Sitting at her table, Gene Grabeel helped launch what became known as the Venona project. The name associated with Venona is that of Meredith Gardner, a linguist and book breaker who brilliantly was able to interpret messages and recover code groups, leading to several prosecutions of Soviet spies in the United States, and ruining the lives of others. But 90 percent of those working on Venona were women. Gene Grabeel separated the traffic into systems; none other than Genevieve Grotjan Feinstein (she married a chemist, Hyman Feinstein) found one of the coincidences. A linguist named Marie Meyer found another. The Russians employed the cipher in question for only a few years, but Arlington Hall worked that system for decades, mining the old material and digging out names. It was a group of former teachers—Carrie Berry, Mildred Hayes, Gene Grabeel, others—who devoted their careers to this. Many never married. In the personal photos of the Venona code breakers, they are wearing shifts and carrying handbags and look like a gardening club. They were best friends, and sometimes lived together, sometimes alone. “Gene was just an independent person that didn’t want the responsibility of a marriage,” said Gene Grabeel’s sister-in-law, Eleanor Grabeel. “She enjoyed her freedom.” When the Venona project was rolled up in 1980, the former schoolteachers had been working on it for more than thirty years.
After them, though, there was an institutional falling off. By far the majority of women at Arlington Hall packed up and went home after the war. Even many of the top women, among them Delia Taylor Sinkov and Genevieve Grotjan Feinstein, at some point stopped working. Often this occurred when they began having children. 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. The 1950s and 1960s would not bring another critical mass of women to succeed the wartime code breakers, and in the 1970s and 1980s, women at the NSA would have to fight a battle for parity and recognition all over again.
For the women who left the field but wanted to continue working or studying, postwar opportunities were mixed. Women who served in the U.S. Navy qualified for the GI Bill, at least in theory. For returning servicemen, the GI Bill was a life-changing benefit that put college within reach for middle-class men.
For the Navy women, however, their experience of GI benefits was hampered by the old idea that women are not suited for the highest levels of learning. Elizabeth Bigelow at age twenty had been recruited by the Navy from Vassar. In college, she shone in her mechanical drawing classes—as close to a drafting class as Vassar offered—and aspired to be an architect. Her professor was the legendary Grace Hopper, a computing pioneer who became a rear admiral for the Navy and helped develop the computer programming language COBOL. Elizabeth Bigelow always believed Hopper identified her for the code-breaking program. When Elizabeth got out of the Navy she applied to three leading schools of architecture. “In every case the response was the same,” she recalled later. “We’re sorry, but we are saving all our spaces for the men who have been in the armed services.” Elizabeth wrote back protesting that she had been in the WAVES for two years. She could not say she had sunk a convoy, because that was top secret. “The answers all came back, ‘We’re sorry, but no.’” So she married and raised a family with her husband. When they moved to Cincinnati, Elizabeth ended up running the computer system at the University of Cincinnati. She taught herself how to do it.
Janice Martin Benario, the Goucher classics major who worked in the submarine tracking room, did use the GI Bill to get a PhD at Johns Hopkins. She met her husband there and spent a productive career teaching in the Classics Department at Georgia State University.
Dorothy Ramale, the aspiring math teacher who grew up in Cochran’s Mills and longed to visit every continent on earth, got a master’s degree using the GI Bill, which meant she earned a higher salary working as, yes, a math teacher, in Arlington County. She taught at the public middle school my own children later attended, where the kids in Miss Ramale’s algebra classes doubtless had no idea that this sweet, good-natured woman broke codes that sank enemy ships. And she did visit every continent on earth, including Antarctica—twice.
Jimmie Lee Hutchison Powers, who lost her husband on D-Day, used the GI Bill to get a community college degree in cosmetology. She opened a salon back home in Oklahoma and supported herself and her widowed mother. After three years, she remarried. On their first anniversary, her new husband gave her a card. She opened it and thought the wording seemed familiar. Sometime afterward, her mother asked if she wanted her trunk of things from her wartime naval service. She opened it and found that Bob Powers had sent her the exact same anniversary card, right before he flew out and died.
Betty Bemis, the champion swimmer who worked at Sugar Camp, corresponded during the entire war with Ed Robarts, a bomber pilot who flew thirty-five missions. One day she was summoned to the phone. “Hi, Betty,” he said. “I’m home.” Other women by then had ended their casual correspondences with men they’d never met; Iris Flaspoller had written a Dear John letter to Rupert Trumble, which somewhat devastated him. But when Ed asked Betty to fly to have Easter dinner with him and his aunt and uncle in Miami, Betty hitched a ride on a military plane to see him. Three days after she arrived, he asked her to marry him. “We had a beautiful marriage,” she told me in November 2015.
For some of the women, especially those who worked in top spots on the Enigma project, life after the war was harder. Louise Pearsall, who worked on Enigma, was tempted to stay on with the work after the war. Some engineers and mathematicians who worked as Navy code breakers formed a partnership to develop code-breaking computers for the Navy, and she considered joining them. But she was exhausted—mentally, emotionally, physically—and there was a boyfriend who had come back to Elgin, Illinois, so she got discharged and returned to Elgin, and they broke up. She went to work but quit when she suffered a nervous breakdown. She married a wealthy man, and her in-laws, who were uppity and pompous (her brother remembered) would not permit her to work. A year after the war she was living in a small apartment in Chicago, looking at an elementary school outside the window. Her daughter, Sarah, felt she suffered from depression much of her life, possibly brought on by having three children in quick succession, compounded by secrecy and the fact that she could not talk to anybody about her wartime experience. “She was a total wreck,” said her brother William. “She was a total nervous wreck. You couldn’t even look cross-eyed at her and she’d break down.” She eventually would divorce her husband and take a job with IBM that she quite liked.
Betty Allen, one of the group of friends in the library unit at the Naval Annex, also had a hard time after the war. Most jobs went to men. For three years she drifted. Meanwhile her friends from OP-20-G-L were coping with their own postwar challenges. The women, mostly married, had new babies and were living isolated lives in small spaces. Housekeeping was hard. There were few new appliances, since American industry for years had been churning out tanks and planes and weapons. New mothers washed bedsheets in the bathtub and wrung out diapers by hand.