Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers Who Helped Win World War II

It was not easy being a smart girl in the 1940s. People thought you were annoying.

In 1942, only about 4 percent of American women had completed four years of college.

Tooth and nail they worked. No one jostled for promotion. All this, they knew, was temporary. The point was to win the war and get back to their regularly scheduled lives.

Crossword puzzles are designed to be solved, while codes and ciphers are designed to prevent solution. With codes, you have to be prepared to work for months—for years—and fail.

Motherhood was the dividing line between brilliant women who stayed in the work and those who did not. For a woman with children, there were few resources to make a career feasible. The nation lost talent that the war had developed.

Women were more than placeholders for the men. Women were active war agents. Through their brainwork, the women had an impact on the fighting that went on. This is an important truth, and it is one that often has been overlooked.

There were discussions about minutiae like pockets, which Virginia Gildersleeve felt were essential for any working woman. But the designers felt pockets would spoil the lines of the suit. 'Utility was sacrificed to looks,' Gildersleeve noted with some disgust in her memoir. 'They certainly looked very attractive and no doubt won many recruits for the Navy; but I regretted those pockets.

Far less well known is that more than ten thousand women traveled to Washington, D.C., to lend their minds and their hard-won educations to the war effort.

Through their brainwork, the women had an impact on the fighting that went on.

Educators worried that they might encourage women to pursue math and science who would then be left high and dry. One electrical company asked for twenty female engineers from Goucher, with the added request, “Select beautiful ones for we don’t want them on our hands after the war.

In science, there is something called a “jackpot effect,” where a male scientist hires women in his lab early in the development of a certain field, and these women hire other talented women, and, as a result, the field ends up with an unusually high number of women. Something like this was at work in cryptanalysis. A few key women proved themselves gifted, early on; a few key men were willing to hire and encourage

It was the first time many of the women had spent time in a bonafide workplace apart from a classroom, and they discovered what workplaces are and have been since the dawn of time: places where one is annoyed and thwarted and underpaid and interrupted and under appreciated.

Women now were expected to quit work when they started having babies. The postwar U.S. government made this clear. There was no more state-sponsored child care. In a postwar, Cold War America, child care was viewed with suspicion, as the kind of thing communists used to raise their children collectively. The U.S. government began doing the opposite of its wartime recruiting; it made propaganda-type films telling women it was important to leave their jobs, return home, and tend their households.

the women used these Enigma messages—along with files on individual U-boats and their commanders—to track, with pins, every U-boat and convoy whose location was known. At another desk, several other Goucher women, including Jacqueline Jenkins (later the mother of Bill Nye, aka Bill Nye the Science Guy), tracked “neutral shipping” based on daily position reports.

It was a rare moment in American history—unprecedented—when educated women were not only wanted but competed for.

In the 1940s, the American labor force was strictly segregated by gender. There were newspaper want ads that read “Male Help Wanted” and others that read “Female Help Wanted.

For a young American woman, it was all too easy to convince an inquiring stranger that the work she did was menial, or that she existed as a plaything for the men she worked for.

A code may be used for secrecy, but also for brevity and truncation. Shorthand is a code in precisely this way and so, often, is modern-day texting.

The women were of a unique and overlooked generation. Many were born in 1920, the historic year when American women won the right to vote. Their early life was led in an atmosphere of broadening opportunity

when Herbert Hoover was elected U.S. president in 1928, Henry Stimson—Hoover’s new secretary of state—was shocked to learn that Yardley’s bureau was penetrating the private diplomatic missives of other countries. Stimson in 1929 shuttered the operation, cutting off State Department funding and primly explaining that gentlemen do not read one another’s mail—something European gentlemen did all the time, of course, and had been doing for hundreds of years.

the Signal Corps recruited U.S. switchboard operators who were bilingual in English and French and loaded them into ships bound for Europe. Known as the “Hello Girls,” these were the first American women other than nurses to be sent by the U.S. military into harm’s way. The officers whose calls they connected often prefaced their conversations by saying, “Thank Heaven you’re here!

Genius itself is often a collective phenomenon.

I don't need a man to give me sympathy Why I needed it before is a mystery

When I visited her, she was living at an assisted-living facility in Maine, an ardent supporter of the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders. Because she could no longer walk easily, she would sit in a recliner and throw clean, balled-up socks at the television when a politician she hated came on.

So much resistance, so many brave men working to defend the free world, had come together. “Even seated at our desks,” Ann White would later write, “we felt the power of our country.

Knowledge is power,” one of Francis Bacon’s favorite phrases.

Passing through the ticket gate and into the concourse, Dot found herself dwarfed by the space, which was said to be big enough to hold the Washington Monument laid out flat. With its arched doorways, its marble and white granite, its elevated statuary depicting ancient legionnaires—shields added for modesty’s sake, to hide their muscular legs and thighs from female view—Union Station was the most imposing public space she had ever stood in. Extra ticket windows had been added, platforms lengthened to accommodate the hordes of wartime travelers. There was a vast waiting room whose mahogany benches were always, now, full. The usual station amenities—newsstand, coin-operated lockers, drugstore, soda fountain—had been augmented by a servicemen’s canteen. Above Dot’s head was a big poster fluttering from the ceiling that declared, AMERICANS WILL ALWAYS FIGHT FOR LIBERTY. Amid the military flavor, though, there was a feminine cast: Female voices now announced the arrival of trains.

Well, I got what I went after, and then some – and I can’t help feeling a little puffed up about it… This is a man size job, but I seem to be getting away with it, and I’m going to see it through.' (Genevieve Hitt)