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The Physics Teacher -- April 2010 -- Volume 48, Issue 4, pp. 228
Women and Men of the Manhattan Project
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Add to FacebookIn the early 1990s Ruth Howes, a nuclear physicist on the faculty at Ball State University, and Caroline Herzenberg, a nuclear physicist at Argonne National Laboratory, were asked to write a chapter on the Manhattan Project for a volume on women working on weapons development for the military.1 Realizing that they knew very little about the women who had been involved in that effort, they embarked on a mission to find out more. Howes and Herzenberg were able to document the wartime contributions of more than 1000 women in Their Day in the Sun,2 preserving this legacy for generations to come. At the 2009 AAPT Winter Meeting in Chicago, the AAPT Committee on Women in Physics celebrated the accomplishments of these women and the men who worked beside them in a session co‐sponsored with the History and Philosophy of Physics and the Concerns of Senior Physicists committees. Howes presented an overview of the contributions of women to the development of the first nuclear weapon, and the session was honored with the presence of Manhattan Project veterans Ellen Cleminshaw Weaver, who worked at Oak Ridge, and Dorothy Marcus Gans, who worked as a technician in the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago.
© 2010 American Association of Physics Teachers
History
Online Mar 2010
ARTICLE DATA
Digital Object Identifier
- R. H. Howes and C. L. Herzenberg, “Women in weapons development: The Manhattan Project,” Chapter 8 of Women and the Use of Military Force, edited by R. H. Howes and M. R. Stevenson (Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder and London, 1993).
- R. H. Howes and C. L. Herzenberg, Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1999).
- R. L. Sime, Lise Meitner, A Life in Physics (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1996) and Patricia Rife, Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age (Birkhauser, Boston, 1999).
- L. M. Libby, The Uranium People (Crane, Russak & Company, New York, 1979).
- S. B. McGrayne, Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries (Birch Lane Press, New York, 1993).
- E. C. Weaver and N. I. Bishop, “Photosynthetic mutants separate electron paramagnetic resonance signals of Scenedesmus,”Sci. 140, 1095–1097 (June 7, 1963); [MEDLINE]
E. C. Weaver and H. P. Chon, “Spin label studies in Chlamydomonas,” Sci. 153, 301–303 (July 15, 1966); [MEDLINE]
E. C. Weaver and H. E. Weaver, “Paramagnetic unit in spinach subchloroplast particles: Estimation of size,” Sci. 165, 906–907 (Aug. 29, 1969). [MEDLINE] - J. C. Arvesen, J. P. Millard and E. C. Weaver, “Remote sensing of chlorophyll and temperature in marine and fresh waters,” Astronautica Acta. 18, 229–239 (June 1973).
- J. Goldman, “National science in the nation's heartland: The Ames Laboratory and Iowa State University, 1942–1965,” J. Technol. Cult. 41(3), 435–459 (2000).
- M. W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action — 1940–1972 (Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore,1995), pp. 2–3 and pp. 10–49.
- This work was supported in part by a grant from the University of Texas. Video of the session is currently posted at www.jillmarshall.com. The authors intend for it ultimately to be posted on the AAPT Committee on Women in Physics website.
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