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Review
| Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project, by Ruth H. Howes and Caroline L. Herzenberg. Forward by Ellen C. Weaver, Ph.D. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003. 272 pages. $21.95, paper.
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| The authors of this book are both physicists, and the impetus to write the book arose from an article they were researching on women's roles in the use of military force. (p. 2) Most of the research was conducted through phone interviews and questionnaires submitted to all female participants in the Los Alamos Fortieth Reunion. In all, the authors located more than 300 women and the result is an expanse of information concerning women associated with the Manhattan Project at every level from secretarial assistance to research science, although, despite frequent references to the household help guaranteed to women who worked on the project at Los Alamos, there is no discussion of those contributions to the effort. |
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Not surprisingly, the authors are mainly concerned with the women scientists, and their interviews with these women yield many good case studies of the career trajectories of female physicists, chemists, and mathematicians before the modern women's movement. Many of these women were married to scientists, could not obtain university positions due to nepotism rules, and followed their husbands to one of the three wartime weapons research and development sites (Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Los Alamos, New Mexico; and Hanford, Washington). Once there, they were recruited for a number of science-related positions. Meanwhile, wives with nonspecific educational backgrounds were in great demand by the computing groups, which performed all the calculations necessary for the success of the project. |
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The biomedical aspects of the Project were centered in Oak Ridge. The first physician hired there was a woman, Gladys Morgan Happer, recruited by her physician brother who described her as "the smartest person I have ever known." Despite her elevated status, Happer experienced troubles finding childcare and often had to resort to convincing wives of project scientists to take care of her young son while she worked late nights decontaminating project workers. Happer was a pioneer in studying and treating the effects of radiation, but after the war mostly took care of her family. |
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A large percentage of the technicians associated with the Project also was female. Because many of them married fellow project workers, the authors had some difficulty following their careers due to name changes. WACs (members of the Women's Army Corps) worked at all three major project sites and many of those were disappointed to find themselves in the United States instead of in Europe or the Pacific. Numerous other women, civilian and military, were employed as truck drivers, switchboard operators, or secretarial help. In fact, their presence created a mini-baby boom at Los Alamos "where the birthrate exploded long before the bomb did." There was also tension between these women and the nonworking wives on the site because the housewives actually received more government-sponsored household due to having the available time to lobby for it. |
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Howes and Herzenberg also tell the stories of women whose roles were more traditionally female, but still vital to the success of the Project. For example, Dorothy KcKibbin, a Smith College graduate living in Santa Fe, was hired by the War Department to greet arriving members of the Manhattan Project and help resettle them and their families. Priscilla Green, a secretary at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory who was a typist for Robert Oppenheimer, followed Oppenheimer to Los Alamos where she managed the director's office. She met her chemist husband on site and, despite Oppenheimer's objections to wartime marriages, married him at a venue supplied by Dorothy McKibbin. |
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As this summary indicates, this book contains much useful information about the lives and careers of the many women who worked in some way or another on the Manhattan Project. Because it contains very little historical analysis and does not make much of an attempt to relate the material to other work on women in the World War II era, this book is not a history book. However, the research is sound and the book would be a valuable reference for a course on the WWII home front or twentieth century women's history. While it is not fair to expect the authors—who are physicists, not historians—to discuss issues of interest mainly to historians, I do wish they had talked a bit more about the ways in which marriage both helped and hindered female scientists' careers, the reasons why women seemed to offer so little support to each other in their work lives, and the feelings these women might have had concerning the war and the development of atomic weapons. All of these themes surface in the individual stories, but they are never pursued systematically in the text, suggesting there is another book to be written on this subject that could build on the diligent efforts of Howes and Herzenberg. |
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| Ripon College |
Barbara McGowan |
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