Women of the Manhattan Project

Physicist Lise Meitner, alongside Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann, and Otto Frisch, discovered nuclear fission in 1938. Meitner was an outspoken opponent of her research being used to develop an atomic bomb, stating that she would have nothing to do with the Manhattan Project. Read more about her life and work at the link.

This unassuming jelly kettle from Manhattan Project National Historical Park contains multiple layers: indigenous, pioneer, and federal. When we zoom in on a single layer of the jelly kettle’s story, we can see how women’s everyday work supported their homes and homelands. If we zoom out and place these layers in succession, we can see how one group’s vision of home has often meant the destruction of another’s. Explore more stories in the "Home and Homelands" exhibition.

Marie Curie, along with her husband Pierre, pioneered research in radioactivity. His untimely death in 1906 led to her continued work in the field of radiation. A two- time Nobel Prize winner (once with her husband) Marie Curie ultimately died from radiation-induced leukemia in 1934.

During the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, Lilli Hornig worked as a chemist, first on basic plutonium research and later on implosion lenses. She was one of many at Los Alamos who signed the petition urging that the atomic bomb be demonstrated in an uninhabited location rather than being used on a populated area with many civilians.

A botanist and onetime member of the Communist Party, Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer was married to J. Robert Oppenheimer from 1940 until his death in 1967. Robert considered Kitty a confidant, even related to situations in the secret laboratory, and the two strongly relied on each other throughout their 26-year marriage.

Liane Russell was a geneticist who worked primarily at ORNL and Y-12 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Her research led to new recommendations regarding x-rays on pregnant women, among other breakthroughs. Later in life, Russell became an advocate for environmental conservation. Read more about her life and work at the link.

Dr. Leona Woods Marshall Libby was the only female member of the team that built the world’s first nuclear reactor—the Chicago Pile—and the only woman present when the reactor went critical.

The Calutron Girls operated the arrays, or racetracks, at the Y-12 Electromagnetic Isotope Separation Plant in Oak Ridge during the Manhattan Project. These young women, many of whom were just out of high school, did not know that their work involved separating uranium for use in an atomic bomb.

Karen Dorn Steele is an environmental journalist known for breaking the story of nuclear experiments causing potential public health damage at the Hanford Nuclear Site.

Leona Woods Marshall Libby was one of a limited number of female scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project. She was the only female member of the team that created the Chicago Pile, the world’s first nuclear reactor, and was instrumental in the development and maintenance of Hanford’s plutonium production facilities.