Rosie the Riveter's Sisters In D.C.

That experience later prompted her to become active in the civil rights movement, picketing businesses and marching in protests. Orbach, who worked as a secretary at the Pentagon during the war, went on to raise a family and work for the Montgomery County Department of Social Services as a secretary and later as a caseworker.

Discrimination was no stranger to Dorothy Height, then a young black woman working with the National Council of Negro Women to help arrange government jobs.

In the film, she recounts her visit to the Woodward & Lothrop department store in downtown Washington and how the white clerk told her that a white linen suit she was interested in was probably too expensive.

"I decide I'm going to buy this suit even if it is $40," she recalls. "Reluctantly she put me in a dressing room, but she locked the door." When Height got out, she bought the suit.

On the job front, some government girls were involved in subversive missions.

Elizabeth McIntosh, who was a reporter for Scripps Howard, quit in 1943 to join the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA. Able to speak some Japanese, she went off to India and China.

McIntosh, 89, tells about one instance in which the Americans seized about a hundred postcards in Burma that Japanese soldiers had written for family back home.

The postcards, written in pencil, conveyed that all was well, that they were proud to be fighting for the emperor and victory was at hand. McIntosh says the Americans erased the words and wrote in Japanese that Japan was losing the war and things were going badly -- all with hopes of demoralizing the folks back home.

After the war, she married and worked briefly for Glamour magazine before going on to a variety of jobs, including at the Voice of America and the United Nations. McIntosh, who lives in Leesburg, also wrote books, "Undercover Girl," which was published shortly after the war, and "Sisterhood of Spies," which was completed about two years ago.

When the war was over, many women left their jobs and returned to roles as homemakers. But the job market had forever changed.

William Chafe, a history professor at Duke University, comments in the film that some soldiers returning from war were in for an awakening. "Suddenly the notion that 'I'm back, I'm a man, now I want your full attention' " didn't sit well with some women, he says. The response from many women, he says, was: " 'I've been getting along without you just fine. Maybe you need to think about changing some of your ideas and patterns.' "

As for Orbach's roommate: In the film, Orbach explains that the woman ran off with a high-ranking serviceman.

"She never returned. I never found out what happened to her."

Researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.