WASHINGTON (AP) — American women have served and died on the nation’s battlefields from the first. They were nurses and cooks, spies and couriers in the Revolutionary War. Some disguised themselves as men to fight for the Union or the Confederacy. Yet the U.S. military’s official acceptance of women in combat took more than two centuries.

New roles for females have been doled out fitfully, whenever commanders have gotten in binds and realized they needed women’s help.

“The main driver is that it’s been militarily necessary,” says retired Capt. Lory Manning, a 25-year Navy veteran who leads military studies for the Women’s Research & Education Institute. She points, for example, to creation of the Army Nurse Corps in response to the struggle against disease in the Spanish-American War.

FROM THE FIRST

They didn’t wear uniforms, but the Army hired women as nurses, cooks and laundresses during the American Revolution. Women were also spies and saboteurs. They carried George Washington’s messages across enemy lines to his generals.

Many “camp followers” went to war with their soldier husbands, sometimes bringing children along. Some stepped into the places of fallen men in battle. Other women disguised themselves as young men to join the fighting.

A few hundred women secretly served as Civil War soldiers, historians estimate. There are records of some who were discovered only after they were wounded or killed.

For her service as a Civil War surgeon, Dr. Ma

via American women have served and died from the first.