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. Women made gains in some professions. The flapper era promised a loosening of restrictions on behavior and a growing awareness of female potential; the exploits of Amelia Earhart and other women aviators, such as Elinor Smith—the “Flying Flapper of Freeport,” who at age seventeen flew under all four bridges across New York’s East River—all pointed to new freedoms, as did the high-profile work of stunt-seeking women journalists like Nellie Bly.
When these women born in 1920 or thereabouts were children, however, the Great Depression hit. Opportunity stopped, and progress reversed. Many women were fired so that what jobs remained could be given to men. Families were destabilized, especially fathers, many of whom also were struggling with the traumatic effects of military service during World War I. Daughters were responsible for helping inside the house; this meant girls were keenly attuned to the emotional disarray of their households. It was not only poor families that were impacted. At the elite women’s colleges from which the Navy recruited its code-breaking cohort, it is striking how many students were there on scholarship and how many had suffered trauma as children. Jeanne Hammond, a member of the class of ’43 at Wellesley, was the daughter of a businessman who lost almost everything in the Depression. Hammond never forgot the night she was eating dinner at the kitchen table and her father came home after meeting with his broker and announced, shoulders sagging, that their money was gone. “Don’t worry, you’ll always have enough bread and milk,” he said, and Hammond, a child, thought bread and milk was all she would be eating forever. She attended Wellesley on a scholarship and felt anxious about keeping her grades up so as not to lose it. She declined her “secret letter” because she was terrified of being subjected to military discipline; it felt too much like the strict and demoralized environment she had grown up in.
Thousands of women did say yes. For them, the chance to come to Washington, to work and live on their own or with friends, was a respite from the cares of home life. It got them out in the world. It provided a breathing period between the demands of being a daughter and the responsibilities of being a wife. Much of America in the 1930s and 1940s was still very rural. The women often came from farms and towns where the future stretched out, unchanging. After the war, many never returned. Their lives were irrevocably altered by the work they did.
Freedom of movement was one of the differences between the British code breakers and their American counterparts. Once British women arrived at Bletchley Park and the surrounding estates, they were obliged to stay where they were, apart from trips to London. Their experience was one of urgency but also, to an extent, confinement. The American women were able to clamber onto trains and buses and travel. Living in the fast-growing nation’s capital, they rented rooms, scrambled for housing, shared beds—two women who worked different shifts and used the same bed called it “hot-bedding”—and settled where they could find a place. The capital was full of odd little boardinghouses. Some bedrooms had only curtains on their doorways. Some proprietors served collard greens and black-eyed peas to northerners who had never eaten southern food. From Washington they were able to jump on the train during a forty-eight-hour or seventy-two-hour leave and spend a weekend in New York or even Chicago.
Edith Reynolds, recruited out of Vassar, woke up her first morning in a street-level room in a Georgetown brownstone. She was wearing red pajamas, sitting up in bed, when she realized there were no curtains on the windows. A gentleman walking along the sidewalk looked inside, saw her, and tipped his hat. Life was like that, during the war.
In Washington, the women code breakers took buses and trolleys. They went to USO dances and to bars. They looked out for one another. One group agreed that if anybody ordered a vodka Collins when they were out at a bar together, that would be their signal that a stranger was showing too much curiosity about their work, and they were all to disperse to the ladies’ room and then flee. They saw Oklahoma!, which premiered in March 1943 and presented a new vision of musical entertainment, one that was dark and included death.
The women learned a lot, in ways they had not expected. Suzanne Harpole, a Wellesley code breaker, returned from a short leave to find that her room in an oh-so-respectable downtown boardinghouse had been “rented” during her absence to a military officer and his mistress. Arriving home a bit early, she had to wait in the parlor until the clandestine couple was finished with it.
In 1942, only about 4 percent of American women had completed four years of college. In part this was because women were denied admission to so many places; even coeducational colleges capped the number of women they would admit, and often had a staff position called “dean of women,” as if women were a special subset of the student body, not full members. Families were more likely to pay a son’s tuition than a daughter’s. For a woman, the financial rewards of a college education were so limited that a degree did not carry the same promise of future earnings that it did for a man, and many families did not consider it worthwhile for a daughter to attend. It was not as if a woman could be an architect, say, or an engineer. Or not many could. Professional graduate schools had few—sometimes no—spots for women.