[Argonne National Laboratory] employee's book chronicles work of women in Manhattan Project

A new book written by Argonne physicist Caroline Herzenberg (DIS) and Ball State University physics professor Ruth Howes chronicles the unsung contributions of women to one of the most intensive scientific projects in history.

"Their Day in the Sun" is the culmination of a 10-year effort. The two colleagues got the idea at a conference they attended titled "Women and the Use of Military Force." It occurred to them that most accounts of the Manhattan Project, a top-secret mission to develop the first nuclear weapon, failed to mention any women scientists or engineers involved in the project.

"We tried to uncover the events and untangle the strands of a half-century-old secret project in an effort to bring to light scientific and cultural information that has been largely lost to history," Herzenberg said.

The writers gathered information from interviews, written records, photographs and the Internet, and were able to identify several hundred women physicists, chemists, mathematicians, biologists, technicians and other women who worked on the Manhattan Project. "At least 85 women helped design and construct the atomic bomb," Herzenberg said. "But you can read through authoritative accounts of the program and never see a word about a woman."

Most of the material was obtained by going through the "old girl network," and telephone interviews. Herzenberg contacted more than two dozen former and current Argonne employees who were either involved in the project themselves or had friends or relatives involved.

Herzenberg said many women scientists in the 1940s were married to scientists and worked for them in their labs for free, devoid of any recognition.

Some of the women profiled in the book include:

• Maria Goeppert Mayer, a Ph.D. physicist whose previous faculty appointments had been unpaid. Hired part-time by Columbia University in 1942 to work on the Manhattan Project, she quickly began leading 20 scientists and technicians in physics research. She subsequently worked at Argonne and received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1963.
• Leona Woods, a graduate of the University of Chicago, developed and operated electronic equipment and radiation counters. She called out the neutron counts at the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction on Dec. 2, 1942, and monitored neutron fluxes in the atomic "piles" at the University of Chicago and Argonne's Site A.
• Elizabeth "Diz" Riddle Graves worked at Los Alamos developing a neutron reflector to surround the core of the atomic bomb. She worked while pregnant and finished a series of experiments as she went into labor. She and her husband monitored radioactive fallout from the the first nuclear explosion, the Trinity Test in New Mexico.

This is Herzenberg's second book. Her first book, published in 1986, lists some 2,500 women from the fields of medicine, science, engineering and technology.

--Linda Jakubowski