Up to that point, it’s worth noting, the Navy code-breaking office had employed some civilian women apart from Agnes Driscoll but treated them differently from men in terms of pay. According to a November 1941 proposed salary memo, female clerks, typists, and stenographers were paid $1,440 per year, while men doing the same job made $1,620. Women college graduates who had taken an elementary course in cryptanalysis made $1,800; men with those qualifications made $2,000. Women with master’s degrees made $2,000, compared to $2,600 for men. Women PhDs made $2,300; men with doctorates made $3,200. The early women came from a variety of backgrounds: Some officers’ wives and daughters liked to dabble in cryptanalysis, and there was a civilian, Eunice Willson Rice, who came from a staunchly naval family and worked on the codes of the Italian Navy. When she became pregnant, the men liked to call her Puffed Rice.
Despite these historic inequities, the young women’s arrival could not come soon enough for the Navy. In May 1942, none other than Commander John Redman—head of the code-breaking operation, known as OP-20-G—wrote each female student, begging her to get herself to the Navy building as fast as she could.
“Could you start within a week or two after the close of College?” Redman asked Ann White and Bea Norton and the other Wellesley seniors. He sent the same letter to each woman at Goucher and the other cooperating schools. “There is important work here waiting to be done,” Redman told them, adding that “it is a good opportunity for you, particularly since you are getting into this work in its early stages.” He gave each woman the address of the office and begged her to “keep me posted as to the approximate date of your arrival.”
By now the women’s ranks had winnowed. The students from the Seven Sisters and Goucher had been selected on the basis of ability, willingness, and loyalty, but tenacity was something they had to prove during the months-long correspondence course. Some had become discouraged and dropped out; others married and relocated to follow husbands; others did not answer enough problems correctly; others were rejected by the Civil Service Commission based on some aspect of their background. Back in the patriotically fervent winter of 1941, Barnard had enrolled twenty women, of whom seven stuck it out and showed up at Main Navy, the Constitution Avenue headquarters. Bryn Mawr started with twenty-seven and ended with twelve. Goucher’s ranks fell from sixteen to eight; Mount Holyoke’s, from seventeen to seven. Radcliffe had a bounty of fifty-nine women at the start and just eight at the finish. Smith’s first class fell from thirty to twelve; Wellesley’s, from twenty-eight to twenty.
In all, 197 young women had received a secret invitation. A hardy band of seventy-four survivors found their way to D.C., where they were employed as SP-4s, assistant cryptanalytic aides making $1,620 a year. Goucher graduates Constance McCready and Joan Richter were among the first to arrive, showing up at the front desk on June 8, 1942. Viola Moore and Margaret Gilman, from Bryn Mawr, walked through the doors of Main Navy on the fifteenth. The rest trickled in toward the end of June and beginning of July.
The Navy didn’t want to lose a single one. Fearful the women might quit if they couldn’t find housing, the Navy wrote each college president, seeking help in locating alumnae for the women to stay with. Some took rooms at the Meridian Hill Hotel for Women, a Washington residential hotel constructed to house g-girls. Others were scattered throughout northwest Washington, staying at homes on Klingle Road and Euclid Street and elsewhere. Vi Moore and Margaret Gilman lodged at 1611 Connecticut Avenue NW. Anne Barus, from Smith, found herself living at 1751 New Hampshire Avenue NW, with Bea Norton and Elizabeth “Bets” Colby and other Wellesley women. Their addresses changed often. Many would live in six or seven different lodgings during their wartime tenure. Navy memos show that clerks were constantly typing updated addresses as the women scrambled for rooms in basements, boardinghouses, and—in one case—the back half of the Francis Scott Key Book Shop in Georgetown, where a group of women were allowed to borrow books and use the telephone, in return for letting the bookstore staff use their lone toilet.
As quickly as they arrived, the women from the Seven Sisters found themselves put to work. The Navy operation was already on a twenty-four-hour, around-the-clock basis, and the women were divvied up between the three shifts, known in the Navy as “watches.” Fran Steen from Goucher and Ann White from Wellesley were among those who drew the midnight watch, from midnight to eight, while luckier souls drew the day watch, from eight to four, or evening watch, from four to midnight.
The summer of the Navy women’s arrival was punishingly hot. The women would start each day in high heels and clean cotton dresses and take the bus downtown. By the time they arrived—or after working for half an hour—they would be dripping with sweat and the thin fabric of their neat dresses would be plastered to their skin. They would lift their forearms from the table and find the paper beneath was soaking wet. Salt tablets were kept in dispensers—they were a fad of the time; it was mistakenly thought the tablets prevented perspiration—which made many of them sick. The old Navy headquarters was not just crowded but unclean. Vi Moore, a French major from Bryn Mawr, was assigned the task of reporting how many cockroaches were crawling around in the women’s bathroom.
Back at their colleges, the women’s training had been rigorous and they had taken it seriously. The naval course included exercises in which they had to memorize the most common English letters—E , T, O, N, A, I, R, and S—and take frequency counts. They had been introduced to old-fashioned methods like a grille, which is a template that can be put over an ordinary letter, with little holes that make certain words pop out to reveal a hidden message. They were instructed that “the motto of the cryptanalyst should be: ‘Let’s suppose,’” and that “the most important aid in cipher solution is a good eraser.” Weekly problems tested their mastery of “numerical cipher alphabets,” “polyalphabetic substitution,” and “diagonal digraphic substitution.” Each packet contained one problem that could not be solved, to show that sometimes, a jumble of letters or numbers doesn’t stand for anything; sometimes, a code breaker fails. The fine institutions the women attended had never encouraged them to fail, and they found the idea disconcerting.