11 Quotes by Liza Mundy

Sometimes, the way around prejudice is education.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

In 1942, only about 4 percent of American women had completed four years of college.