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SUCCEED IN SCHOOL
"Much has been made of the early twentieth century focus of private schools on training girls for marriage and motherhood."(6)
"Grace grew up secure and self-reliant."(7)
"At seventeen, Grace failed the Latin entrance exam for Vassar."(8)
"In Grace's freshman year, Vassar followed this postwar trend in women's education away from pioneering efforts at equality with men's colleges, introducing instead subjects aimed at preparing women for marriage and children."(9)
"The Depression further hastened the drift away from the goal of equality in education and economic opportunity between women and men. Widespread unemployment raised the notion that working women were selfishly taking jobs away from me on whom families depended for support."23(9)
23SL Hopper Interview, 17; Chafe, American Woman, 103-4; Hopper's sister Mary graduated in 1930 and her brother Roger graduated from Yale in 1932.
SL Hopper Interview Capt. Grace Hopper Interview by Linda Calvert, 3 September 1982 to 28 February 1983, OH46, Women in Federal Government Oral History Project, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge, MA
"Grace was asked once, years later, about Vassar students' career goals, and she answered that most of her classmates had no goals other than to get married. If they expected to work at all, it was just assumed that they would become schoolteachers. [...] Fifty years later Hopper attended her class reunion at Vassar and found that not much had changed among her peers. Most of them were married and, if they worked outside the home, they were mostly occupied with volunteer work."(11)
"Hopper graduated from Vassar with honors in 1928, majoring in both math and physics. She had also taken a great many courses in economics, public finance, money and banking, business cycles, and that sort of thing. This business background would stand her in very good stead later when she worked in industry. On graduation, Hopper won a fellowship to study mathematics at Yale, where she earned a master of arts two years later. Her father had gone to Yale,and her brother was in the undergraduate class of 1932. He, too, like his older sister, graduated Phi Beta Kappa, but with a major in economics." (11)
"Grace and Vincent were married on 12 June 1930 in a traditional wedding." (12)
Hopper always maintained that she had been brought up to write things out and that she had been well trained in writing. Because she thought it was a very important skill, she used to "bug" her students about it. She started her probability course, for example, by giving a lecture on Sterling's formula. Then she would have her students write up the lecture. She marked what they handed in, covering their submissions with red ink in the process of correcting their writing. The students were generally indignant, letting her know that they were taking a math course, not English. Unfazed, Hopper replied that they would never get anywhere in math or in any other subject unless they could communicate and write clearly."36(13)
36NMAH Hopper Interview 1972, 2.
Grace Hopper interviewed by Henry Tropp, 5 July 1972, folder 9, box 11, series 1, Computer Oral History Collection accession 196, National Museum of History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
"Yale awarded seven doctorates in mathematics between 1934 and 1937. [...] The only other woman going through the doctoral program in math at the same time as Hopper was a nun. Social pressures on women to marry and have children rather than a career were an effective deterrent for many." (15)
"Only a minority of women with a PhD in mathematics in those days ever married and even fewer had children. Of those who married fellow academics, the man's career was almost always given priority.41 Grace was unusual in maintaining the momentum of her career, but perhaps the effort was too much for the marriage. She and Vincent built a house on the Vassar campus where they were together most weekends during the academic year commuting back and forth[...] Such an arrangement must have put a strain on the marriage. So, too, did ht immense amount of work they packed into those years."41(15-16)
41For marriage and career paths of women mathematicians see Murray, Women Becoming Mathematicians, 35-39, 155-60.
"Grace continued to use her married name, never spoke of the divorce, and disliked mention of it in articles about her. Many articles, in fact, stated that she was a widow, and some, including the venerable New York Times, even went so far as to say that her husband died during World War II. In those days, divorce was not acceptable, it was a stigma, and if Grace was not intentionally misleading about her husband, she apparently did nothing to correct the erroneous stories."46(18)
46MMW Interview, 1: 21-22; Cushman, "Admiral Hopper's Farewell", New York Times, 14 August 1986.
Mary Murray Westcote interviews by author, 1, 23 October 1999; 2, 11December 1999.
"Although she eventually spent almost forty-three years in the navy, initially she had to fight to get in."(19)
Navy Liason Office Harvard University July 1944
Bureau of Ships Computation Project
Regarding her work on the Mark I
"Hopper was always sure that Aiken's only concern was to get the job done, and if there were only women available with the requisite skills to do that, it was fine with him. She knew he could be equally critical of all his staff, male or female." (32)
"Hopper also wrote a number of smaller programs for special jobs involving partial differential equations and things of that sort. Then, part way through that first year, Aiken walked up to her desk and told her she was going to write a book. When she protested that she had never written a book before, Aiken's response was a laconic, "Well, you're in the navy now." So she went to work (against her wishes) writing a manual for the Mark I."75(49)
75NMAH Hopper Interview 1968, 46.
Grace Hopper Interview by Uta Merzbach July 1968, folders 5, 6, 7, box 11, series 1, Computer Oral History Collection acc. 196, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
At this point Hopper's computing education under Aiken took an interesting twist. He insisted that she read Charles Babbage's autobiography for the origin of most of the basic computing concepts. Aiken also wanted her to familiarize herself with the work of Lady Ada Lovelace, whom Hopper always remembered for having written the first loop. Hopper did have access to the original Babbage papers, which she found delightful reading. In fact, she thought they were still worth reading by anyone interested in computers because Babbage had some novel ideas that had not yet been implemented."77(49)
77 SL Hopper Interview, 139-40; NMAH Hopper Interview 1968, 47-48.
"On such occasions Hopper, who was a heavy drinker for quite a number of years, invariably drank Manhattans...more than one of them."(55)
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