Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea

GRACE

HOPPER

This book has been brought to publication

with the generous assistance of Marguerite and Gerry Lenfest.

Additional titles in the Library of Naval Biography series, edited by James C. Bradford

Confederate Admiral: The Life and Wars of Franklin Buchanan

by Craig L. Symonds

Andrew Foote: Civil War Admiral on Western Waters

by Spencer C. Tucker

Thomas ap Catesby Jones: Commodore of Manifest Destiny

by Gene A. Smith

Joshua Barney: Hero of the Revolution and 1812

by Louis Arthur Norton

Matthew Calbraith Perry: Antebellum Sailor and Diplomat

by John H. Schroeder

Mad Jack Percival: Legend of the Old Navy

by James H. Ellis

Commodore Ellsworth P. Bertholf:

First Commandant of the Coast Guard

by C. Douglas Kroll

Thomas Macdonough: Master of Command in the Early U.S. Navy

by David Curtis Skaggs

GRACE

HOPPER

Admiral of the

Cyber Sea

Kathleen Broome Williams

Naval Institute Press

Annapolis, Maryland

This book has been brought to publication by the generous assistance of Marguerite and Gerry Lenfest.

First Naval Institute Press paperback edition published 2012.

ISBN 978-1-61251-265-5

Naval Institute Press

291 Wood Road

Annapolis, MD 21402

© 2004 by Kathleen Broome Williams

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Williams, Kathleen Broome, 1944–

Grace Hopper : admiral of the cyber sea / Kathleen Broome Williams,

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Hopper, Grace Murray. 2. Women admirals—United States—Biography. 3. Admirals—United States—Biography. 4. Women computer engineers—United States—Biography. 5. Computer engineers—United States—Biography. I. Title.

V63.H66W55 2004

359'.0092—dc22

2004007942

16151413127654321

First Printing

For Chlöe, a loving friend

Contents

Foreword

Preface and Acknowledgments

1Remember Your Great-Grandfather the Admiral

2You’re in the Navy Now

3Women Enter the World of Technology

4A WAVE Ordnance Officer?

5I’m in the Reserve, Retired, and on Active Duty

6The Navy’s Best Recruiter?

7Amazing Grace

Notes

Bibliography

Further Reading

Index

Foreword

On 6 September 1995, the U.S. Navy commissioned its newest Arleigh Burke–class destroyer, the USS Hopper (DDG-70). Bristling with the most advanced electronic weapons systems, it was fittingly named for Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, a pioneer computer scientist and the officer who contributed most to the standardization of the navy’s computing systems.

Arleigh Burke was Hopper’s senior by five years. He graduated from the Naval Academy with a degree in engineering in 1923; Grace Hopper, a student of math and physics, graduated from Vassar five years later. The year 1943 was pivotal for both Burke and Hopper. In May of 1943 Burke was promoted to captain and transferred from the Bureau of Ordnance, where he had been testing guns in the Naval Gun Factory in the Washington Navy Yard, to command of a destroyer squadron in the Solomon Islands. In December 1943 Grace Hopper entered the navy, was assigned to the Computation Project of the Bureau of Ships at Harvard University, and began writing programs for the Mark I, the navy’s most advanced computer. Eighteen years later Burke retired from the navy as Chief of Naval Operations and entered the business world where Hopper, a systems engineer, had risen to become Director of Automatic Programming Languages for the Univac Division of the Sperry Corporation. Five years after Burke retired from the navy, Hopper was placed on the retired reserve list, but within a year was recalled to active duty to spend the next nineteen years working on the navy’s computer systems. When Hopper retired again in 1986, this time as a rear admiral, she was the navy’s oldest serving officer. Both Burke and Hopper served in the navy for forty-two years.

Unlike Burke, Hopper has not until now been the subject of a scholarly biography. This is due in part to the reading public’s preference for studies of individuals with political or combat careers, and in part to a shortage of personal papers left by Hopper. Kathleen Broome Williams is the perfect individual to correct this lacuna in both naval history and the history of technology. She brings to this study an understanding of women in the navy and naval technology gained through her previous books, Secret Weapon: U.S. High-Frequency Direction Finding in the Battle of the Atlantic (1996) and Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists and the U.S. Navy in World War II (2001). Thus, I was more than pleased when she responded positively to my invitation to contribute this volume to The Library of Naval Biography series.

