Dot paid the driver—it took almost all the money she had—and walked up to a gate. “I’m supposed to be here,” she nervously asserted, giving her name and watching the guard pick up a telephone. She was directed to the main school building, where she opened the door and found, to her relief, that she was expected. She was at a place called Arlington Hall. Before the war, Arlington Hall had been a finishing school for girls: a two-year “junior college” complete with lily ponds and an indoor riding ring and flowering cherry trees lining a gracious central drive. Now it had been requisitioned by the U.S. War Department and transformed into a government operation whose purpose was not clear. But the presence of so many military officers impressed upon Dot that her new job must be even more important and serious than she had understood. The thought was intimidating. Inside the main building, the French doors and elegant moldings of the girls’ school were intact, as was the gracious central staircase, but the furnishings consisted of no-nonsense chairs and desks. A self-assured civilian woman, no older than Dot, possibly younger, seemed to be in charge of the whole place, as far as Dot could tell.
Other women were arriving, gathering in the hallway and looking as uncertain and travel grimed as Dot felt. When a good-size crowd had collected, the women were ushered into a kind of drawing room, where the self-assured young woman distributed printed copies of a loyalty oath. Dot signed it, swearing that she would “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic”; that she took this obligation “freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.” She also signed a secrecy oath, swearing that she would not discuss her activities with anyone outside her official duties—not now, and not ever, and that to do so opened her up to prosecution under the Espionage Act. The whole exercise felt frightening; she was really in for it now. The self-assured young woman told Dot that was enough for the day. She could leave and come back tomorrow.
“There are buses here that will take you wherever you are staying,” she said.
Dot looked blank. “Where I’m staying?”
“Aren’t you staying somewhere?” the woman wanted to know.
“No, I’m not staying anywhere,” Dot stammered, embarrassed. She had formed the notion—or had been led to believe—that the U.S. government would provide lodging in return for her wartime service. She had been mistaken. There was nobody with whom she could stay; she did not know a soul in the city of Washington or its suburbs.
The woman looked scornful but told Dot that there was a facility nearby where she could rent a room. Dot gathered her things and clambered onto a bus. In fifteen or twenty minutes she found herself standing on yet another campus. The buildings here, however, were neither old nor high ceilinged nor gracious; they were new and hastily constructed, ugly temporary structures arranged in rows and connected by freshly poured sidewalks. Giant shade trees were interspersed among them, but the effect—old arching foliage, new blocky buildings—was incongruous rather than pleasing. Dot made her way in the direction that other workers who had ridden the bus with her were now moving. Her companions were all female: The facility where she found herself had been built at the behest of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to accommodate the young women, like Dot, who were pouring into Washington to take jobs to serve the war effort. Past conflicts—the Civil War, the First World War—had brought female workers to the nation’s capital, but this incoming wave was of another order of magnitude. Hundreds of women were arriving at Union Station every day, creating an acute housing shortage throughout the capital and the surrounding area.
Like Arlington Hall, this cluster of female-only dormitories was located in Arlington County, Virginia, a compact and nondescript suburb located across the river from Washington proper. Like that of the capital city, Arlington’s population was in the midst of doubling, rapidly, as its southern portion became, with the construction of the Pentagon, a virtual military city. The women’s dorms, wedged on a patch of land near the river, were intended to last for the war’s duration, and they were so flimsy that whoever built them must have thought the duration would be short. A newspaper reporter described them as “gray and extremely temporary in appearance.”
The dormitory complex had been finished just months before Dot arrived, constructed on land that had once been part of the family estate of Robert E. Lee’s wife, Mary Anna Custis Lee, who was descended from First Lady Martha Washington. The federal government had come into control of much of this land after the Civil War, and until recently the U.S. Department of Agriculture maintained an “experimental farm” here, conducting horticultural research on crops and growing methods. Hence the name: Arlington Farms.
But there were other, informal names for the sprawling new women’s residence. In Washington, Arlington Farms was fast becoming known as Girl Town.
Other locals had dubbed it “28 Acres of Girls.”
Dot didn’t know it, but the national media had already taken notice of what was happening in Washington—the influx of young women. More than twenty-four thousand had entered government service in 1940 alone, when the Civil Service Commission began recruiting workers for the defense buildup, and tens of thousands more had arrived since then. The population of the city had swelled by more than two hundred thousand, served by innumerable boardinghouses. But nothing personified the city’s changing demographics as much as Arlington Farms, a “duration residence for women” built to house seven thousand female war workers. Its denizens tended to be written about in condescending tones, as wide-eyed rubes from the heartland. “There’s a new army on the Potomac,” gushed Good Housekeeping, “the bright-eyed, fresh-faced young Americans who have poured into Washington from remote farms, sleepy little towns, and the confusion of cities, to work for the government in a time of national emergency.”
The girls moved into Arlington Farms even before there was time for grass to grow. Some had come to work for Congress, some for federal agencies, some for the Pentagon, which was the new War Department headquarters. Many, like Dot, were employed at Arlington Hall. They were known as government girls, or g-girls for short. The complex was designed to make their life as easy as possible, so they could devote their full energies to helping win the war. At Arlington Farms, women could take meals in the cafeteria and send their clothes to be laundered or dry-cleaned. Maids cleaned their rooms weekly. There were pianos and snack bars, and little cubbyholes meant to resemble the “dating booths” of American drugstores. Each dormitory was named after an American state.
At the front desk, a clerk told Dot that there was a room available in Idaho Hall, but she would have to pay a month’s rent—$24.50—in advance. She was appalled. Dot didn’t have anything like that much money with her, and wouldn’t until she got her first paycheck. Sheepish, she went into a phone booth and placed a long-distance call to her mother. “I’ve got to pay in advance,” she told Virginia Braden.
“Well, I’ve never heard of anything like that in my whole life,” came her mother’s familiar voice.
“Well, Momma, that’s what they say,” she said. Dot felt guilty; she had taken the job to ease her mother’s financial hardship, and here she was, exacerbating it.