Special Collections Department
403 Parks Library
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011-2140

MS 676
Mary F. Singleton
Papers, 1958-2005


Descriptive summary

creator: Mary F. Singleton
title: Papers
dates: 1958-2005
extent: 0.42 linear feet (1 document box)
collection number: MS 676
repository: Special Collections Department, Iowa State University.

 

Administrative information

access: Open for research
publication rights: Consult Head, Special Collections Department
preferred citation: Mary F. Singleton Papers, MS 676, Archives of Women in Science and Engineering, Special Collections Department, Iowa State University Library.

 

Biographical note

Mary Singleton was born in 1936 in Fort Lewis, Washington. She received her B.S. (1958) in Chemistry from Wheaton College (Wheaton, Illinois), graduating summa cum laude. She received her M.S. (1960) in Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1960-1962 she worked with Melvin Calvin, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1961, at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1962 she left Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and for the next twelve years she raised her children and moved to Europe, Wisconsin and California as her husband's job required.

Singleton began working again in 1974 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, where she worked for twenty-two years. Most of her career was in research, including tritium-getter materials, oil shale processing, and growth of nonlinear optical crystals for the LLNL laser project. When she retired at the end of 1996 she was deputy plutonium facility manager. Soon after retirement, she enrolled as a student at the University of California, Berkeley in the Division of the History of Science and Technology and attended Oxford University during the summer of 2000. Her studies focused on the history of women in science, including the Manhattan Project and Dorothy Hodgkin's students.

In 1998 Singleton was among five other female employees of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who filed a lawsuit against the Lab on December 23, 1998. They charged that the Lab paid and promoted female lab employees, in a variety of job categories, less than their male counterparts with comparable education and experience. The situation was facilitated by a system of annual salary adjustments based on a subjective method which ranked an employee based on their relative "value" to other employees, called the "Relative Value Rank." The settlement in November of 2003 required the lab to make significant reforms and benefited over 3000 female employees who worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at the time. Singleton had been removed as a plaintiff in the original case since when she retired she had signed an agreement to surrender her right to sue the University of California. She negotiated a separate agreement.

Singleton has been an active member in the American Chemical Society (ACS), serving on the Women Chemists Committee of the ACS and as chair of the California Section.

 

Collection description

This collection (1958-2005) includes biographical material and correspondence with professional colleagues regarding salaries and advancement at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, as well as news clippings regarding the lawsuits against the Laboratory and a similar lawsuit involving the Los Alamos National Lab. Most of the collection consists of papers, articles and newsletter contributions in the field of chemistry and women in the sciences.

For a related collection which includes Mary Singleton, see MS-650, Women in Chemistry Oral History Project.

 

Organization

The collection is arranged in chronological order.

 

Container list

Box

Folder

Title

Dates

1

1

College transcripts and test scores

1958

1

2

Photo-induced electron paramagnetic resonance in mutant photosynthetic species lacking carotenoids or chlorophyll

1962

1

3

EPR in chromatophores from rhodospirillum rubrum and in quantasomes from spinach cholorplasts

1962

1

4

The trimethylsilylation of xylose and the nuclear magnetic resonance spectra of the major products

1962

1

5

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: personal career documents

1974-1996

1

6

Collection of deuterium on a uranium getter during dynamic flow conditions

1975

1

7

Proposal for director’s research initiatives

1984

1

8

Assay products from Green River Oil Shale

1986

1

9

Laser-induced bulk damage in potassium dihydrogen phosphate crystal

1988

1

10

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Salary Study Committee

1988-1996

1

14

Lawsuit clippings Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Lab

1988-2005

1

11

Conference papers and programs

1991, 1996

1

12

Coking or cracking reactions of oil vapor over hot oxidized oil shale

1992

1

13

Newsletter articles

1999-2005