The Library of Naval Biography provides accurate, informative, and interpretive biographies of influential naval figures—men and women who have shaped or reflected the naval affairs of their time. Each volume explains the forces that acted upon its subject as well as the significance of that person in history. Some volumes explore the lives of individuals who have not previously been the subject of a modern, full-scale biography, while others reexamine the lives of better-known individuals adding new information, a differing perspective, or a fresh interpretation. The series is international in scope and includes individuals from several centuries. All volumes are based on solid research and written to be of interest to general readers as well as useful to specialists.

With these goals in mind, the length of each volume has been limited, the notes placed at the end of the text and restricted primarily to direct quotations, and a brief essay on Further Reading provided to assess previous biographies of the subject and to direct the reader to the most important studies of the era and events in which the person lived and participated. It is the intention that this combination of clear writing, fresh interpretations, and solid historical context will result in volumes that restore the all-important human dimension to naval history and are enjoyable to read.

James C. Bradford

Preface and Acknowledgments

In 1983 Grace Murray Hopper, then seventy-six years old, was made a commodore by special presidential appointment. Two years later the title of that rank was changed to rear admiral. In 1987 the navy named its new computer center in San Diego for Hopper and in 1996, four years after her death, it launched the newest Arleigh Burke–class destroyer Hopper. The recipient of numerous medals, awards, and honorary degrees, Hopper was esteemed both for her intellect and for her energy. Her message to everyone was above all to innovate and never to be tied to the old or customary way of doing things. Even when she finally retired in 1986—the oldest serving officer in the navy—Grace Hopper continued working as a consultant for Digital Equipment Corporation. She died in 1992 and was buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery.

Hopper had a long and distinguished civilian career, first as a professor of mathematics and later as a computer scientist in a major corporation. Her greatest source of pride, however, was always her service in the U.S. Navy. After earning a PhD in mathematics from Yale in 1933, Hopper went on to teach mathematics at Vassar College in New York. After World War II, she moved into commercial computing, entering the new field on the ground floor and helping to define the meaning of systems engineering. In 1949, she joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, remaining with the company through its various permutations until 1967. During her years in private industry, Hopper became well known and respected for her role in the invention of the compiler and in the creation of COBOL, a programming language in wide use today. Her pioneering work in the development of programming languages is considered her major contribution to computing, earning for Hopper the nicknames Grandma COBOL and the Grand Lady of Software.

The pivotal point in Hopper’s life, however, and the catalyst for all her later successes, was her military service in World War II. The navy introduced her to the emerging world of computing, where she spent the rest of her long and productive life. Years later, Hopper admitted that she had never thought of going into computer work because there were no computers to go into—not until she met the Mark I at the navy’s Computation Laboratory at Harvard. Hopper began her computing career writing programs for the Mark I, the first automatically sequenced digital computer in the United States. After the war, she spent twenty years in the naval reserve using what she was learning in her civilian career to help establish the navy’s emerging computer systems. Then, in 1967, Hopper was recalled to active duty, serving a further nineteen years standardizing navy computer programming languages.

In 1944, the Mark I could complete three operations a second. Nine years later, Hopper was writing programs for the UNIVAC, the first commercial large-scale electronic computer, which completed 1,000 operations a second. In 1963, when Hopper still had twenty-three working years ahead of her, the fastest computer around, the CDC 6600, could execute over three million instructions a second. Hopper not only kept up with these changes, she was also forward looking and quick to anticipate where the field would go next. For much of the second half of the twentieth century, she played an important part in the computer revolution. Always pushing the limits of conventional thinking and finding innovative approaches to problem solving, Hopper left her mark not only on navy computing, but also on the information processing profession as a whole. Today, U.S. Navy computing is so ubiquitous that at a cost of about a million dollars a year a civilian firm provides secure Internet message boards where officers at sea can post information, recount experiences, ask questions, and receive answers. Anticipating such developments, Grace Hopper would not have been surprised.

In part because of her gender and her age, Hopper attracted considerable media attention. Because she spent nineteen of her last working years in uniform, she became the symbol of navy computing, and many people know a little about her. She herself was the author of dozens of papers and articles on computing, and she was the subject of dozens more, as well as of print, radio, and television interviews. Two biographies have been written about Grace Hopper. Both are good but limited because they are intended for young readers. Two dissertations have looked more closely at Hopper’s career: one deals with her as a teacher and the other is an examination of her pioneering computing work. Her experiences in the navy, however, have been treated only superficially.

