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

by Liza Mundy

In college, she shone in her mechanical drawing classes—as close to a drafting class as Vassar offered—and aspired to be an architect. Her professor was the legendary Grace Hopper, a computing pioneer who became a rear admiral for the Navy and helped develop the computer programming language COBOL. Elizabeth Bigelow always believed Hopper identified her for the code-breaking program. When Elizabeth got out of the Navy she applied to three leading schools of architecture. “In every case the response was the same,” she recalled later. “We’re sorry, but we are saving all our spaces for the men who have been in the armed services.” Elizabeth wrote back protesting that she had been in the WAVES for two years. She could not say she had sunk a convoy, because that was top secret. “The answers all came back, ‘We’re sorry, but no.’”