Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

by Liza Mundy

Precisely because they did not expect to be celebrated or even promoted, the women tended to be collegial.

Administrators were finding to their chagrin that there often was not a correlation between a person’s background and how well that person would do at breaking codes. Some PhDs were hopeless, and some high school dropouts were naturals.

Married women were problematic, the memo observed, through no fault of their own but because they tended to move to follow their husbands.