Review by Duncan A. Buell
Three years ago, producer/director LeAnn Erickson came out with Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of WWII, a documentary about women mathematicians who held jobs as “computers” during the Second World War. Their primary job at the Philadelphia Computing Section connected to Aberdeen Proving Ground was to compute ballistics tables. The film was well done and has been well received. It tells the story of women who broke the gender barrier doing scientific work in the war years when men were wanted elsewhere.
The Computer Wore Heels is a mobile application telling much the same story but in a different format. The app is book-like, with pages of text, backgrounds that include calculations, mathematics, and photo images, and touch-activated photos, video, and audio. The text is done as if on a manual typewriter, and the format and background are done as if this were sort of a scrapbook, with some annotations done as handwriting.
The story line isn’t linear. It goes back and forth largely as the personal story of women given an opportunity. One waits until halfway through to see the letter to the AAUW from the Dean of the Moore School asking for names of women who would be suitable to work as computers in the ENIAC era, and only because the letter was the same letter as was used for the initial recruitment of women.
Where the film seemed to be largely the personal story of these women pioneers in computing, the app feels much more like the personal stories of women who have professional lives. I found this appealing. Instead of just interviews, one gets from the interspersed documents and backgrounds a good feel for how these women worked with the technology of that era. In many ways, this version of the story improves on the version from the film. Interestingly, I don’t see a single clear photo of a woman wearing high heels.
I have a few complaints. Not all the photos enlarge, and it’s not clear why that could not have been done. At times it does seem to be text-heavy, but there are also places that would seem to cry out for more text. There is a letter from Herman Goldstine offering Doris Blumberg a job as a “Junior Computer” that is a priceless artifact of the terminology of the 1940s. More could have been said, but perhaps not without being dull for the intended audience.
I think The Computer Wore Heels is a great app. My only hesitation is that, if this were to be used for school purposes, the teacher would be well advised to read up on the background. Students will have a hard time today understanding the barriers women faced then to do mathematics and science. In a world that seems constantly engaged in wars that have little impact back home, students may have trouble understanding an entire nation’s mobilizing for the effort of WWII. But the whole story is a large story, and would not have fit in an app in a way that would engage the target audience. The app presents a compelling and inspiring story of women being able to use their intellectual and mathematical talents in an era when that was not common and a story of some of those who were in the thick of things at the dawn of the computer age.
