Woman’s Work : It Would Have Seemed Unlikely a Couple of Decades Ago, but San Diego Has Nation’s 1st All-Female Fire Engine Company

When change came to this city’s Fire Department two decades ago, few would have predicted that San Diego would someday be hailed as a leader in the tough task of adding women to the all-male world of firefighting.

The firefighters’ labor union grumbled that women lacked the upper-body strength to do the job and could destroy the department’s esprit de corps. Among other obstacles, a group of men went to court to keep women from getting any special consideration in hiring.

Despite the rocky start, women firefighters in San Diego have persisted and now, 17 years after the city hired its first women firefighters, the department has set a national milestone: the first all-female engine company, consisting of a captain, an engineer and two firefighters.

The change at Engine Company No. 3 has its origins in a decision by city officials in the early 1970s to bow to legal and political pressure to drop the city’s ban on hiring women as firefighters.

“There have been struggles,” Deputy City Manager Bruce Herring said of the city’s determination to add women to the department. “It hasn’t been easy.”

The first five female recruits flunked out of the academy in 1974, judged by the fire chief as physically unfit. The San Diego Union editorialized against the city’s “futile exercise in trying to fit women into jobs which common sense tells us are best filled by men.”

Four of the five failed recruits filed a lawsuit charging that their civil rights had been violated. Only after four years of controversy and legal maneuvering did women finally begin graduating from the academy.

Some were greeted with hostility and harassment when they reported to work. Fire stations had the hail-fellow air of fraternity houses, complete with pinup calendars and skin magazines and a just-us-guys attitude.

“Some [men] resisted the change more than others,” recalled Monica Higgins, who was one of the first two women hired in 1978 and is now a deputy fire chief. “Some--a very few--seemed to resent us a great deal. It made it very difficult.”

A fire captain, who was naked at the time, delivered a lecture to a female firefighter on the proper way to clean the fire station bathroom. A male firefighter, also naked, barged into the shower to join two women firefighters, much to their shock.

Afraid for their jobs, the women kept quiet. The incidents only came to the attention of superiors when a male firefighter broke the station house code of silence and filed a report.

At a disciplinary hearing, the firefighters union defended the two men by arguing that the nudity incidents were trifling and represented the kind of thing that should have been anticipated when the city tried to integrate an all-male environment.

Things have changed in the intervening years. Although women still represent a small percentage of firefighters, San Diego ranks far above other cities with more politically progressive reputations.

Women comprise 8.4% of San Diego’s firefighting force (71 of 836). By comparison, women comprise 2% of the Los Angeles City Fire Department, less than 1% of the Los Angeles County Fire Department and 5% of the San Francisco Fire Department.

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Other departments have had all-female engine companies on a temporary basis for a few days or weeks, as women fill in for men, but the San Diego company is the first permanently assigned all-female fire company in the nation, according to Terese Floren, executive director of a Wisconsin-based organization called Women in the Fire Service.

“This should send a strong message: that women in the fire service are here to stay and can do the job as well as men,” Floren said. “Before this, the idea seemed to be that, ‘If we have to have women in the fire service, let’s just have one or two in a company so the men can look out for them if they need help.’ This changes that.”

The four San Diego women--Capt. Linda Morse, 33, engineer Lisa Blake, 38, and firefighters Carol Ringe, 31, and Leilani Cerruto, 30--are assigned to Engine Company No. 3 at a station that has responsibility for Lindbergh Field, Balboa Park, portions of downtown and Interstate 5, the marinas, and dense residential areas known as Mission Hills and Middletown.

The assignment of four women to the same engine company, announced last week, was not done for political reasons or for symbolic impact. In fact, it occurred unintentionally through the department’s seniority system for filling vacancies when two spots formerly held by men became open.

Still, being pioneers brings added pressure to do well, and the four women from Engine Company No. 3 accept that as inevitable. Like all engine companies at the city’s 42 stations, they work 10 or 11 24-hour shifts each month.

“We’re being watched and scrutinized,” said Morse. “If you want to call that pressure, we’re under pressure.”

“We’re in a fishbowl,” said Blake, who, as the engineer, drives the rig and is responsible for the equipment.

A report done in 1993 for the U.S. Fire Administration, a division of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, singled out the fire departments in San Diego, Madison, Wis., and Montgomery County, Md., as leaders in the national effort to hire and promote women.

The report, “The Changing Face of the Fire Service: A Handbook on Women in Firefighting,” also lauded Firefighters Local No. 145 in San Diego, the same union whose members once opposed hiring women firefighters and used dues to provide adult magazines for station houses. The local in the mid-1980s formed a women’s issues committee that has served as a forum for concerns about recruitment, mentoring, harassment, uniforms, pregnancy issues and maternity leave.

San Diego became one of the first departments in the country to adopt a pregnancy policy. The policy holds that any firefighter is entitled to an immediate transfer to a non-hazardous job, without any cut in pay, as soon as she learns she is pregnant. (Morse and Cerruto switched to such jobs while pregnant, but Blake chose not to.)

“Too many departments have just told the women, ‘OK, we hired you. Now act like men,’ ” said Floren. “They have not wanted to realize that women are different. San Diego was one of the first to realize the differences.”

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Though it is difficult to assess the private opinions of male firefighters in San Diego toward their female colleagues, there are clear signs that the highly publicized discipline meted out in the early 1980s in the nudity incidents had a salutary effect on eliminating similar problems.

The captain was demoted. The firefighter was suspended without pay for 30 days. Neither, according to city officials familiar with the case, has been accused of anything similar again, and women firefighters who know the pair said they seemed to have “gotten the message.”

Several reasons are offered by firefighters and city officials to explain why San Diego no longer has the kind of controversy and litigation that plague other fire departments over the issue of hiring women.

One major reason is political support from City Hall, support that has filtered down to the administrators and the Fire Department brass. The city’s last two mayors have been women, and women hold four of eight spots on the City Council.

Another reason may be timing.

Because it was under pressure from the U.S. Department of Justice to increase the number of women and minorities in city employment, San Diego was one of the first cities in the nation to attempt to break the no-women rule for its Fire Department.

The result is that San Diego has already weathered the difficulties other cities are experiencing, including the flap over Playboy in Los Angeles County fire stations, the “female follies” video taken of women fire recruits in Los Angeles, litigation in San Francisco over alleged discrimination, and the debate and litigation over physical agility tests for the New York City Fire Department.

In the 1980s, San Diego officials declared that firefighters could keep Playboy and other such magazines in their lockers or bunks but not in the common areas.

A decade earlier, the wives of San Diego firefighters--concerned that women would not be strong enough to help their husbands in dangerous situations--had attempted to videotape women recruits struggling to pass agility tests, a forerunner of the dispute that has roiled the Los Angeles department.

After much debate over the importance of agility tests in the hiring of firefighters, San Diego adopted a “pass-fail” system. New York still ranks all applicants and puts such weight on the agility tests that only one woman has been hired in the past decade.

“Other departments seem embedded in tradition,” Blake said. “Tradition can be good but it can hold you back. . . . We’re starting our own tradition.”