"We are anonymous. If people ask you what you do here, tell 'em you are file clerks. People aren't interested in file clerks — not enough to ask questions." Women and men who served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) were instructed to keep their service secret. As spies, soldiers, and scientists, many of the women who had contributed to the war effort during World War II remained silent even after those wars had ended. The tasks that women were asked to perform went beyond the homefront and into the front lines.

The "Government Girls"

With so many men overseas, several government offices were vacated. Because of the vital nature of those positions, the U.S. government actively recruited women as "government girls," or temporary workers who could only hold those jobs for the duration of a national emergency, in this case World War II. This included OSS jobs in both intelligence gathering and code breaking. Women sent to Europe served in dangerous missions, often delivering messages behind German enemy lines and training resistance groups.

By 1944, women held more than a third of the jobs in the federal government, not only in the OSS but in all agencies. At the end of WWII, only a few women retained their positions. Most were forced to leave because their service was only considered necessary while men were away at war.

From Pilots ... to Prisoners of War

The earliest efforts to bring women into U.S. armed forces started with a woman, Jacqueline Cochran. An established pilot, Jacqueline wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt in 1940 to suggest that a women's flying division be established in the Army Air Force. While she didn't get her wish entirely, a group known as the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASP, was created. The WASP ferried planes from factories to bases all across the country. Many of these pilots came from the Pacific Northwest where the Boeing plant desperately needed fast options for transport.

Women had been serving the American military as nurses since the Revolutionary War in the late 1700s. But after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the armed services made a conscious effort to step up the involvement of women. In 1942, women were authorized by Congress to serve with the Army, Navy and Coast Guard and one year later, with the Marines. The WAC (or Women's Army Corps) was first used in clerical and administrative jobs to replace men being sent to direct combat. As the war continued, however, WAC members took on more duties, from rigging parachutes to fixing vehicles.

Some of the first Americans to be taken as prisoners of war during WWII were women as well. Not afraid to serve in dangerous regions, female military nurses and civilian civil servants were among the first people to be captured by the Japanese in the Philippines during the war.

Civilians and Scientists

One of the most controversial American inventions to come from the Second World War was the atomic bomb that devastated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The process of its development, known as the "Manhattan Project," was not driven by male scientists alone — at least 300 military and civilian women worked on the atomic bomb, not only as clerks but in research positions. Many female scientists, married to scientists themselves, worked in laboratories for free, receiving little or no recognition for the work they did.

Dr. Leona Woods Marshall was one of those scientists. Leona moved to Richland, Washington to work at Hanford, a nuclear facility, with her husband. She was part of the construction of the B-reactor, a reactor that manufactured plutonium for both the first atomic blast in New Mexico and the bomb that was dropped over Nagasaki. Her testing and calculations helped improve the bomb's performance.

After the War

More than 150,000 American women served in the armed forces during World War II. It was difficult for many Americans to accept the idea of women in uniform when the war began, but as it progressed popular images and the expectations of women's capabilities began to change. Overcoming low expectations and fighting prejudice, women continued to advance in the armed forces, proving that they could serve their country not only in the home but on the front lines.