Women were considered more polite: Kenneth Lipartito, “When Women Were Switches: Technology, Work, and Gender in the Telephone Industry, 1890–1920,” American Historical Review 99, no 4 (October 1994): 1084.
Soon after Pearl Harbor, however, companies like Hercules Powder: Betty Dowse, telephone interview with the author. In the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin, the president of Bryn Mawr described the dilemma facing educators. Under normal circumstances, they discouraged women from going into math and science, especially fields like physics: “It would have been hard to urge them when there was little promise of a job and a good salary.” Now, she said, “there is a new situation for women here, a demand that has never existed for them before.” She worried that “the problem of the prospects in science after the war is a serious one for the women’s colleges.” Katharine E. McBride, “The College Answers the Challenge of War and Peace,” Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin 23, no. 2 (March 1943): 1–7.
Youth, the memo noted, is “a time”: RG 0457, 9032 (A1), Box 778, “Signal Intelligence Service, General Files, 1932–1939.”
Lever Brothers and Armstrong Cork also needed chemists: These are all real examples, cited in surveys of members of the class of 1943 at Wellesley College, conducted by Betty Dowse, in which class members were asked what work they did during the war and whether it had been held by a man before they took it on. 6C/1942, Betty Paul Dowse, A01-078a, Wellesley College Archives.
One electrical company asked for: Beatrice Fairfax, “Does Industry Want Glamour or Brains?” Long Island Star Journal, March 19, 1943.
On the eve of Pearl Harbor: Army personnel numbers are in RG 0457, 9002 (A1), Box 92, SRH 349, “The Achievements of the Signal Security Agency in World War II.” Navy numbers are in RG 0457, 9002 (A1), Box 63, SRH 197, “U.S. Navy Communication Intelligence Organization Collaboration.”
Many of the program’s major successes: RG 38, Box 4, “COMNAVSECGRU Commendations Received by OP-20-G.”
Chapter One: Twenty-Eight Acres of Girls
Unfortunately for Dot Braden, neither: Here and throughout, the details of Dot Braden’s application, hiring, employment, and life in Washington are taken from approximately twenty author interviews conducted with Dorothy Braden Bruce, in person at her home near Richmond, Virginia, and over the phone, between June 2014 and April 2017. They also are from her Personnel Record Folder for War Department Civilian Employee (201) file: “Bruce, Dorothy B., 11 June 1920 Also: Braden, Dorothy V., B-720,” National Personnel Records Center, National Archives, St. Louis, MO.
Lynchburg was not a big city: A good description of Lynchburg and Randolph-Macon is in Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration in the State of Virginia, Virginia: A Guide to the Old Dominion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1940), 264–266.
As Dot stepped out of the train: An invaluable description of D.C.’s Union Station in wartime is in William M. Wright, “White City to White Elephant: Washington’s Union Station Since World War II,” Washington History: Magazine of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. 10, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 1998–99): 25–31.
Other women were arriving: In addition to Dorothy’s recollection and her personnel file, which includes the signed loyalty oath, this description of the first day at Arlington Hall comes from the author’s interviews with Josephine Palumbo Fannon, at her home in Maryland, on April 9 and July 17, 2015. Fannon swore in new hires, and likely was the self-possessed young woman Dot remembers.
Like Arlington Hall, this cluster of female-only dormitories: An excellent history and description of Arlington Farms is in Joseph M. Guyton, “Girl Town: Temporary World War II Housing at Arlington Farms,” The Arlington Historical Magazine 14, no. 3 (2011): 5–13.
“There’s a new army on the Potomac”: The Good Housekeeping and Reader’s Digest articles are cited in Megan Rosenfeld, “‘Government Girls’: World War II’s Army of the Potomac,” Washington Post, May 10, 1999, A1.
Dot didn’t know this, but she had found her way into: That Arlington Hall was the biggest message center in the world is in Ann Caracristi, interview, undated, Library of Congress Veterans History Project, https://memory.loc.gov/diglib/vhp-stories/loc.natlib.afc2001001.30844/transcript?ID=mv0001, in comments by Jack Ingram, curator of the National Cryptologic Museum.
Around the time Dot was hired, a harried: RG 0457, 9032 (A1), Box 1016, “Signals Communications Systems.”
In America in the 1940s, three-quarters: Claudia Goldin, “Marriage Bars: Discrimination Against Married Women Workers, 1920s to 1950s” (NBER Working Paper 2747, National Bureau of Economic Research, October 1988).
To say that Dot was “trained” would be an overstatement: There are many Arlington Hall training documents, including RG 0457, 9032 (A1), Box 1007, “Training Branch Annual Report,” and RG 0457, 9032 (A1), Box 1114, “History of Training in Signal Security Agency and Training Branch.”
Specifically, Dot Braden was assigned to: RG 0457, 9032 (A1), Box 1114, “SSA, Intelligence Div, B-II Semi-Monthly Reports, Sept 1942–Dec 1943” shows Dorothy Braden’s name on the roster and that she had been assigned to Department K, as part of the sixth group undergoing orientation that fall and winter. It shows that Ruth Weston was in the same orientation group, assigned to research. The mission of Department K is described in RG 0457, 9032 (A1), Box 115, “Organization of Military Cryptanalysis Branch,” 12.
Chapter Two: “This Is a Man’s Size Job, but I Seem to Be Getting Away with It”