Comstock also received another letter, this one from Laurance Safford, one of the U.S. Navy’s few experienced code breakers, now responsible for building a much-enlarged code-breaking unit. Safford elaborated on the qualifications they wanted by spelling out the kind of young women the Navy did not want.
“We can have here no fifth columnists, nor those whose true allegiance may be to Moscow,” Safford wrote. “Pacifists would be inappropriate. Equally so would be those from persecuted nations or races—Czechoslovakians, Poles, Jews, who might feel an inward compulsion to involve the United States in war.” Ada Comstock duly put together a list of about forty Radcliffe seniors and young graduate students, with the idea that twenty or so might meet the standards. Disregarding the not-so-subtle anti-Semitism of the Navy’s communications, she included the names of two Jewish women.
At the Navy’s request, Comstock also approached leaders of other women’s schools. These deans and presidents were devoted to the cause of educating women and eager to defend liberty and freedom of thought against fascism and totalitarian belief systems. They also were keen to develop career opportunities for their students. The leaders savvily perceived that war might open up fields—and spots in graduate schools—that up to now had been closed to women. Even before Comstock received the Navy’s letter, many of the leaders had been strategizing over how they could provide what Virginia Gildersleeve, dean of Barnard College, called “trained brains” to a war effort that would depend on advances in science and math.
The women’s college leaders met at Mount Holyoke on October 31 and November 1, 1941, with representatives from Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Vassar, Wellesley, Radcliffe, Smith, and Mount Holyoke attending. Comstock told them about the Navy’s request and said Radcliffe would participate. She distributed some materials the Navy had developed: a “Guide for Instructors” and an “Introduction to Students.” The idea was that selected students would take the course during the remainder of their senior year, then go to work for the Navy, in Washington, as civilians. The “Guide for Instructors” assured them that no prior experience was necessary and that they would receive a “gouge,” or answers to the problems. The instructors would be given a few texts to jump-start their own education, including a work called Treatise on Cryptography, another titled Notes on Communications Security, and a pamphlet called The Contributions of the Cryptographic Bureaus in the World War—meaning World War I, the so-called war to end all wars.
The result was the wave of secret letters that appeared in college mailboxes in the fall of 1941, summoning surprised young women to secret meetings. Most were in the top 10 percent of their class, selected based on academic performance as well as character and loyalty and grit. (A memo from a Radcliffe administrator explaining why one young woman was not selected said that she lacked “gumption,” had “perhaps been spoiled by money and a very domineering mother,” and seemed unlikely to “develop a serious interest in the work or to stick to it.”) The chosen women not only were cautioned against uttering the word “cryptanalysis” outside the confines of the classroom; they were not to say the words “intelligence” or “security” to any person outside their study group, lest they tip off the enemy. Pembroke, the women’s college affiliated with Brown University, soon found itself in hot water. A professor at Brown took the “bit in his teeth,” as one angry Navy memo put it, and began bragging about the course. As a result, in February 1942, Brown and Pembroke were blacklisted from the program.
There was controversy over whether the course would be offered for academic credit. The Navy at first was against this, because it wanted young women who were motivated and independent. But John Redman, a high-ranking naval communications officer with a keen interest in the program, came to think that giving credit was a good idea. Being graded would make the students try harder, and it would ease the heavy workload the women already faced in order to graduate. Many of the colleges did offer the class for credit, without listing it in the catalog. For secrecy’s sake, it went on the women’s transcripts as a math course.
By March 1942, the women were well embarked and had turned in some of the problem sets. Lieutenant Commander Ralph S. Hayes wrote Menzel, saying that the students had performed so well that the Navy was hoping women’s schools would contribute more students the following year, and from a wider array of institutions, including Wheaton and Connecticut Colleges. He added that, in the Navy’s view, “it looks as if the demand for high grade women in this work would continue for some time.”
By mid-April 1942, Donald Menzel reported that the Radcliffe women were shaping up ably. He knew this because he was teaching the Radcliffe contingent, and he felt very proud of their performance. “Miss McCormick, my star student, who incidentally is the only girl taking the Harvard Japanese course, has beat out all the men in an extremely large class.” By mid-May, twenty-five Radcliffe women had been certified by the Civil Service Commission for naval work as civilians and were expected to start duties in June.
The Navy was a service that cared about status. It wanted women who were well connected socially, and there also seems to have been interest in knowing what the women looked like. The application asked that the women submit passport photos, some of which excited a bit of commentary. “I might point out that the passport photos will scarcely do justice to a number of the members of the course,” enthused Harvard’s Donald Menzel, saying that the women’s “appearance is such that large-scale photographs would be a grace to any naval office.”
Around the same time, another meeting was taking place. Twenty women’s colleges sent representatives to the elegant Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., where the U.S. Army was working to forge its own ties with institutions that schooled women. Already it was clear that educated women would be needed for the broader war effort. As the country coped with an acute labor shortage, the inspector general of the Department of Labor noted that adult civilians would not be sufficient to stock an economy bereft of its male workers. Students would be needed, and it made sense to start with the female ones. So the Army worked to tap its own network of women’s colleges before the Navy could reach them; indeed, the Navy suspended its own efforts to set up training at Connecticut College when it learned that the Army had gotten there first.