This biography focuses on Hopper’s navy career, examining the skills she possessed that were so valuable to a male-dominated military bureaucracy that she overcame the barriers of gender and age so often inhibiting to others. Hopper had nothing to offer the navy but her understanding of computers. Yet the navy had emerged from World War II so dependent on advanced information systems that Hopper’s area of expertise was exactly what was needed. In a fast-developing field and with growing competition from industry, there was a shortage of people in the navy with her ability, knowledge, and experience. Once back on active duty, her strength of character and energy ensured her continuing relevance in a rapidly changing young person’s game.

Perhaps it is inevitable that someone who attracted such media attention should be the subject of numerous myths. Among the most persistent of these are that Hopper invented the computer term bug; that her husband had been killed in World War II; that she created the computer language COBOL; and that she was the first woman to achieve the rank of rear admiral. While she herself did not start these stories—found in sources as reputable as the New York Times, the Navy Times, Time magazine, and the Baltimore Sun—neither does she seem to have discouraged them.

Another of the errors that has persisted, and to which Hopper herself really did contribute, was that the Harvard Computation Laboratory was taken over by the Bureau of Ordnance (BuOrd) during World War II. In fact, as all primary documents make clear, it was the Bureau of Ships that ran the Computation Lab, handing it over to Bureau of Ordnance control only on 1 January 1946. Perhaps Hopper’s carelessness on this point in later interviews stems from the fact that she continued to work at the lab for three years after the war, during which time it was, indeed, under BuOrd.

Regrettably, very little of Grace Hopper’s personal correspondence has survived. Her voice can be heard clearly, however, in the several lengthy oral history interviews she granted over a fifteen-year period. Her energetic personality and her strong views also emerge in the hundreds of less formal interviews she gave to newspapers and journals and in her interviews on Sixty Minutes and the David Letterman Show. The extensive professional writing she left is infused with her unmistakable vigor, and the hundreds of thank-you letters she received for her speeches and presentations ring with repetition of her memorable phrases and ideas. Both sources demonstrate the range and depth of her influence. Hopper donated many of her professional papers to the Smithsonian Institution, which has the best collection. Additional papers are scattered among the Howard Aiken Papers at Harvard University and other civilian and navy collections, particularly at the various branches of the National Archives and Records Administration, and at the Hagley Museum and Library in Delaware. Hopper also left a large collection of memorabilia to the navy. It is housed in the Grace M. Hopper Building, Naval Computer and Telecommunications Station, Naval Air Station North Island, San Diego, California. Two huge crates contain all her plaques, awards, trophies, honorary doctoral hoods, and framed certificates, as well as a large collection of photographs and newspaper clippings. The navy maintains a small gallery in the building featuring a rotating exhibition from among its Hopper collection. The Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis is the best source for documents on the history of computing and has an excellent oral history collection. Finally, the recollections of Hopper’s colleagues, family, and friends have added valuable insights and little-known facts.

I am most indebted to members of Grace Hopper’s family, who have been generous in sharing their memories in interviews and correspondence and in giving me access to family papers. I regret that Grace’s sister Mary Murray Westcote did not live to see this book, but I thank her three sons, Walter, William, and John Westcote. Grace’s brother’s son, Roger F. Murray III, graciously showed me around the family camp at Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, and spent hours talking to me on a rainy afternoon sitting on the porch looking out at the lake that Grace loved so much. Once more I am indebted to the late Bob Campbell and the late Dick Bloch, who were there to help when I began research on Grace Hopper and who were very keen to have her story told. Ruth Brendel Noller has also given generously of her time and her memories of the early days at the Harvard Computation Lab. Rita Yavinsky, Grace’s close friend at Digital, shared her many recollections with me and gave me access to her large collection of papers and news clippings from Grace’s later years. Dick Fredette, who worked closely with Grace in the navy for almost nineteen years, very kindly allowed me to plague him with innumerable questions, always responding patiently, as did Norma Gealt, Grace’s navy secretary.

