Code Girls Quotes

“It was not easy being a smart girl in the 1940s. People thought you were annoying.”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“In 1942, only about 4 percent of American women had completed four years of college.”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“Crossword puzzles are designed to be solved, while codes and ciphers are designed to prevent solution. With codes, you have to be prepared to work for months—for years—and fail.”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“Tooth and nail they worked. No one jostled for promotion. All this, they knew, was temporary. The point was to win the war and get back to their regularly scheduled lives.”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“There were discussions about minutiae like pockets, which Virginia Gildersleeve felt were essential for any working woman. But the designers felt pockets would spoil the lines of the suit. 'Utility was sacrificed to looks,' Gildersleeve noted with some disgust in her memoir. 'They certainly looked very attractive and no doubt won many recruits for the Navy; but I regretted those pockets.”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers Who Helped Win World War II

“Women were more than placeholders for the men. Women were active war agents. Through their brainwork, the women had an impact on the fighting that went on. This is an important truth, and it is one that often has been overlooked.”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“It was the first time many of the women had spent time in a bonafide workplace apart from a classroom, and they discovered what workplaces are and have been since the dawn of time: places where one is annoyed and thwarted and underpaid and interrupted and under appreciated.”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers Who Helped Win World War II

“Far less well known is that more than ten thousand women traveled to Washington, D.C., to lend their minds and their hard-won educations to the war effort.”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“Motherhood was the dividing line between brilliant women who stayed in the work and those who did not. For a woman with children, there were few resources to make a career feasible. The nation lost talent that the war had developed.”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“In science, there is something called a “jackpot effect,” where a male scientist hires women in his lab early in the development of a certain field, and these women hire other talented women, and, as a result, the field ends up with an unusually high number of women. Something like this was at work in cryptanalysis. A few key women proved themselves gifted, early on; a few key men were willing to hire and encourage”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“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.”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“Through their brainwork, the women had an impact on the fighting that went on.”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“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.”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“For a young American woman, it was all too easy to convince an inquiring stranger that the work she did was menial, or that she existed as a plaything for the men she worked for.”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“Far less well known is that more than ten thousand women traveled to Washington, D.C., to lend their minds and their hard-won educations to the war effort. The recruitment of these American women—and the fact that women were behind some of the most significant individual code-breaking triumphs of the war—was one of the best-kept secrets of the conflict. The military and strategic importance of their work was enormous.”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“A code may be used for secrecy, but also for brevity and truncation. Shorthand is a code in precisely this way and so, often, is modern-day texting.”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“The women were of a unique and overlooked generation. Many were born in 1920, the historic year when American women won the right to vote. Their early life was led in an atmosphere of broadening opportunity”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“when Herbert Hoover was elected U.S. president in 1928, Henry Stimson—Hoover’s new secretary of state—was shocked to learn that Yardley’s bureau was penetrating the private diplomatic missives of other countries. Stimson in 1929 shuttered the operation, cutting off State Department funding and primly explaining that gentlemen do not read one another’s mail—something European gentlemen did all the time, of course, and had been doing for hundreds of years.”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“the Signal Corps recruited U.S. switchboard operators who were bilingual in English and French and loaded them into ships bound for Europe. Known as the “Hello Girls,” these were the first American women other than nurses to be sent by the U.S. military into harm’s way. The officers whose calls they connected often prefaced their conversations by saying, “Thank Heaven you’re here!”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“Women now were expected to quit work when they started having babies. The postwar U.S. government made this clear. There was no more state-sponsored child care. In a postwar, Cold War America, child care was viewed with suspicion, as the kind of thing communists used to raise their children collectively. The U.S. government began doing the opposite of its wartime recruiting; it made propaganda-type films telling women it was important to leave their jobs, return home, and tend their households.”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“the women used these Enigma messages—along with files on individual U-boats and their commanders—to track, with pins, every U-boat and convoy whose location was known. At another desk, several other Goucher women, including Jacqueline Jenkins (later the mother of Bill Nye, aka Bill Nye the Science Guy), tracked “neutral shipping” based on daily position reports.”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“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.”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“Not to be ministers’ wives, but to be ministers.”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“newspaper want ads that read “Male”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“If the Navy could possibly have used dogs or ducks or monkeys, certain of the older admirals would probably have greatly preferred them to women,” Gildersleeve acidly remarked later. The”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“During World War II, code breaking would come into its own as one of the most fruitful forms of intelligence that exists.”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“Schoolteachers were smart, educated, accustomed to hard work, unused to high pay, simultaneously youthful and mature, and”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“It was a rare moment in American history—unprecedented—when educated women were not only wanted but competed for.”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“these always paid less than men’s jobs did.”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II

“Frank Raven was a smug Yale graduate who seems to have arrived spoiling for a fight.”
― Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II