Part of WWII you knew nothing about

by Chris Gunter 

Imagine that you are a young woman enjoying your job and relative freedom in New York City during World War II. One day your boss tells you that your job is being transferred, and they’d like you to go with it. But they can’t tell you where. So you can’t tell your family where you’ll be going, and you don’t know what to pack in your one allowed suitcase. Your boss says they’ll pick you up with a car at home and put you on a train, and someone on the train will tell you where to get off.

Once you arrive in the middle of nowhere, your brand new fancy shoes sink into ankle-deep (at least) mud every day. You quickly learn to leave the fancy shoes and clothes at home. You begin working at an office on the biggest construction site you’ve ever seen, at its peak a town of 75,000 people, but not depicted on any existing map. There are thousands of young women working with you, but you are not allowed to talk with them about your job or theirs – which, in a way, is easy to do, because even you don’t know exactly what the point of your job is.

Welcome to The Girls of Atomic City, a great read by author Denise Kiernan. On Labor Day weekend, I had the pleasure of introducing Denise at the Decatur Book Festival near Atlanta, the largest independent book festival in the USA. [Thank you to Marc Merlin of the Atlanta Science Tavern for the opportunity!]

Denise’s book takes a moment in history that many of us think we know very well and then fills in this giant part that we didn’t know anything about. You can hear Denise and two of the “girls” here, including Celia Klemski, the girl who boarded a train from NYC to who-knows-where.

Author Denise Kiernan, as she says on her own website, tells stories. She started out in journalism and has written for many, many major outlets. Later, she became a television writer and producer, and served as the head writer for the ABC show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” during its first season. If you’d like to interest your kids in science or math, she has also written a number of books for kids, including tutorials on math skills and graphs, chemistry, and Indiana Jones (because of course that’s a natural progression).

And then she came upon the above picture, of women working at “calutrons,” or machines that (unbeknownst to the women) used heat, electricity, and magnets to enrich for precious uranium-235. Denise wondered what they could be thinking about their jobs. Did they know anything about what they were making, and what the effects would be? How did they get trained to use these machines? What was life like for them? She immediately recognized what an amazing story they would make. The Girls of Atomic City alternates between telling their stories and describing the science and the politics behind the project.

Once the Manhattan Project got underway to build atomic bombs, the military quickly realized they needed huge projects to enrich the proper isotopes of uranium needed. Many people associate Los Alamos, New Mexico with the project, but it was not the largest site by far. The Army Corps of Engineers established a huge complex in what would become Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and needed to fill it with workers. Of course, given the war, the workers would mostly be female. This “atomic city” recruited tens of thousands of young women, and trained them in everything from pipe welding to statistics to medicine to administrative work, and yet they could not speak to anyone what they were doing, least of all each other.

Here, Denise tells us that two officials in the project had a contest and the “high school girls they had pulled from rural Tennessee” got more uranium from the calutrons than a group of highly trained scientists in Berkeley. Yet, these girls got paid much less and had almost no idea exactly what it was they were doing. It was only when the atomic bombs were detonated over Japan that most of the Oak Ridge workers realized what their contributions truly were.

One of the things I liked most about this book is that you can examine it from so many angles. A major theme is the inclination of our government to keep secrets from its citizens – I think we can all agree this is a theme that’s been highlighted in our country in 2013, from leaks of confidential information to the US National Security Agency reading an ever-increasing percentage of the entire Internet, regardless of “encryption” status.

But given that I work a lot with women in science, of course I was captivated by the idea that so much has changed and yet so much remains the same for women in science and engineering fields. For example, one of the women featured in the book, Jane Greer, planned her college courses to go into a career in engineering. Denise tells us what happens to Jane when she goes to register for more classes in her major, at the University of Tennessee.

“…come registration day, a university official rudely yanked her out of line where she stood waiting to register for the School of Engineering.

‘We don’t matriculate engineering as a major for females,’ he told her.

Jane stared, heat rising up through her cheeks, speechless. Angry. Who did he think he was to tell [her] what she could or could not do?

‘See that man standing over there?’ the official said, gesturing to [another professor]. ‘He’s a statistician. You can study statistics.’

And just like that, all her hard work, all the course choices and the studying and the stellar grades she’d earned at the junior college didn’t matter.”

Now, on the one hand, we can’t imagine this happening today because Jane would probably have Facebook and Twitter accounts and she would post this interaction and it would go viral. Ideally, the University would end up apologizing to her. At the book festival, I got to meet Jane Greer’s daughter, Beverly Puckett, who was lovely and completely agreed with this assessment!

On the other hand, I talk with women all the time who still face difficult choices and obstacles to pursuing their dreams of a career in a scientific field. Another example: Jane learns, once she gets to work at Oak Ridge as a statistician, that men ranked beneath her were making more money than she was. That’s one of the issues, as Double X Science readers know all too well, still alive for women working in STEM fields now.

I’m glad that Denise captured and preserved the stories of these girls for future generations, offering inspiration to girls, and women, and men, of today. The Girls of Atomic City is out in paperback in March. Denise Kiernan’s Tumblr offers more pictures from the era and, if you’re into writing, a hilarious account of what publication day is like. Spoiler: “Yay! Boo! Wine.”