There are a number of other people to whom I owe a debt of gratitude; without their cooperation this book could not have been written. When I had hit several brick walls, Tim Nenninger of the National Archives found accessions that included Hopper documents from the 1960s and 1970s at the Washington National Records Center, Suitland, Maryland. The navy’s Jim Jenson and Lt. (jg) Steve Boatwright made it possible for me to access these collections. While at Suitland, Taiqua Wormley and Sean Brown cheerfully helped me with the masses of boxes. As so often in the past, Kathy Lloyd and Gina Akers at the Naval Historical Center were of great assistance. Capt. Susan S. Jannuzzi, Lt. Cdr. Sandra Jamshidi, Lt. Cdr. Marianna Magno, and James E. Becker made me very welcome at Naval Computer and Telecommunications Station (NAVCOMTELSTA) San Diego, where they went to considerable trouble to enable me to spend a day browsing happily among all the Hopper memorabilia. The U.S. Navy has been both cooperative and helpful in advancing this project. I also wish to thank the many archivists whose assistance made my work so much easier: Sandy Smith and Barry Zerby at the National Archives; Michael Nash at the Hagley Museum and Library; Ronald Hindman and Eric Voelz at the National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis; David Wright at Unisys Corporation; Alison Oswald and Kay Peterson at the Smithsonian; Harley Holden and Dean Martin at the Harvard University Archives; Sylvia McDowell and Ellen Shea at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; Dean Rogers at the Vassar College Library; Emilyn Brown and Nancy Cricco at New York University Archives; Christine Fipphen at the Wolfeboro Historical Society; Dawn Stanford at IBM Archives; Maggie Dixon at the Collegiate School, as well as David Smith and Marcia Eldridge at Brewster Academy, and Jim Hollister and Jill Rouse at Bloomsburg University. My thanks also go to the late I. Bernard Cohen, Winifred Asprey, Nancy Whitelaw, Charles Bates, the Hon. John F. Lehman, and Fred Stott, each of whom contributed help and encouragement, to Kurt Beyer for kindly allowing me to read his unpublished dissertation on Grace Hopper, and to Frank Delano for the title of this book. Beverley Ben Salem made it possible for me to spend many weeks each year at the various archives around Washington, D.C. I could not have done it without her kind hospitality. As always, my children make all endeavors worthwhile.

Doubtless there are errors and omissions; for these, alas, I have no one to blame but myself.

GRACE

HOPPER

1

Remember Your Great-Grandfather the Admiral

Early Years: 1906–1944

One summer afternoon when she was young, Grace Murray climbed into her little sail canoe and shoved off from the dock. She had already acquired a considerable nautical proficiency, and her mother watched indulgently from the porch as she progressed down Lake Wentworth. Suddenly, a sharper than usual gust of wind caught the little craft, capsizing it. As Grace was to recall later, in this much-repeated tale, her mother merely picked up the megaphone she kept handy for such occasions and called to her daughter, remember your great-grandfather, the admiral. With this stout admonition not to abandon ship, Grace clung to the upturned canoe and kicked it safely back to shore. ¹

This adventure was to become one of Grace Murray Hopper’s signature tales of her youth, told and retold in talks, interviews, and articles. The story of the clocks was another in her standard repertoire. It usually ran something like this: Seven-year-old Grace had always been fascinated by the alarm clock that woke her up each morning. One day she determined to find out what made it ring. Unscrewing the back caused the wheels, springs, and cogs to cascade to the floor before she could see how they all fit together. Undeterred, Grace took apart each of the remaining six alarm clocks in the seven-bedroom house, but without any better luck than the first time. Her mother’s reaction was to restrict Grace’s experimentation to one clock only—a degree of restraint calculated not to dampen her daughter’s enthusiasm for investigation. In later years, Grace obviously cherished this incident as indicative of her early passion to find out how things worked. She often told interviewers that she had always had a basic drive towards technology. . . .² Both stories, moreover, reflected her view of herself as plucky, resourceful, inquisitive, and unstoppable. Later in life she was often described as feisty and strong-willed, and she said of herself that she was a maverick. What she did not recount, perhaps because it did not fit this image, was that she was also much attached to a dollhouse with flowered wallpaper, a blue mansard roof, and dormer windows. She kept the dollhouse all her life.³

On a snowy day in December 1906, Grace Brewster Murray was born in her grandparents’ brownstone in New York City, the first child of Walter Fletcher Murray (1873–1947) and Mary Campbell Van Horne (1883–1960). The baby, named for her mother’s best friend, was ushered into a well-to-do, upper middle class family and had a privileged upbringing in a harmonious home. A few weeks after her birth, she and her parents moved into a fashionable new apartment building on 95th Street, off Riverside Drive, just north of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. Grace’s arrival was followed three years later by the birth of a sister, Mary Campbell (1909–2000), and two years after that by a brother, Roger Franklin Murray II (1911–98).⁴

