What was the name of a woman doing on a WWI memorial?

When Holly Baxter comes across the name Lillian on a First World War memorial, she sets out to find out why this person has been commemorated alongside the military dead

Odd one out: the memorial in Brooklyn’s Saratoga Park (Holly Baxter)

In Saratoga Park in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn – really more of a small green than a park, with a lawn for dogs and another section of playground surrounded by pre-war brownstone houses – stands a small monument to local dead from the First World War. Standing in front of it this week, in my snow boots, I scrolled through the names out loud: Harold, Arthur, Thomas, Harold, Arthur, Arthur, James, John, Arthur, Thomas. Then my internal reading mechanism snagged on an unexpected addition: Lillian M Patterson. What was this woman doing among the named military dead on a monument erected in the early 1920s?

My husband wondered if Lillian might be a name that went the way of Ashley or Evelyn, starting out as an exclusively male moniker before sliding down the perceived social scale to become unisex and then, eventually, almost exclusively female. But I’m a name nerd, and I knew that Lillian had never been male. Indeed, a quick search on the US government’s social security website shows that in the early 1900s, Lillian consistently appeared in the top 15 of all given names to baby girls (interestingly, it began to fall out of favour by the mid-1920s and stayed relatively unpopular until 2009, when it began to climb upward in popularity again with a vengeance.)

So much for that theory, then. But we knew American women didn’t fight in the First World War. What, then, did it mean that Lillian Patterson shared a monument in New York City with 105 exclusively male names, nestled between Charles O Olsen and Arthur W Picard?

A search through the New York City Parks and Recreation website revealed that Lillian died while working for the military “at a local recruiting station,” while the men she is listed beside died overseas fighting on the front lines. Further investigation done by a group calling themselves the Brownstone Detectives found that Lillian’s full name was Lillian May Bogen Patterson, and that she stepped up to take charge of military recruitment for the Marines when men doing the same jobs were conscripted to go and fight. Traveling in to Manhattan every day from her home down the road from me in Brooklyn, Lillian wore a military uniform and was told that she was “fighting on the home front”. She was known among other Marines, according to newspapers from the time, as “Little Pat”.

In the continuing midst of a pandemic, it isn’t hard to imagine the dedication and the suffering of someone like Lillian, struck down unexpectedly while going about her daily life

Lillian met a sadly familiar end near the conclusion of the war, when an influenza pandemic that especially affected the young was raging through New York. She caught the flu, presumably during her recruiting duties, and succumbed to it quickly. The “entire recruiting force of the Marine Corps for the New York District” is said to have attended her funeral, as Marines fired “three volleys” alongside a bugler. She is understood to have been the first female Marine in the US to be buried with full military honours.

In the deep snow of current New York and in the continuing midst of a pandemic, it isn’t hard to imagine the dedication and the suffering of someone like Lillian, struck down unexpectedly while going about her daily life. Her name might be missed by passersby who don’t stop to scroll through the list, but it’s a reminder that every generation had its trailblazers. She joined, it seems, because she wanted to do something – anything – to support her husband Alfred, who was away fighting in France with the 70th Artillery. At the end of the war, Alfred returned; in service to her country, it was only Lillian who made the ultimate sacrifice.