In June 1921, in the flush of a triumphant six-week American tour by Marie Curie, a prominent male scientist urged the young women graduating from Bryn Mawr to follow her example and “enter into a career of science.”
An unsigned editorial in The New York Times scoffed.
Not to take anything from the “illustrious” Mme. Curie — then the only woman to have won a Nobel Prize and the only person to have won twice. But surely, the editorial opined, the young women must have understood “that such achievement was not for them.” While some might be “efficient” in the laboratory — for “drudgery” and perhaps “original investigation” — most had yet to develop “the scientific or mechanical mind.” Men had more “latent capacities” in those directions; women were too emotional to view the facts abstractly.
The Times was, to use the old newspaper cliché, not alone.
Back home in Paris, the French Academy of Sciences refused to elect her a member (it later repeatedly rebuffed her daughter, who also won a Nobel). In her new biography, “The Elements of Marie Curie,” Dava Sobel quotes a letter from a Yale professor recounting Curie’s American visit, saying he was “pleasantly surprised” to find she was “quite keen about scientific matters.”
“But I felt sorry for the poor old girl,” he added. “She was a distinctly pathetic figure.”
The belief that women lack the intrinsic aptitude to master math and science stubbornly persists. As Sobel begins her book: “Even now, nearly a century after her death, Marie Curie remains the only female scientist whom most people can name.”
Previous chroniclers of women in science — especially Margaret Rossiter in her three-volume book on the Americans among them — have argued that Curie’s exceptional achievement made it harder for women who aspired to follow her. They already suspected they’d have to be twice as good to get half as far; she made the standard more unattainable, and gave cover to male department heads looking for an excuse not to hire them: She’s likable enough, but she’s no Marie Curie.
Sobel, the author of several scientific biographies — “Longitude” was a best seller, and “Galileo’s Daughter” a Pulitzer finalist — looks for a more positive result. She sets out to show how Curie’s discovery of radium “lit a path for women in science,” namely, the 45 aspiring female scientists who “spent a formative period in the Curie lab at the Sorbonne.”
But her telling confirms, heartbreakingly at times, just how narrow and gloomy the path was.
Curie herself was able to have a lab of her own only because her husband, the physicist Pierre Curie, demanded that the school where he worked give her the space. Her father-in-law moved in with the couple to babysit for their two children. After Pierre and Marie Curie shared the Nobel, the Sorbonne gave Pierre a professorial chair; Marie was relegated to chief of operations in his new lab. The university made her its first female professor only in 1906, after Pierre was killed by a horse-drawn wagon on a rainy night near the Pont Neuf.
As with so many early women in science, Curie’s is a story of self-sacrifice: Before she met Pierre, she nearly starved herself, living on tea and bread as she studied in a Parisian garret. After his death, she dressed in black and shunned attention. Urged to write a memoir, she wrote his biography instead. She poured what paltry prize money she won back into buying bits of radium for her research.
With rare exceptions, the 45 other women subjects appear in Sobel’s book only as emanations. Sobel names her chapters for them, but tells little of their stories beyond that. One, Irén Götz, is mentioned in only one sentence in the chapter named for her.
Two get fuller treatment. After Barnard College told Harriet Brooks she had to quit because she was getting married, she did — her job as a physics instructor and the engagement, too, only to sacrifice her career for another marriage down the road. Ellen Gleditsch became a university professor in Norway, but after 13 years the university still refused to grant her tenure or lab space.
Support came from several men, one of whom referred to his wife as B.G., for “Beautiful Genius.” When Curie, four years widowed, was attacked as immoral for an affair with a married man, Albert Einstein defended her. (The man in question went on to have a child out of wedlock with a former student working in his lab; predictably, no scandal ensued.)
By contrast, the women in Sobel’s book doubted themselves, and Curie. Some noted that she barely showed up in the lab as her health declined from years of exposure to the radioactivity she had discovered. And those who did try to improve conditions for women often worried that such efforts only distracted them from their scientific passions. As one suffragist scientist wrote, “I often think very sadly that I might have been more useful to the Cause if I had devoted myself to my own special work as Madame Curie has done.”
As in her earlier books, Sobel writes elegantly about science, unspooling Curie’s pursuits in the lab like a mystery. She leaves us less clear how Curie herself viewed the position of women in science. When a member of the Nobel Committee suggested that she not come to Stockholm to collect her second prize in 1911 because of the bad publicity around her affair, she insisted on going: “I believe there is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of private life.” But when Gleditsch and others formed an international society devoted to promoting women in science, Curie declined “to ally herself.”
Her ailments debilitated her so much that she begged off several events on her American tour. Her exposure to the very elements she had discovered ultimately killed her. The Times ran its obituary on the front page of July 5, 1934: “Mme. Curie Is Dead; Martyr to Science.”
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