Lenah Higbee was one of the first twenty women to serve in the United States Navy, ran its Nurse Corps through the First World War and the 1918 influenza pandemic, and was the first woman awarded the Navy Cross.
The Sacred Twenty
Higbee was born Lenah Sutcliffe on May 18, 1874 in Chatham, New Brunswick. She trained at the New York Post-Graduate Hospital, married, and was widowed young.
Congress established the Navy Nurse Corps in 1908, and in October twenty women reported for duty as its entire strength. They are known in Navy history as the Sacred Twenty: the first women to serve in the United States Navy in any capacity.
They had no rank, no equivalent status and no benefits. They were, formally, neither officers nor enlisted.
Higbee was made a chief nurse in 1909, and in January 1911 became the second Superintendent of the Navy Nurse Corps. She held the post for almost twelve years.
The war and the pandemic
Under Higbee the corps grew from a few dozen to more than 1,300 nurses, serving in naval hospitals, on hospital ships and at overseas stations. She also built the Navy's training programme for hospital corpsmen — the enlisted medical specialists who serve with the Marines — which is a system still recognisably hers.
Then the 1918 influenza pandemic hit the Navy's crowded shore stations and troop transports hard, and nurses died of it.
In 1920 Higbee was awarded the Navy Cross for "distinguished service in the line of her profession and unusual and conspicuous devotion to duty as Superintendent of the Navy Nurse Corps." She was the first woman to receive it.
Three other Navy nurses received the Navy Cross the same year — Marie Louise Hidell, Lillian M. Murphy and Edna E. Place. All three received it posthumously, having caught influenza from the patients they were nursing.
Afterwards
Higbee retired on November 23, 1922 and died in Winter Park, Florida on January 10, 1941. She is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
The Navy named a destroyer USS Higbee for her in 1945 — the first American warship named for a woman who had served in the Navy. It served through Korea and Vietnam, where it was hit by a North Vietnamese aircraft in 1972, making it the first US Navy ship named for a woman to be damaged by enemy fire. A second ship, USS Lenah H. Sutcliffe Higbee, was commissioned in 2023.
Related
Sources
- Lenah S. Higbee, for the chronology, the Sacred Twenty and the Navy Cross. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- Navy Nurse Corps history. Naval History and Heritage Command. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- USS Lenah H. Sutcliffe Higbee (DDG 123). United States Navy. Accessed September 9, 2026.