Their Day In The Sun (Labor And Social Change) - Hardcover

Howes, Ruth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1566397197 ISBN 13: 9781566397193

Publisher: Temple University Press, 1999

Synopsis

Although women participated in the Manhattan Project, their contributions are either omitted or only mentioned briefly. It is this story that is presented in Their Day in the Sun through interviews, written records, and photographs of the women who were physicists, chemists, mathematicians, biologists, and technicians in the labs.

About this title

About the Author

Ruth H. Howes is George and Frances Ball Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Ball State University. She is Vice President of the American Association of Physics Teachers and President-Elect of the Indiana Academy of Science. She is also co-editor of The Energy Sourcebook and Women and the Use of Military Force. Caroline L. Herzenberg, a physicist at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, is past president of the Association for Women in Science. She is author of Women Scientists from Antiquity to the Present.

Reviews

As detailed in this book, many women worked on the Manhattan Project, from physicists and mathematicians at Los Alamos to public health specialists at Oak Ridge and Hanford to chemists at the Metallurgical Lab of the University of Chicago. Working from archival files at the various labs and universities and then pursuing leads developed through personal and telephone-based interviews, the authors, both physicists, have identified several hundred women affiliated in some way with the project. Valuable because so little has been written on this subject, this book is nevertheless frustrating because of its anecdotal nature. In many cases, the text jumps from person to person, simply presenting a sentence or two about each one as though that were all the files and investigation could produce. Still, the book is quite interesting in what it reveals, both particularly about the chauvinism of the project's male management and the na?vet? of professional and support staff regarding the harmful effects of nuclear materials. Recommended for academic history of science collections.AHilary Burton, Lawrence Livermore National Lab., CA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"I am thrilled to learn of so many of the remarkable women who contributed to innumerable aspects of [this] great enterprise. This book enables us to meet each other, to swap stories. The authors have done a superb job of detective work, tracking down an impressive number of them, more than 300. It is important to record and credit women's contributions to the social and technological history of the making of the bomb." From the Foreword by Ellen C. Weaver, Ph.D., Past President, Association for Women in Science

Edition details

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1566397197
• ISBN 13: 9781566397193
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 264