Abstract

The documentary film Top Secret Rosies, directed by LeAnn Erickson, provides a long overdue and fascinating look into the experiences of the young American women who worked as human “computers” during World War II. The hour-long film makes the case that the top-secret activities of the women of the Philadelphia Computing Section of the U.S. Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory (housed in the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Engineering) were crucial not only to the war effort but also the development of ENIAC, arguably the first electronic digital computer. The film mixes archival footage with recent interviews of the “Rosies” and professional historians. This film will be of interest to historians of technology, computing, and gender, as well as U.S. and military historians.

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