Customer Reviews

Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project (Labor and Social Change)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This work chronicles the role that women played in the Manhatten project during World War II in the fields of mathematics, chemistry, physics, health biology, etc. It also provides an interesting account of the role of women in the physics discoveries during the early twentieth century which made the development of nuclear weapons possible.

This book is especially valuable since this information has not been treated in any kind of systematic way in any previous historical accounts of the Manhatten project.

Although attempts to profile female contributions to great undertakings are appreciated, Their day in the sun, is fundamentally flawed by the authors bias toward academic, primarily physicist, researchers and by the authors failure to understand the mechanisms and downstream effects of Manhattan Project technologies. This has lead to a poorly organized document that spends pages on the contributions of a truck driver, secretary, or clerk whose husband was a Los Alamos or Chicago Met Lab physicist while ignoring the contributions of the tens of thousands of women who worked at other facilities, often in professional scientific or engineering capabilities. This is partially due to the uniqueness and historic significance of the atom bomb. However, other successes growing out of the Manhattan Project touch our lives every day: the medical isotopes that delineate a blocked heart artery, the separations that make good vaccines and new plastics possible, and the nuclear power reactors that remain our cleanest electric energy generators.

The authors indicate that the limitations on their research imposed by the availability of published documents or potential interviewees were responsible for their omissions. However, in preparing reviews of the technology developed at a variety of Manhattan Project sites, my working group found reasonable access to both people and written records. Also, epidemiological researchers who have evaluated clinical effects, mortality, and morbidity of Manhattan project staff have been able to contact significant portions of former workers. Recent epidemiological studies of female illnesses (e. g., breast cancer) make the omission of the bulk of the Manhattan Projects female staff for reasons other than bias or intellectual laxness difficult to understand.