![]() A good ol’ plump woman with a welcoming lap no matter your age, a soft bosomy shelf that held the answer to any crisis, a pillow for your troubles.” In another spot, Kiernan paraphrases Dot Jones’s thoughts as: “She missed her mama, though. The book is further bogged down by the unfortunate decision to drop borderline vernacular into the text, with such phrases as “No, sir, not with the nonstop coming and goings” and the pot-bellied stove “right smack-dab in the middle” mentioned earlier. A “Principal Cast of Characters” section at the front of the book, helpful as it is, lists nine women of primary focus and seven “other women of note.” And that doesn’t include any of the men. And Kiernan delves into the lives of so many women that they become a blur of names. So many of the women had similar experiences in arriving at Oak Ridge, and on the job, that the anecdotes quickly feel redundant. That is both the book’s strength and its weakness. ![]() Kiernan has amassed a deep reservoir of intimate details of what life was like for women living in the secret city, gleaned from seven years of interviews and research. Few achieved levels of authority at work housing policies forbade gender or racial mixing a household wasn’t a household unless it was led by a man, which meant women with children who arrived ahead of their husbands struggled to find shelter. Women may have migrated to Oak Ridge in droves, but they were still hemmed in by the social and racial narrows of the time. ’The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II’ by Denise Kiernan (Simon and Schuster) They were drawn from cities in the Northeast, farms in the South and small towns in the Midwest, were paid good money for the time and the place, and were crammed into dormitories and trailers and for the small contingent of African Americans, there were four-person, 256-square-foot “hutments,” each one “a square plywood box of a structure that had a potbellied stove sitting right smack-dab in the middle.” Houses, impermanent as they were, were reserved for families. It was so vertically segregated in its operations that only a handful of people at the top knew what was really going on, and so swaddled in internal secrecy that to speculate on the purpose of your job invited immediate dismissal and eviction.Īs Kiernan demonstrates, because of the shortage of manpower during the war years, much of the work at Oak Ridge was done by women. The sprawling complex was off-limits to anyone without proper ID. The secret Tennessee city eventually became modern Oak Ridge, built to support what was known as the Clinton Engineer Works. But given the project’s significant and lasting impact, there’s plenty more mining to be done, and Denise Kiernan has found a rich vein in “The Girls of Atomic City.” Rosie, it turns out, did much more than drive rivets. The fascinating story of the Manhattan Project has been told often, and often told well - Richard Rhodes’s “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” placing high on that lengthy list. Its purpose? To process uranium for the world’s first atomic bomb. government, which swept up some 59,000 acres of land and in a matter of months built an instant city of 75,000 people so secret it wasn’t even listed on maps. In the fall of 1942, residents of a rural swath of east Tennessee began receiving official notifications that their homes and farms were no longer theirs and that they would have to move.
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