Frances Dunne setting an explosives point in the spring of 1945 at R Site or Two Mile Mesa. Courtesy/Los Alamos Historical Society Photo Archives
Dorothea Hermann, left, and Lyda Speck in their crowded Women’s Army Corps barracks in 1945. An unknown WAC is moving in the background. Courtesy/Vieira Collection, Los Alamos Historical Society Photo Archives
By AIMEE SLAUGHTER
Los Alamos Historical Society
The next time you’re in the Los Alamos County Municipal Building, be sure to check out the new exhibit from the Los Alamos History Museum, “Women, Science, and Project Y.”
Ever wonder how women contributed to the scientific and technical work of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos? Visit this exhibit to learn about some of the remarkable women who worked for the project in a diversity of fields, working as researchers, computers, explosives experts, and more.
At the end of the war, about 11 percent of Los Alamos’ workforce were women. Most of these around 640 women were civilians, but around a third were soldiers in the Women’s Army Corps. We don’t know what jobs over a third of the women working in Los Alamos held (perhaps an indication of how women’s work was often underappreciated at the time). Of those women whose jobs we know, most worked in science and technology: more than 150 women contributed to the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos in STEM fields.
Many of these women held jobs that they may not have had access to during peacetime.
Prejudices in education and hiring prevented capable women from having access to opportunities that their male colleagues enjoyed. But the urgency and enormous scale of the wartime work of the Manhattan Project demanded that many skilled positions had to be filled, and quickly. Women were hired for jobs they may not have been considered for before the war.
For some of these women, their Manhattan Project experience opened doors to post-war careers that may not have been available to them otherwise. The work these women did at Los Alamos changed the course of the war—and the course of their lives.
“Women, Science, and Project Y” highlights six women who worked in science and technology at the wartime Los Alamos laboratory. Their stories capture just some of the diversity of experiences women brought to their Manhattan Project work. Frances Dunne was an aircraft mechanic and explosives supervisor.
Mary Frankel was a mathematician, computer, and programmer. Jane Hall was a Manhattan Project physicist and influential leader. Jane Heydorn was a Manhattan Project WAC who went on to a career at Los Alamos. Floy Agnes Lee is a Santa Clara biologist who worked as a hematologist for the Manhattan Project. Maria Goeppert Mayer went on to become the second of two women recognized with the Nobel Prize in Physics.
These women came from New Mexico and from across the world to contribute to the Manhattan Project in fields from biology to physics to computing as technicians, researchers, and leaders.
Visit the “Women, Science, and Project Y” exhibit in the Municipal Building to learn more! Who was probably the only woman to operate a fast neutron reactor? What ground-breaking computer did Mary Frankel program for after the war? Who turned down an invitation to chair the Atomic Energy Commission?
Find out the answers to these questions and more. The exhibit case is on the right as you enter the building, and the museum updates it twice a year with new exhibits. The exhibit will be on display through June.
The Los Alamos Historical Society preserves, promotes, and communicates the remarkable history and inspiring stories of Los Alamos and its people for our community, for the global audience, and for future generations. Find out more at losalamoshistory.org and by following @LosAlamosHistory on facebook.