Yale students and advocacy groups say motto drawn from second inaugural should be changed to reflect women’s service

The US Department of Veterans Affairs is reviewing a petition demanding it change its motto, which quotes Abraham Lincoln, to something less “gendered and exclusionary” that will highlight the contribution of female service members.

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The VA supervises the care of all American military veterans. Its motto is: “To care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan.”

It is drawn from Lincoln’s revered second inaugural address, given in March 1865 as the civil war drew to a close and the 16th president looked towards reconciliation with the defeated southern states.

The petition to change the motto was delivered on Friday by students at the Veterans Legal Services Clinic at Yale, which has been pushing for the change for some time.

Three advocacy groups – Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, NYC Veterans Alliance and Service Women’s Action Network – also signed the petition, which seeks to highlight the growing role of women in the US military and what it says is their discriminatory treatment as veterans.

The VA motto, the petition said, “is gendered and exclusionary, relegating women veterans to the fringes of veteran communities. Many of the systemic issues confronting women veterans – inadequate healthcare facilities, mental illness, suicide – relate to a VA culture that does not adequately acknowledge their service and sacrifice.”

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The Connecticut Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal – a veteran who misrepresented his service in the US marine corps reserve and is regularly ridiculed for it by Donald Trump – supported the petition.

Amending the motto, Blumenthal said, would “honor and recognize the 2 million women veterans who have served and sacrificed for our country” as “part of substantive and systemic reforms required to effectively serve women veterans”.

According to the petition, more than 345,000 women have deployed with US forces since the 9/11 attacks.

The petitioners noted that the manner of their approach, through a process called “notice and comment”, would not guarantee change but would require the administration and the department take an official position, thereby “letting the country know where they stand when it comes to standing up for all veterans”.

A VA spokesman told the Associated Press that Lincoln’s words were a tribute to all veterans, but the agency was reviewing the petition.

The full quote, which came when Lincoln concluded his speech on the steps of the Capitol, was: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

The actor John Wilkes Booth was present. Six weeks later, at Ford’s Theatre, he shot the president dead.

The civil war began in 1861, after southern states withdrew from the union over the fate of slavery. Estimates of the death toll range from a generally accepted 620,000 to 850,000 men. According to the American Battlefield Trust, 420,000 were wounded.

According to the VA, Lincoln’s words were adopted in 1959 and put on plaques flanking the entrance of its Washington headquarters.