The defense establishment’s grip on the economy of southeastern Virginia had become so strong during the war, its influence so critical to the material well-being of the local residents, that just as Hampton Roads was once the very model of the war boomtown, so too had it become a warfare state, dependent on the defense industry dollars that lapped into the region like waves on the shores of its beaches. Hampton Roads had become the embodiment of what Cold War president Dwight D. Eisenhower would a decade later dub the “military-industrial complex.”
The inevitable reduction in force that visited Langley—the staff had peaked at more than three thousand employees just before V-J Day—was short-lived and shallow, mostly accomplished through the natural attrition of those who decided it was time to move on from their life at Langley. Many computers and other female employees at the laboratory exchanged the daily routine of office life for a full-time position at home. No small number of them married the men they worked with; the laboratory’s success as a matchmaking service rivaled its research prowess. The employee newsletter Air Scoop was replete with tales of the sparkler spotted on the ring finger of this bachelorette in the personnel department or the happy ending for that starry-eyed couple who found true love over model tests in the Free-Flight Tunnel.
A steady stream of “heir mail” announcements ensued. Disability or accumulated sick leave were available to expectant mothers who wanted to return to work when their children were old enough to be left in the care of someone else during the day, though how easily this was done depended on the disposition of their managers. Many women tendered their resignations during their pregnancies and reapplied to the laboratory when they were ready to work again, hoping they would find a way to wrangle back their old jobs.
But talented computers, particularly those with years of experience, were valuable resources. The ink was barely dry on the bulletin in Air Scoop announcing the reduction in force before Melvin Butler released a plan to offer permanent appointments to war service employees. Some top-ranked managers went out of their way to keep the most productive women on the job by giving them the flexibility they needed to take care of their families.
In three years at Langley, Dorothy Vaughan had proven to be more than equal to the job, handing off error-free work to Marge Hannah and Blanche Sponsler and managing the constant deadlines with ease, garnering “excellent” ratings from her bosses. During the war, Dorothy and two other colleagues, Ida Bassette, a Hampton native (cousin to West Computing’s Pearl Bassette), and Dorothy Hoover, originally from Little Rock, Arkansas, had been appointed shift supervisors, each managing one-third of a group that had swelled to twenty-five women. At the war’s peak, when the laboratory operated on a twenty-four-hour schedule, Dorothy often worked the 3:00 p.m.-to-11:00 p.m. shift, responsible for eight computers’ work calculating data sheets, reading film, and plotting numbers. Perhaps it was no surprise that Dorothy was a keeper, but it must have come as a relief when, in 1946, she was made a permanent Civil Service employee.
Nearly to a woman, the West Computers had decided they were going to hold on to their seats, whatever it took. The section had outgrown its original room in the Warehouse Building, and in 1945, the group moved into “two spacious offices” on the first floor of the West Side’s newly built Aircraft Loads Division building.
Black or white, east or west, single or married, mothers or childless, women were now a fundamental part of the aeronautical research process. Not a year after the end of the war, the familiar announcements of vacancies at the laboratory, including openings for computers, began to appear in the newsletter again. As the United States downshifted from a flat-out sprint to victory to a more measured pace of economic activity, and as the laboratory began to forget that it had ever operated without the female computers, Dorothy had time to pause and give consideration to what a long-term career as a mathematician might look like. How could she entertain the idea of returning to Farmville and giving up a job she was good at, that she enjoyed, that paid two or three times more than teaching? Working as a research mathematician at Langley was a very, very good black job—and it was also a very, very good female job. The state of the aeronautics industry was strong, and the engineers were just as interested in retaining the services of the women who did the calculations as the aircraft manufacturers had been in keeping the laundry workers who supported their factory workers on the job.
Thousands of women around the country had taken computing jobs during the war: at Langley; at the NACA’s other laboratories (the Ames Research Laboratory in Moffett Field, California, which the agency had founded in 1939, and the Flight Propulsion Research facility in Cleveland, inaugurated in 1941); at the army’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, run by the California Institute of Technology; at the Bureau of Standards in Washington, DC; at the University of Pennsylvania’s secret ballistic research laboratory; and at aircraft companies like Curtiss Wright, which called the women “Cadettes.” A new future stretched out before them, but Dorothy Vaughan and the others found themselves at the beginning of a career, with few role models to follow to its end. Just as they had learned the techniques of aeronautical research on the job, the ambitious among them would have to figure out for themselves what it would take to advance as a woman in a profession that was built by men.
Renowned aerodynamicists Eastman Jacobs, John Stack, and John Becker had come to the laboratory as freshly minted junior engineers and were quickly allowed to design and conduct their own experiments. R. T. Jones, the engineer who had intervened on behalf of the black man with the Hampton police, had beguiled Langley managers immediately with his facile mind. Jones never finished college, so when he was hired in 1934, it was as a subprofessional scientific aide, the category that most women fell into. Despite good performance reviews, a P-1 rating was out of his reach, because the grade required a bachelor’s degree. So his managers conspired to skip him ahead to a P-2, which, by the arcane rules of bureaucracy, didn’t have the same requirement.
Seasoned researchers took the male upstarts under their wings, initiating them into their guild over lunchtime conversations in the cafeteria and in after-hours menonly smokers. The most promising of the acolytes were tapped to assist their managers in the operations of the laboratory’s valuable tunnels and research facilities, apprenticeships that could open the door to high-profile research assignments and eventual promotion to the head of a section, branch, or division. By the end of the 1930s, R. T. Jones had been promoted to head the Stability Analysis section, an influential redoubt of the “no-air” engineers, which used theoretical math rather than wind-tunnel experiments or flight tests to understand how to improve aircraft performance.