The story starts with a couple of women in the 1930's who wrote papers describing the ability to enrich uranium, and how it might be done--the papers were largely ignored at the time.
This is the story of the plant in Tennessee that was erected almost overnight in 1942, after enough land had been confiscated under eminent domain that was specifically designed to 'split the atom'--to make the enriched uranium that was part of the Manhattan Project.
There were men involved in this story as well as women, but for the women it was much more of an opportunity. There are two stories told within the book of women with the intellectual ability to go to the top of their professions, but that was simply not an option in the early 1940's. One of them had parents who would not consider sending her to college. The war offered them the opportunity to get out of their rural dead end towns, get out from under parents who had sons overseas and did not want to lose their daughters as well, and the job paid well--far better than anything else available to them.
The women were very successful at their jobs--the book points out that the Tennessee plant, dubbed Clinton Engineering Works, consistently outpaced the scientific teams aiming at producing the same enriched uranium--these women were trainable and they followed directions well. The living situation was primitive--substandard housing at first, dorms for the single women, and no entertainment, but over the time that the bomb was being built they became a real community.
The part of the story that is not attended to is that these women had no idea that they were building a bomb that would be dropped on Japanese target cities that had not just military importance, but had civilian populations as well--the women who are interviewed touch on this in a very superficial way, but that is a real moral dilemma--that these workers might have psychological fall out from working on the atomic bomb.
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