In the current issue

Peter Soppelsa, "Intersection: Technology, Mobility, Geography"

Film Review
Joseph November, "When Women Were Computers: LeAnn Erickson, Top Secret Rosies"

Essay Reviews
Shannon Jackson, "Technology, Bodily Limits, and Ways of Knowing: Joy Parr, Sensing Changes"

Eda Kranakis, "'And it is, it is a glorious thing/To be a Pirate King!': Adrian Johns, Piracy"

Peter A. Shulman,"The Richest Hills Unearthed: Timothy J. LeCain, Mass Destruction"

Amy E. Slaton, "The Uses of Context: Steen Hyldgaard Christensen, Bernard Delahousse, and Martin Meganck, eds., Engineering in Context"

Technology and Culture
October 2011

When Women Were Computers:
LeAnn Erickson, Top Secret Rosies

Joseph November
Almost seventy years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, World War II still looms large in the U.S. historical consciousness. However, the enormous contributions of women to America’s war effort receive scant attention. While the work of women in industrial production, personified by the bicep-flexing Rosie the Riveter, often gets a perfunctory nod, the stories of the women who performed great feats of intellectual labor have not received the attention they deserve in both popular and scholarly accounts of the war.1

A big step in the right direction can be found in Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of WWII, an hour-long documentary film produced and directed by LeAnn Erickson and written by Cynthia Baughman (PBS Distribution, 2010). Tightly edited and highly polished, the film mixes interviews with archival footage to tell the stories of several young women who were recruited by the military to work as human computers for the Philadelphia Computing Section, a secret operation run by the U.S. Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory and housed within the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Engineering. In short, the task of these women was to quickly and flawlessly carry out the enormous number of calculations necessary to construct accurate ballistics tables used to predict the flight paths of fired artillery shells, as well as bombs dropped from airplanes (figures 1 and 2).

Fig. 1: Rosies pose for a portrait. (Source: Photo by Marlyn Meltzer, reprinted with permission.)		Fig. 2: Rosies at work. (Source: Photo by U.S. Army.)
(Click either image for a larger view)

In terms of engaging a wide audience and introducing viewers to several important yet seldom discussed historical aspects of the war, the story of the “Rosies” is particularly effective. To make clear the importance of the Rosies’ work with differential equations and calculating machines, the filmtakes great care to explain the context of computational work within the war effort. Although one could classify as an overreach the film’s claim that “without their contribution to the war effort, we would have lost World War II . . . we could not have won World War II without that data,” the viewer does become convinced that many of the important weapons, such as the Norden bombsight, that the United States deployed during the war would have been ineffective without the tables developed by the Ballistic Research Laboratory.

The film also does a fine job in bringing to light the causes and effects of the feminization of the U.S. labor force during the war. The documentary accomplishes this by following the lives of four women who worked in the Philadelphia Computing Section. Although all the Rosies had enough education to demonstrate aptitude in mathematics, they otherwise had little in common—for instance, two were twins who grew up in a tough neighborhood of Philadelphia, another left a farm in Missouri to join the war effort, and yet another was an English major who happened to know how to operate an adding machine. Through interviews, these women show that having a full-time job with a good salary was at once a liberating and shocking experience for them and their families. The viewer also learns that after the war, most of the film’s subjects gave up their careers in order to raise families. Erickson’s 2004 documentary Neighbor Ladies shows how two human computers-turned-housewives (twins Doris and Shirley Blumberg) became active in the real estate business.

Watch the trailer for Top Secret Rosies

A third story Top Secret Rosies illuminates is that of the wartime origins of electronic digital computing. Parallel to the work of the women in the Philadelphia Computing Section, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert of the Moore School of Engineering were receiving support from the Ballistic Research Laboratory to automate much of the work of the Rosies. The computer that Mauchly and Eckert built, called ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), which was arguably the first electronic digital computer, could perform in a matter of seconds what took human computers days to complete. As the film shows, however, getting ENIAC to actually operate required the active participation of the women working in the Philadelphia Computing Section. In configuring and reconfiguring ENIAC to solve particular problems, the Rosies were among the first to work as programmers, years before the term “programming” came to describe these activities and decades ahead of the era in which programming emerged as an almost all-male profession.

Taken as a whole, Top Secret Rosies is an excellent resource for introductory history of technology and history of computing courses, as well as for more general courses covering twentieth-century U.S. history. At fifty-six minutes it can easily be screened in class. While more careful editing could have made some of the statements by interviewed veterans seem less moralizing [End Page 790] and some of the claims by the interviewed professional historians less hyperbolic, the film provides much fodder for good discussion. Beyond the classroom setting, Top Secret Rosies can help historians of technology add a human dimension to processes so large—for example, computerization or the changes in production of technical data—that in analyzing them, it becomes easy to lose sight of the people driving them.

The film is currently available on DVD in standard definition. Within the United States, it can be viewed in high definition via the Netflix “instant” streaming video service. No captions or subtitles are available.

1. A notable exception is Jennifer Light’s “When Computers Were Women,” Technology and Culture 40 (1999): 455–83, which inspired the title of this review.

Joseph November is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of South Carolina.

©2011 by the Society for the History of Technology.