Proving ground, p.2
Proving Ground, page 2
As I left the wharf, I set a task for myself. I was going to find out the names of the women. I would learn what they had done in order to be in these beautiful, black-and-white pictures of ENIAC in the 1940s.
I was going to learn their story.
The Double Doors Open
The women walked down the stairs from the second floor, their saddle shoes squishing against the marble. All of the students and professors at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering were men, and the women were used to being hazed, ogled, and mocked when they walked down the hallways or down to the differential analyzer room, where some of them had worked.
But this time the hallways were quiet. Betty, Jean, Kay, Fran, Marlyn, and Ruth—the six women assigned to program solutions for Army ballistics trajectory problems—all twentysomethings, turned right and stopped at a set of double doors. A sign read RESTRICTED. For three and a half months, in classrooms, an antechamber, and a repurposed nearby fraternity house, they had been familiarizing themselves with the computer behind the door, studying diagrams and piecing together the puzzle of how to use it. But they had never once been granted the privilege of seeing the computer that they would program. They had been prohibited from setting eyes on it—until now.
It was mid-November 1945, almost three months after the official surrender of the Japanese, and the women’s boss, Captain Herman Goldstine, serious-minded with an officious air, was walking in front of them. With no warning, he had summoned them down from the second-floor classroom in which they had been working.
The double doors swung open, and they came face-to-face with the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer—the great ENIAC, all forty-five units of it. They had nearly given up asking when they would see it, let alone move the switches and wires and cables they had come to know so intimately on paper over the past three months. But now everything had changed, and they came out of the classroom and followed Herman down the wide concrete steps to the first floor.
It was like meeting someone in person for the first time, after studying their face in photographs. A series of black steel units, each eight feet tall and two feet wide, stared down at them. The units stood in the shape of a huge U—sixteen on the left side, eight at the base, sixteen more on the right. Three square units on wheels stood at odd places around the room, while the remaining two units, an IBM card reader and an IBM card punch, were connected by wires. The women were delighted.
Curious to get a better look, they walked around the large thirtyby-sixty-foot room. The units had been pushed away from the wall so that the engineers could work on the backs. The women took in ENIAC’s depth, a few feet. They inspected the great U and examined the units and their switches. They were impressed: They knew this huge computer was capable of completing 5,000 additions in a second and 500 multiplications in the same second, not to mention lightning-fast divisions and square roots.
Even with the AC roaring, they could feel the heat coming off the tubes and hear their low hum. It had taken more than 200,000 hours of work to build ENIAC and cost just under $500,000—equivalent to just over $7 million today. The women had closely studied the machine on paper, but to see it before them in real life was surreal. They walked around the room completely absorbed by ENIAC, oblivious to the other people in the room.
Too soon, their senior supervisor Herman Goldstine brought them out of their reverie with his command: “We’re going to put a problem on.” They looked up and realized there were about a dozen people already inside the room that they had missed while gazing around in wonderment. These included some young ENIAC engineers (builders of the computer) and Herman’s wife, Adele, a mathematician who had trained some of the women to calculate ballistics trajectories when they first started their Army work. There were also two men from an Army base in New Mexico who the women had met briefly that summer, Dr. Stanley Frankel and Dr. Nicholas Metropolis.
Herman quickly assigned the women to work with various other people in the room, and they took their places around the units of ENIAC. Metropolis and Frankel distributed small, prepared slips of paper that were slid into metal slots at the front of many of the units.
Engineers had been testing small problems on ENIAC, such as tables of squares and cubes, but this new problem, which no one explained, seemed to take up almost the whole machine. As everyone awaited the next command, there was a moment of silence.
Standing in the center of the room, Herman lifted his hands like an orchestra conductor. It would direct the actions of the entire group as they strung wires across the computer and hoisted 50-pound digit trays into place.
The young women were about to do something they had never done before, but they had a shared history that made them exuberant and optimistic. They would work on ENIAC the same way they had done everything since they began their collective journey more than three years earlier: by sitting at desks typing numbers into clunky calculators; by holding what they liked to call “bull sessions” in their barracks; by squinting at enormous diagrams to learn ENIAC’s units in borrowed rooms on the Penn campus. They would teach themselves to program a computer they were not even allowed to see.
And they would do it together.
Looking for Women Math Majors
On a cloudy day on Tuesday, June 2, 1942, Kathleen “Kay” McNulty, twenty-one years old, smiled and took her bachelor’s in mathematics diploma from Reverend Hugh L. Lamb, Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.1 She had dancing eyes, a narrow face, and dimples. It was commencement at Chestnut Hill College, a Catholic women’s school in the northwestern edge of Philadelphia, overlooking the Wissahickon Creek. Kay was one of 107 graduates.2
The commencement was outside, near the tennis courts, and the principal address was also delivered by Bishop James Kearney of Rochester. One of Kay’s best friends, Frances “Fran” Bilas (pronounced BEE-las) received many awards that day, including one from the National Catholic School Press Association, the Student Teacher’s Gold Key Award, and a Kappa Gamma Pi certificate “for graduation with distinction and leadership in extra-curricular activities.”3 Kay knew Fran was one of the smartest students in the class. As Kay and Fran met their families, clutching their degrees in their hands, both of them knew that they were starting the next chapters of their lives.
