Those who did go to college were unusually motivated. Some came from families who valued learning for its own sake. Other families viewed college as a way for a woman to be exposed to neighboring men’s schools at dances and mixers and to ensure a marriage to a husband of good prospects. Any payoff derived from a woman’s education would likely depend on the achievements of her spouse. Sometimes the women came from immigrant families—German, French, Italian—where having a daughter in college was a way of Americanizing the family as soon as possible. In some large first-generation families, to have an educated daughter was a way of competing with one’s siblings in the ascent up the social ladder. It was a status symbol. Sometimes, a girl was so intellectually voracious that there was no way to keep her away from college. It was not easy being a smart girl in the 1940s. People thought you were annoying.
The four-year women’s colleges were a mix of true cerebral inquiry, rank social climbing, and raw marital ambition. The messages the students received were mixed. The leaders of the Seven Sisters schools were committed to women’s education, as were some southern leaders, including Meta Glass at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. Many women’s colleges had rigorous programs in everything from zoology to classics. Students were pushed to excel, often by female teachers who had devoted their own lives to their disciplines: Greek, physics, Shakespeare. Perfection was encouraged.
And many of the students embraced these aspirations and high standards. At Wellesley, the Latin motto, Non Ministrari sed Ministrare, was an exhortation to good works and service that meant “Not to be ministered unto, but to minister.” Some undergraduates preferred a proto-feminist rallying cry: “Not to be ministers’ wives, but to be ministers.”
But the pressure to marry was intense. At Wellesley, there was an entire page of the yearbook, the Legenda, devoted to a list of engagements (Mabel J. Belcher to Raymond J. Blair; Alathena P. Smith to Frederick C. Kasten) and naming women who had recently married (Ann S. Hamilton to Lieutenant Arthur H. James). The school in 1940 delivered a series of marriage lectures to its students, including one on “marriage as a career,” another on “biological aspects of marriage,” and others on “obstetrics” and “the care of the young child.” School lore had it that the winner of the senior class hoop roll—performed with much hilarity in cap and gown—would be the “class’s first bride,” and the winner was awarded a bouquet in recognition.
What is interesting about this generation of women is that they did understand that at some point they might have to work for pay. Forged by the Depression, they knew they might have to support themselves, even on a teacher’s salary, no matter how “good” a marriage they did or did not make. Some were sent to college with the idea that it would be ideal to meet a man, but their degree would permit them to “fall back” on teaching school. And some women went to college because they were, in fact, ambitious and planned to compete for the few spots in law or medical schools that were available to them.
Suddenly these women were wanted—for their minds. “Come at once; we could use you in Washington,” was the message conveyed to Jeuel Bannister, a high school band director who had taken an Army course on cryptanalysis at Winthrop College, in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
In the 1940s, the American labor force was strictly segregated by gender. There were newspaper want ads that read “Male Help Wanted” and others that read “Female Help Wanted.” For educated women, there was a tiny universe of jobs to be had, and these always paid less than men’s jobs did. But it turned out that the very jobs women had been relegated to were often the ones best suited to code-breaking work. Schoolteaching—with the learning it required—was chief among these. Knowledge of Latin and Greek; a close study of literature and ancient texts; facility with foreign languages; the ability to read closely, to think, to make sense of a large amount of data: These skills were perfect.
But there were other women’s jobs that turned out to be useful. Librarians were recruited to make sense of discarded tangles of coded messages. “Nothing had been filed. It was just a mess,” said Jaenn Coz, one of a number of code-breaking librarians who came to work for the Navy. “They sucked us out from all over the country.” Secretaries were good at filing and record keeping and at shorthand, which is itself a very real kind of code. Running office machines—tabulator, keypunch—was a woman’s occupation, and thousands were now needed to run the IBM machines that compared and overlapped multidigit code groups. Music majors were wanted; musical talent, which involves the ability to follow patterns, is an indicator of code-breaking prowess, so all that piano practicing that girls did paid off. Telephone switchboard operators were unintimidated by the most complex machines. In fact, the communications industry from its origins was one that had been considered suitable for women. Boys delivered telegrams, but women connected calls, in large part because women were considered more polite to callers.
Character also mattered. Here again, women’s colleges were ideal. All the schools had codes of comportment—curfews, housemothers, chaperones, rules about not smoking in your room and not having men visit you in private and not having sex and not wearing trousers or shorts in public. All of this enabled the women to sail through the military’s background checks. Bible colleges were even better; many of those graduates didn’t drink.
To be sure, women had a strike against them in that they were considered bad at keeping secrets—women, everybody knew, were gossips, rumormongers, talkers. Then again, when it came to sexual behavior, women were seen as less of a security risk than men. Just before the United States entered the war, when the Army began recruiting privates to train as radio intercept operators, an internal memo raised a concern about the ramifications of entrusting young men to do top secret work. Youth, the memo noted, is “a time for sowing of wild oats and under the influence of women and liquor, much is said that the speaker would not dream of saying when uninfluenced.” Women were thought to be less problematic, at least when it came to drinking and bragging.
It was a rare moment in American history—unprecedented—when educated women were not only wanted but competed for. Up to now, many college leaders had hesitated to encourage women to major in math or science, because jobs for women were so scarce. Soon after Pearl Harbor, however, companies like Hercules Powder started recruiting at places like Wellesley, looking for chemists. The Office of Strategic Services was avidly recruiting women, as was the FBI. The jobs landscape for female college graduates changed even just between 1941 and 1942. The men were gone but the war industry was complex and ongoing, and somebody had to staff it. The ballistics industry needed mathematicians to calculate weapon trajectories. Lever Brothers and Armstrong Cork also needed chemists. Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation needed “specifications men”—it used the same term for women—who could read blueprints. Raytheon needed engineers. Bethlehem Steel needed designers for armor plates. MIT needed female graduate students to run its analog computers. The military services were competing with the private sector and with one another. It is true that this was seen as a temporary state of affairs and also true that sexism persisted: Educators worried that they might encourage women to pursue math and science who would then be left high and dry. One electrical company asked for twenty female engineers from Goucher, with the added request, “Select beautiful ones for we don’t want them on our hands after the war.”