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

by Liza Mundy

After the war, the U.S. Army and Navy code-breaking operations merged to become what is now the National Security Agency. It was women who helped found the field of clandestine eavesdropping—much bigger and more controversial now than it was then—and it was women in many cases who shaped the early culture of the NSA.

It was not easy being a smart girl in the 1940s. People thought you were annoying.

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.

The open-mindedness of the aviators was thanks in part to the efforts of Joy Bright Hancock, a former yeomanette who worked to persuade the Navy to allow women to train as mechanics for airplane engine repair and maintenance. She was also a trained pilot.

Still, many Americans persisted in the view that military women were just prostitutes in uniform, admitted into the military to service the men. It was an old slander that had been used against the yeomanettes in World War I.

On walls were chiseled inscriptions of the school motto, Vincit qui se vincit, or “She who conquers self conquers all.”

After World War II ended, Stephen Chamberlin, operations officer for General Douglas MacArthur, declared that code breakers shortened the war and helped save thousands of lives. The postwar accolades did not mention that more than ten thousand U.S. code breakers were women.