The Girls of Atomic City

The District Engineer informs Ernest Lawrence that the “high school girls they had pulled from rural Tennessee to operate his calutrons in Y-12 [are] doing better than his own team of scientists,” that “the ‘hillbilly’ girls [are] generating more enriched Tubealloy per run than the PhDs” (109). The District Engineer understands are well-trained and disciplined. Women occupy “every corner of every workplace at CEW, from the personnel processing down to chemical processing” (110). Workers in personnel are considered particularly lucky as they have access to all the information about the young men coming in droves to the Reservation and are often asked to check up on friends and relatives of other workers. Accessing personnel files could be severely punished but was often seen as a necessary risk.

Women like Helen who work as cubicle operators at Y-12 pass through several sets of armed gates on their way into work. Once there, they work in a large, loud space, for eight-hour shifts monitoring panels and adjusting knobs so that needles fall within an acceptable range. Little else is known, even by supervisors. In fact, “no one in the cubicle control room [has] all the pieces of the puzzle of which they [are] an integral part” (114).