 to care for her sick mother. 

“I was scared they would send me overseas,” Touchstone said. Though she’d previously lived in Brooklyn and Japan with the Army as well as Turkey and Italy with the National Guard, Touchstone wanted to spend time with her 92-year-old mother.

“I went through a change of life when I was in the military,” Touchstone said. “Before, I kind of had a temper.”

But her supervisors made “military women” out of her and countless others, a career Touchstone would recommend to anyone who asked.

“If you want to travel, that’s the best way to do it – you don’t have to pay and the benefits alone are worth it,” Touchstone said.

By the end of her time with the Guard, when she transitioned to working at the post office, Touchstone saw more and more women in the service. 

“There was a huge amount of women,” Touchstone said. “Now you have all the other women to compete with.”

When Henley started as a civilian working with the National Guard in 1967, only two other women worked on the base: a switchboard operator and a secretary. 

“They were looking for a lady to do the key punch,” Henley said. “They said a man didn’t like to do that and that’s why they chose a lady.”

Henley sat most of the day, wiring boards and debugging the programs of the IBM system she used in data processing. 

“In my interview, they asked, ‘How did I feel about working with a bunch of men?’ and I said, ‘All I know is men,’ ” Henley said, mentioning her husband and three brothers. “I don’t have a problem with men.”

Henley quickly grew close with her coworkers, both men and women, earning the nickname “Granny” when she shared her excitement about becoming a grandmother for the first time.

“I couldn’t have asked for a better group of people,” Henley said. 

Though Henley was the only woman in her department, she had a nationwide group of women in her same position who worked together to debug their programs.

“We worked together – all the ladies – to try to get our programs working,” Henley said. “Without them, it would have been more difficult and I wouldn’t have all of my friends (today).”

Henley retired early, in 1989, to spend time with her husband, John, who died in 2002. By 1989, many women had joined the Guard and the first wave of women now gathers annually to bond and remember a different time.

For Henley, her career with the Guard left her with many happy memories and a chance to befriend people across the county.

“It wasn’t like a lot of other places… they saw me through a lot and they still would,” Henley said. “I was their Granny. I was proud to be their Granny.”