ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the personal narratives written by a few of the women who participated in building the American communities in which the first atomic bombs were developed, focusing in particular on middle-class women's accounts of wartime Los Alamos, in the south-western state of New Mexico. Examining women's personal memoirs of the Manhattan Project provides a distinctive slant on the relation between gender, war and science. In the US, at least until very recently, the story of the making of the first atomic bombs was almost always told as a story about human creativity and co-operation, not as a story about destructive violence. The choice of the local and personal as vantage point in the narratives is clearly overdetermined, not simply by the memoir form, but by many other factors, in particular the relative isolation of the site and the secrecy of the project.
