Historical background: The Home Front
Novelists and filmmakers began telling stories about World War II before the war was over and before anybody even knew how it would end. These movies and films have often focused on the experiences of the people on the battlefield, as most war stories do. The experiences of the people left behind are less often told, and some of them are in danger of being lost to time. While writing The Physicists’ Daughter, I listened to oral histories and read the stories of people on the American home front, many of them women, who did far more than wait by the mailbox for word of their faraway, endangered loved ones.
These women built airplanes, cracked military codes, separated uranium for the first atomic bombs, managed households single-handedly while necessities were rationed, and much more, and they did it at a time when many could not even own a bank account. They did it in a world shadowed by a war that touched everyday lives in the United States in ways that aren’t always depicted in novels and films about World War II. People on North Carolina beaches watched and listened as submarines sunk American ships. German spies came ashore in Florida and New York. A Japanese submarine bombarded coastal targets near Santa Barbara. Blackouts and air raid drills across the nation drove home the notion that the oceans weren’t a fail-safe protection against attack.
Through it all, women held down the home front. The familiar image of Rosie the Riveter reminds us that they built the war machines that won the war, but what was Rosie’s life like? The legend of Rosie the Riveter begins and ends with the image of her flexing the muscles she used to get her job done. In The Physicists’ Daughter, I have tried to give readers more of Rosie in the form of the protagonist, Justine Byrne. Justine, the orphaned daughter of two physicists, brings a specialized expertise to her work that nobody expects a woman to have, and this is very bad news for the Nazis.
Putting Justine into Context: From Women in War Work to Ladies in the Lab
Even before World War II, women were pioneering the twentieth-century science that changed the world. Marie Curie is justifiably famous for her pioneering research in radioactivity, but the contributions of other women are too little-known. Curie’s daughter Irène Joliot-Curie was a co-discoverer of artificial radioactivity. Lise Meitner was a co-discoverer of nuclear fission. Their work paved the way for the nuclear bombs that ended the war.
My protagonist, Justine Byrne, is literally the descendant of this generation of female scientists. Her parents, like Marie and Pierre Curie and Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie, were scientists, colleagues, and life partners, and Justine has been raised to see her future in the laboratory with them. Her parents taught her physics from the time she could talk. They taught her to weld and to blow glass so that she could craft her own laboratory equipment. They made sure that she could speak German so that she could communicate with important thinkers in the field and read their work, but her dreams of college and then a lifetime in science are dashed when they die in a car accident before she even finishes high school.
Resilient and determined, Justine takes work in a munitions factory, where the war means that she can hold a job normally reserved for men and collect a man’s paycheck. What her employer—and her unseen adversary—don’t realize is that her knowledge of physics means that there are secrets that they can’t keep from Justine. She knows that she is not building what her boss says she’s building, and she can tell that someone is trying to sabotage her work.
It doesn’t pay to underestimate a woman like Justine. The Nazis are no match for the physicists’ daughter.