Anna Mae McCabe was born on February 10, 1920, in Buffalo, New York.
Anna Mae McCabe was born on February 10, 1920, in Buffalo, New York, the daughter of a working-class family. She grew up during the interwar period, a time when opportunities for women in professional fields, especially medicine and military service, were extremely limited.
Her early exposure to caregiving and her academic diligence led her toward nursing, a field that was one of the few professional avenues broadly open to American women at the time. She pursued her nursing education at the Allentown Hospital School of Nursing in Pennsylvania, graduating in 1941, just as the United States was on the brink of entering World War II.
This early foundation set the stage for a remarkable four-decade career in the Army Nurse Corps, during which she would rise from a young lieutenant to become the first woman in the history of the United States Armed Forces to hold the rank of general officer. Her humble beginnings in Buffalo belied the extraordinary trajectory her life would take, ultimately reshaping the role of women within the U.S. military establishment.