Both sides of the family were by then well established in New York and New Jersey, of Dutch and Scottish ancestry. Walter’s father, John W. Murray, had moved with his parents from Kirkubright, Scotland, to America when he was eleven, settling on the north side of 20th Street between Eight and Ninth avenues in New York City. John’s father had been a builder who worked on the reservoir that used to be behind the Fifth Avenue New York Public Library. John Murray attended New York Free Academy (later City College) and moved up to what was then the countryside at 125th Street. He had a strong sense of community, joining both the Volunteer Fire Department and the New York 7th Militia Regiment, soon to be the National Guard. When his regiment was mustered into the regular army in April 1861, at the outbreak of the Civil War, John Murray, who had been elected a first lieutenant, accompanied it to Washington where it was detailed to protect the capitol. John’s military career was cut short, however, when he contracted typhoid that June and was mustered out. Returning home, he moved to Plainfield, New Jersey, prospered in the insurance business, and sent his two sons to Yale University. Eventually, he became president of the German American Insurance Company. During World War I, the company was confiscated from its German owners and became the Great American Insurance Company.⁵

Grace’s mother’s side of the family traced its lineage back to the revolution through Russells as well as Campbells and Van Hornes. Grace would later tell interviewers that one of her ancestors was a privateer with a well-armed brig⁶ and that another, Samuel Lemuel Fowler, picked up his musket on 19 April 1775 and marched from Newbury to Concord Bridge to stand up to the British.⁷ More recently, a maternal great-grandfather, Alexander Wilson Russell, had fought the Barbary pirates in Africa and saw action under Gen. Winfield Scott in the Mexican War of 1846–48. During the Civil War, he fought at Mobile Bay and Vicksburg in the Union Navy and eventually retired as a rear admiral. Alexander’s grandfather and namesake had been a lieutenant in the Seventh Pennsylvania Regiment during the Revolutionary War, and Alexander’s brother, John H. Russell, also distinguished himself in the Union Navy in the Civil War and retired as a rear admiral in 1886. John’s son and namesake, an Annapolis graduate who began his career in the navy, became commandant of the Marine Corps in the 1930s. His daughter, Brooke Russell, a distant cousin of the Murrays, married Vincent Astor, heir to the fortune of John Jacob Astor.⁸

Although she was barely two when she met him before his death, Grace retained a lifelong impression of Great-grandpa Russell—a big man with white muttonchop whiskers and a silver-topped cane. She often referred to a meeting at his home in Philadelphia as the source of her early reverence for the naval service. The incident was surely fixed in her mind more by being told about it than by memory, but Grace was never one to miss an opportunity to use a good story. Another of her stock-in-trade tales was that Great-grandpa Russell took a dim view of women and cats in the navy. When she was commissioned, she put some flowers on his grave to comfort and reassure him.⁹

John Garret Van Horne, Grace’s maternal grandfather, was born in 1853 and lived until 1932. The original American branch of the family had come to Jersey City (then part of New Amsterdam) at the time of Petr Stuyvesant. John Van Home graduated from New York University and became the chief civil engineer for the City of New York. He helped to lay out the streets in Pelham and the Bronx. Grace loved to accompany him on these expeditions and recalled with pleasure being allowed to help him by holding up the red-and-white-striped surveyor’s pole and watching him figure angles and intersections. Mary Van Home, Hopper’s mother, grew up in a brownstone on 69th Street. One of her friends was Marie Borden of the Borden milk family.

Surrounded by books in their home at 316 West 95th Street, Grace was raised in a family where intellectual curiosity was encouraged and acumen rewarded. Like his father, John, Walter Murray was an insurance broker. He was a graduate of Andover Academy and a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale. He started out in his father’s German American Insurance Company but later formed his own company, R. F. Murray & Bro., with his older brother Roger. Grace’s mother, Mary, is remembered for her love of mathematics and intellectual games and puzzles of all sorts. She used to do the New York Times crossword every Sunday, carefully copying it onto graph paper first, so that someone else could use the original. She, too, like her daughter after her, had sometimes accompanied her engineer father on his surveying trips in New York City. Although special arrangements had been made to allow her to study geometry in school, her formal mathematical education went no further. Nevertheless, she was very intelligent and well informed and had strong opinions on everything, particularly world politics, and delighted in expressing her views freely. Her son once remarked that, during his mother’s youth, it was unthought of for a girl to go on to college but that she was determined her daughters should do just that. This notion was reinforced in 1915 when her husband, who suffered from hardening of the arteries, submitted to the only procedure then available, amputation of his leg. His children were eight, five, and three.¹⁰