It was a strange time to be a young American entering the job market. At the University of Pennsylvania commencement exercises, which took place the same day, seventy-three degrees were awarded in absentia to young men who had already joined the armed services. The Philadelphia Inquirer might have been addressing Fran and Kay with the headline it ran above photos of different area commencements: STUDENTS GRADUATING INTO WORLD AT WAR.4
The Women’s Undergraduate Record, the yearbook for women at the University of Pennsylvania for 1941, declared that the war was
a great sorrow to the world… Even though we were not actively engaged in it, it is a war world in which we live. We cannot isolate our sympathies, even though we may hope to isolate our nation. Our eyes are on Europe and her guns strike our hearts. The maturity of Seniority has been accepted by the sober thoughts that are with us all.5
Kay and Fran had been two of only three math majors in their class at Chestnut Hill College; the third, Josephine Benson, was also their best friend. Kay had picked math because it was easy and fun for her. A few days into college, an adviser asked her to pick a major, telling her to choose the subject she liked best. “Mathematics,” she immediately responded. For her, math was “no work. It was a no brain thing for me. It was just like a wonderful puzzle that you could do and there was always an answer.”6
Most women who entered Chestnut Hill College during the Depression majored in home economics, the study of life skills such as cooking, sewing, and finance. In fact, just a few weeks before Kay, Fran, and Josephine’s commencement, Chestnut Hill’s home economics department presented a fashion show in the school auditorium. A hundred gowns were modeled by students, with a patriotic theme, due to the war.7 Many young women in Kay’s class wanted to be dietitians in schools or hospitals. Then they would marry and have children. Home economics could help them in the dietitian field, but that wasn’t the point; they had to learn how to cook and run a household well if they were going to be good housewives.
Kay was not like many of the other students. She wanted to do something important, and eventually she wanted to start a family. And she did not think the two were mutually exclusive.
Not two weeks after she graduated, she spotted a notice in Philadelphia’s Evening Bulletin: LOOKING FOR WOMEN MATH MAJORS. The Army sought women to work at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering. She didn’t know what the job was but thought it amazing that a job for women with degrees in mathematics “would be advertised in the paper.”8 Before the war, this would have been unheard of; ads for math-related positions (such as accountants and actuaries) were in the “Male Help Wanted” section of the newspaper. Math was a man’s job. In the “Female Help Wanted” sections, there were jobs for secretaries, nutritionists, nannies, and laundresses.9 Those interested in the Moore School opportunity were to report to a recruiting office on South Broad Street in South Philadelphia, inside the Union League, a storied private club that also contained offices.10 Kay called Fran and Josephine and said they should all interview together.
But Josephine already had a job. And so the next day, Kay showed up with only one best friend, not two.
All over the country, American women were seeing notices telling them they were needed for war work. Many of these ads were for industrial positions. With brothers, cousins, uncles, and fathers volunteering for service and being drafted, the government and military began a deliberate strategy to recruit women into factories and farms, for now-vacant positions.
During the Great Depression, it had been difficult for both men and women to obtain jobs. Unemployment soared to 24.9 percent in 1933 and remained above 14 percent from 1931 to 1940.11 During World War II, the government encouraged women to fill the jobs formerly open only to men—and women enthusiastically responded. From 1940 to 1945, the percentage of women in the workforce increased by 50 percent.12
If the country were to clothe, feed, and provide guns, artillery, planes, and tanks to the armed forces, its women would have to take jobs in industrial manufacturing and in labor. The fictitious Rosie the Riveter, later the subject of a WE CAN DO IT! poster, was first introduced in a 1942 song that went, “All day long whether rain or shine / She’s a part of the assembly line / She’s making history, / working for victory.” Rosie had “a boyfriend, Charlie / Charlie he’s a Marine / Rosie is protecting Charlie / Working overtime on the riveting machine.”13 Posters recruiting women to war work trumpeted, “The more WOMEN at work the sooner we WIN!”14
Millions of American women stepped up to the plate—taking on jobs making jeeps and tanks, sewing uniforms, canning food, making weapons and ammunition, and doing production for the wartime movies that kept the population (at home and overseas) entertained and diverted. Norman Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter picture, featuring a young woman in blue overalls holding a sandwich in one hand with a rivet gun on her lap, and published on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in May 1943, “proved hugely popular” and the Post loaned it to the US Treasury Department for war bond drives for the rest of the war.15
Economic mobilization due to the war shifted many boundaries of traditional “men’s” and “women’s” work. Previously male-defined jobs such as building tanks and repairing airplanes were recast as feminine and glamorous, and women were welcomed—for the time being.16
But separate from the boom in industrial employment, the war greatly expanded opportunities for college-educated women with backgrounds in engineering, science, and math. Women like Kay were seeing notices that seemed to be written just for them.
The Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau proclaimed the new opportunities:
[For] war job opportunities in science and engineering, you will find that the slogan there as elsewhere is “WOMEN WANTED!”17
Women with math degrees were desirable assets who could help the Allies win the war.
Several months after Kay saw the ad in the Evening Bulletin, leaders of war industries and women’s college heads met at the Washington, DC, branch of the American Association of University Women to discuss steps that could speed the induction of college-trained women into specialized war jobs.18 During the conference, vice chairman of the War Production Board William Batt told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “Winning this war is a job of great magnitude and tremendous seriousness, and there is an appalling demand of everything an Army needs.” Women, he said, were demonstrating that “they can do as good a job as men, and in many instances a much better job in the factories and shops.” He said American women had not yet reached the pace of women in Russia and England in their war activity, but they could.19
For decades, college-educated and highly skilled women had been turned away from well-paying jobs despite their qualifications. Now they held no grudges and jumped into the workforce wherever they were needed.
When Kay and Fran went to the office inside the Union League, they were met by an Army recruiter who asked them about their math backgrounds right away: “Did you have differential calculus?”
“Yes,” Kay answered.
“Did you have physics?”
“Yes.”
“You are exactly what we need,” he said.
“They hired us on the spot,” Kay remembered.20
She was happy; she had been out of college for only two weeks and she had a job—somewhat unusual for a graduate in any era, but even more unlikely given the circumstances. She and Fran were to report to the Moore School on July 1, 1942.21
Kay was born in Creeslough, whose name means “surrounded by lakes.” It is in the northwest part of Ireland, in Donegal County, and Kay was born on the same land where her father’s family had lived since 1804. Their land was 160 acres and ran from the top of Cruckatee Hill and its lake down to the ocean.22
Her father, James McNulty, was the youngest of seven children, and both of his parents had died while he was a child. An older brother had gone to the United States and was studying to be a stonemason, and James had three uncles who had also emigrated. He decided to take a three-year apprenticeship in Philadelphia to become a stonemason as well.
While serving his apprenticeship, James was active in Irish politics in Philadelphia, becoming an Irish Volunteer and studying how to drill and train troops. The group raised money for guns and ammunition and trained to return to Ireland to throw out the British. He was also a champion Irish step dancer and won many medals for it. In 1915, he got typhoid fever and went home to Ireland to recover.23
James and Annie married in February 1917 on the McNulty family farm. In 1918, Kay’s older brother Patrick was born. A year later, her brother James (Jim) was born, and two years later, on February 12, 1921, Kay arrived.
The night Kay was born, her father was arrested. He had been with a group of men who blew up a bridge and were in hiding. Knowing the baby’s birth was imminent, James returned home to be with Annie for the birth. “Name her Kathleen after my mother and grandmother,” he said, and then was arrested by the Black and Tans, English recruits to the Royal Irish Constabulary during the Irish War of Independence. Many Irishmen were arrested the same night, but most of the men who had been with James at the bridge were not caught. For two years he was kept in Derry Jail in solitary confinement without any charges ever being brought against him and no trial. When he was brought to trial, without any charges, he was released.24
After his release from jail in 1923, James tried to live in Ireland but decided he could not live under the new Irish Free State, established in December 1922 under the Anglo-Irish Treaty. He opted instead to return to America and have his family join him. He and a brother formed a development company to buy land and build houses in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, a beautiful, tree-lined, growing suburb of Northwest Philadelphia.
While James was building a house for his own family, Annie, who was pregnant, delivered Kay’s sister Anna in Ireland. In October 1924, Annie and the children sailed for the United States. James met them in New York and took them to their new, furnished home in the Wyndmoor section of Philadelphia.25
Kay arrived at the age of three speaking only Gaelic. But she learned English quickly, from books her brothers brought home from school. As her English grew stronger, she dropped her Irish accent, and yet whenever she came in from outside and stepped across the doorstep of her home, it came roaring back.26
After another baby, Cecelia, was born, the McNultys moved to a larger house, on Highland Avenue in Chestnut Hill. When Kay entered the local, almost entirely Irish, Catholic elementary school at six and a half, she was adept at math and advanced for her grade. One day her teacher announced that she was going to teach the class to count to ten. Kay stood up and said she could already count to fifty. “You don’t need to be here,” the teacher said. “You can go home.” Kay walked out of the school.27
The teacher ran after her down the block, laughing. “I was joking!” she exclaimed. “You can stay! I’m going to teach you other things besides how to count.” In the second half of third grade, Kay was advanced to fourth grade. She loved everything about school, and on the way home would stop at the local library to check out books. Sometimes she would sit on the steps in front of a bank and tell stories to other children, stories drawn from books and from her imagination. It got to be so late that her mother Annie would send one of the boys to make her come home.28
At night, during homework time, Kay helped her older brothers with their math homework.29 As a result, she learned each math course at least a year before she studied it.
