Celebration of Women Firefighters in San Diego

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San Diego, California

The San Diego Firehouse Museum recently hosted a gathering in celebration of the women of the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department. The event was attended by current and retired female members of the department, and it recognized the achievements of the women who broke the fire department's all-male barrier in the late 1970's.

On hand was Lonnie Kitch, the first female to be hired by San Diego Fire-Rescue. Kitch, who retired in 2008, graduated from the fire academy in 1978, along with Monica Orton, who is now San Diego's Fire Marshall. Kitch recalled the era in which she was hired saying, "It was a time in the City of San Diego when they had relaxed the requirements as far as weight and height. So the other firefighters had to be 5'8" and 150 lbs, and I was 120 lbs and 5'3". There were also other people in my academy that were shorter males that were coming on, and a lot of the equipment didn't fit us…They hadn't seen a firefighter that was 120 lbs, 5'3" do the job. We didn't know if we could do it but we just tried as hard as we could, and we ended up doing everything."

Kitch's hiring was a milestone in San Diego Fire-Rescue's history. Before she and Orton graduated, there had been a class that included five females that had passed the pump and truck tests at the fire academy, but they were found "unfit for duty" a few days before their graduation and never made it into the ranks, according to San Diego Fire-Rescue Engineer Shannon Mueller. The city cited the reasons for their rejection as being a lack of physical strength to do the job.

Ida Jones, a retired Firefighter and Public Information Officer who served the City of San Diego for 25 years, says that when she began working for the department, female firefighters were not fully accepted by their male counterparts. For decades, it had been an all-male fire department, and at first many people had a hard time accepting the idea of having female firefighters in the ranks. She remembers, "I went into the stations with a big smile on my face and figured, 'Aren't you glad I'm here, because I'm definitely glad I'm here?' And I didn't realize for quite awhile that there was a little bit of anti-female feelings, but we have worked very hard as individuals to prove ourselves. Once you walk through the door of a fire station, we are all professionals, and that's the feeling I tried to purvey over the years."

Today female firefighters are a welcome and essential part of the San Diego-Fire Rescue Department. The second largest fire department in California, it employs approximately 3% of the female firefighters in the United States. In addition to having a female Fire Marshall, the city appointed Tracy Jarman to be its first female Fire Chief in 2006. Accommodations for female firefighters have also advanced significantly since Lonnie Kitch was hired in 1978. At that time, there were no special living quarters for women and at some stations the shower and toilet stalls did not have doors. This, of course, has changed, and recently, the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department opened an all-female fire station with an on-duty crew of four women per shift.