Soon, Walter Murray’s other leg was also removed at the knee. At a time when few women drove, his wife went right out and bought a car, a Model-T Ford, and when he was well again, drove her husband to work every day. Throughout his long recovery, Mary took up much of the burden of running the household that would normally have fallen to Walter. It was she who paid the bills, balanced the accounts, and figured the taxes. She was Dutch, you know, her daughter Mary said of her mother years later, as though that was sufficient to explain her fortitude.¹¹

Against the odds, Walter Murray survived for many years after his double amputation, dying in 1947 at the age of seventy-four. His insurance business thrived and he got around on wooden legs and two canes, even continuing to play golf. Totally unselfconscious about his legs, he loved to tease his children about how seldom he had to change his socks—only when they got dusty. A slender, bald man with just a fringe of hair, he was very self-sufficient and seldom asked anyone to do anything for him. He never complained about anything and was always cheerful. Still, he was also aware of his shortened life expectancy because of his poor circulatory system and was insistent that his daughters be educated to support themselves should they need to. In the early twentieth century, middle-class young women were generally prepared only for marriage and motherhood. The Murrays’ determination to see their daughters schooled for employment was rare.¹²

All three children adored their father and seem to have felt a pressure to live up to his high standards. After all, if he could thumbtack his socks to his mahogany legs, then there was no obstacle they should not be able to overcome. Looking back after more than eighty years, Grace’s sister Mary remembered what fun she and her brother Roger had had together. Grace, however, she pronounced to be kind of a bore. Perhaps she became that way, her sister speculated, because from an early age their mother put on Grace the burden of taking care of her younger siblings. We always had maids and everything, recalled Mary, but Grace was supposed to tell us what to do.¹³

As was customary in that day and for people of their circumstance, the Murrays also employed a nanny to help care for the children when they were young. Grace remembers being taken with her sister to play in Riverside Park in the afternoons. Every couple of months or so, Grace and her family would take a ferry across the Hudson—there were no bridges nearby, and no tunnels yet—and then ride the Jersey Central down to Plainfield to spend the weekend with their Murray grandparents. The extended family was close and everyone went, all the children and grandchildren. The Walter Murrays were also frequent visitors at Grace’s maternal grandparents’ on 69th Street. On the weekends, Mary Murray would pile all the children into the car and take them to historic or cultural sites in the city. Later, they had a subscription to the Saturday morning lecture series at the Natural History Museum and the Philharmonic Children’s concerts. Mary pursued her determination to have her children know their city well with the same sort of persistence later seen in her oldest child. Years later, Grace remarked that she had probably been to every single museum in New York. The Murray children were never spoon-fed, though; they were encouraged to have new ideas and to innovate. Their ideas were taken seriously, carefully evaluated, and good ones were rewarded with a pat on the back. The children were also expected to hold their own in the debates the whole family enjoyed so much. Grace learned at the dinner table how to make an argument and back it up convincingly.¹⁴

Like many girls of her time and class, Grace attended private girls’ schools. She went to the Graham School at 42 Riverside Drive, a few blocks from home. The school, which marked its centenary when Grace was nine, was one of the oldest for girls in New York City and was older than the well-known Seven Sisters women’s colleges, to which many Graham School graduates aspired. Nearby Barnard College, for example, was barely twenty-five years old that year, and Vassar College, just up the Hudson River, which Grace would later attend, was only fifty-five years old. The Graham School boasted an illustrious faculty: Elihu Root, later secretary of state, secretary of war, and U.S. senator from New York, was one of many well-known former teachers. The school was also just around the corner from the venerable Collegiate School for boys, the oldest independent school in the United States, where Grace’s brother went. The Collegiate School was affiliated with the West End Collegiate Church next door—an outgrowth of the Dutch Reformed Church—that the Murrays attended.¹⁵

In general, women’s career opportunities were highly circumscribed until major changes began to occur in the 1960s. Yet even at a time when there were still many