Quotes from Liza Mundy

Most people hate cell phone use on trains; I love cell phone use on trains. What do you want to do, read that report on your lap, or hear about your neighbour's worst date ever?

Men are just as willing as women to marry up, and life is now giving them the opportunity to do so. So, women, own up to your accomplishments, buy him a drink, and tell him what you really do.

While there may have once been a stigma to making money, high-earning women actually have an advantage in the dating-and-marriage market.

Most people hate cell phone use on trains; I love cell phone use on trains. What do you want to do, read that report on your lap, or hear about your neighbor's worst date ever?

Sometimes, the way around prejudice is education.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Through their brainwork, the women had an impact on the fighting that went on.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.