Pat Stuart

How easy it is to change history ... something to think about in this era of both alleged and real fake news.  Surrounded by lies and liars, it may be time to reflect on one of the biggest and most successful lies of all times.

It might have been heralded by a song.  

“I want to buy a paper doll that I can call my own ...”  

So go the lyrics of one of 1944’s most popular tunes.  American men and boys, off in trenches or on ships far from home, loved those lyrics that seemed to promise a return to the patriarchal society they’d left.

America, as war broke out, was a strict, white, male-dominant country where women of all colors had fewer rights than even colored men. Society said women weren’t capable and, therefore, needed a man to care for them. That being the case, their rights were few.

But as the men marched away, someone had to fill their shoes to keep the economy moving, to build planes and ships and fly and pilot them, too.  

Gradually, in 1942, women filtered by the hundreds of thousands into jobs never before filled by their gender.  

From the male perspective, far away from home in 1944, that must have seemed a threat.  “It’ll have to change,” they may have told themselves because our soldiers and sailors knew exactly what they didn’t want — their current or future wives competing with them for jobs. They wanted their paper dolls in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant.  

That was America when the men and boys marched off to war.  That was the world they wanted back.

And so it was in 1945, the men not just ejected all those girls and women from jobs they’d done so capably but quite literally erased the fact of their contributions. The big lie was set loose, the clock set back, and, once more, it was a story of “women can not.”

Once more, women could not get into college courses in many subjects considered male fields because of their feeble brains. Women couldn’t work in the trades because they lacked strength, etc. 

A book called “Code Girls,” by Liza Mandy, brought this home to me. A lot of information has appeared recently about the work women did in WWII, but this was a new one to me, and my job put me in contact with the codes they’d broken, the code systems they used. Their work survived, but I — two decades after the war — had no idea it had been done by some 10,000 women hired by the Army and the Navy. Those women broke the best codes that the Japanese, German and other Axis countries could devise. Their work was critical to the war effort. As one example, it enabled the Navy to predict where U-boats would be and be there to sink them.

Then, Roosevelt declared victory, and the code breakers were told to go home. Most did. More, they said nothing about those years to their daughters who, like me, grew up with the big lie that “women can’t.”

I, personally, didn’t question that lie ... except where it concerned me.  Thus, I ignored the many men who told me that it would be impossible for me, for any woman, to be an espionage officer, to spot, assess, develop, recruit and handle spies for the U.S. Government. I knew I could.

What I didn’t know until much, much later concerned the many women of WWII who not only filled field espionage jobs but did so behind enemy lines in constant threat of imprisonment, torture and death. Some had died. Some came back from the war and refused to quit, accepting file clerk jobs.

Even as the men around me kept repeating the big lie (“You can’t possibly do that, Pat. No woman can.”), some of those women were on other floors in the same Langley Headquarters building. They were referred to dismissively as “Little Old Ladies in Tennis Shoes” and as “our hereditary memory.” The latter was said in tones that made it clear that a book would have been more welcome.  No man wanted the living proof and daily reminder of his lies sitting in the next office.

You might think a lie affecting millions ... 50.5% of Americans ... could certainly not survive. This one has. The canard that women “can’t” has been weakened, but it’s still with us and serves as a reminder of just how easy it is to use lies to change a culture and how far-reaching the impact can be.