In all the interviews and conversations, it hadn’t come up. To the sisters, it was just a job they’d held a long time ago, when they were teens with a talent for numbers.
To filmmaker LeAnn Erickson, it was history rediscovered.
It was 2003 and Erickson was interviewing sisters Shirley Blumberg Melvin and Doris Blumberg Polsky for her documentary, “Neighbor Ladies,” about a woman-owned real estate agency that helped to peacefully integrate a Philadelphia neighborhood. The twins, long-retired by then, reluctantly mentioned a different sort of job they’d held during World War II: Female “computers.”
Computer, at that point, was a job title, not a machine. Long before the sisters were businesswomen, community activists, mothers or grandmothers, they were recruited by the U.S. military to do ballistics research. They worked six days a week, sometimes pulling double or triple shifts, along with dozens of other women.
The weapons trajectories they calculated were passed out to soldiers in the field and bombardiers in the air. Some of their colleagues went on to program the earliest of general-purpose computers, the ENIAC.
It wasn’t factory work, but they were “Rosies” nonetheless, filling jobs that men would’ve taken if they hadn’t been at war or wrapped up in other military research.
Jamie Gumbrecht, CNN
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