Women of the Manhattan Project

In the book Their Day in the Sun, Ruth Howes and Caroline Herzenberg documented more than 1000 women who worked on the Manhattan Project, preserving their legacy for generations to come. At the 2009 Chicago meeting, the AAPT Committee on Women in Physics celebrated the accomplishments of these women and the men who worked beside them. Howes presented an overview of the contributions of women to the development of the first nuclear weapon, and the session was honored with talks from two 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. I will present a summary of the session, analyzing the effect of working on the project on the career trajectories of the women involved, and point listeners toward additional documentation of this history.