Status Updates From Code Girls: The Untold Stor...

These codes. Intense. It took Agnes Driscoll ( Mrs. X) three years to decipher one, 7 months to decipher another. After the book described the solution, I'm pretty confident I never would have gotten it. Additions without carrying, plus rotating blackout cypher on top of that, and in Japanese. The other one was written vertical and deciphered horizontal on a rotating substitution.

Oh for fucks sake, the navy asked for passport pictures and the colleges replied, you should really get bigger pictures of these women, they are quite pretty and the passports don't do them justice
Oh for fucks sake again... their cover if they were asked what they did was to say " I sit on the laps of the commanding officers" and everyone just believed them. They were also allowed to say " i sharpen pencils"

The navy rear-admiral said " if you can find women who know multiple languages, are good at mathematics and astronomy, are native born, have grit and can keep their mouth shut, bring them in" to this, the Deans of the seven sisters said " hold my beer" and brought in hundreds, many scoring higher on every test than male counterparts. The only leak came from a male professor at pembrook.

It took so long for the army to figure out that women were smart, that the navy had recruited them all from the seven sisters by the time they tried recruiting from those colleges.

After the war, the army and navy women merged into one signals intelligence team, forming the NSA.

Once the army decided to "try and find smart women" they recruited 10,000 women secretly basically overnight. Educated women were everywhere, good at keeping a secret, willing to relocate quickly, and answered the call with a " hell yes." These women didn't augment or supplement the code breaking in WW2, they were the backbone of it. The full foundation. They started from scratch.

Kind of hilarious/ sad, that the nation was desperate for code breakers and by the time the Army figured out that women from the seven sisters colleges were brilliant and had no job prospects ( other than teaching due to .. patriarchy) and went to recruit these women.... the navy had already figured it out and recruited all of them. It took the army that long to consider women smart.