Amy Bug reviews The Marie Curie Complex
Hi friends of women in science,
Recently, Amy Bug, Swarthmore physicist who posted here last year, reviewed a new book by Julie Des Jardins called The Marie Curie Complex in the August, 2011 issue of Physics Today. She quotes a zombie version of Curie from the web comic site xkcd saying that, "You don't become great by trying to become great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process." So setting up Curie as an idol is not such a good idea if it means the focus is upon her and not upon the science. But you may recall last spring one of the outstanding girls who won a major science fair read Curie's biography and was inspired (see here).
Des Jardins finds that the myth of Curie has both empowered and stimatized women who aspire to science careers. Bug notes that Karimat El-Sayed, a physicist who has inspired many Arabic women, said that knowing about Curie had changed her life. But Des Rosiers points out the findings of Margaret Rossiter, a ground-breaking historian of women in science, who found that Curie's successes were so far out of the normal orbit that they were intimidating to both men and women. Curie toured American twice in the 1920's under the aegis of a publicity seeking magazine, which evidently portrayed her ias a "maternal saint and humanitarian martyr" instead of the "brilliant dedicated scientist," whose work had a welcome humanitarian side benefit.
Bug points out that Des Jardins focuses on three periods birth of science as a profession in the late 19th century, the mid-20th century 'heroic age", and the late 20th century when second-generation feminism was on the rise. She examines the lives of particular women in each period, revealing barriers and strategies they used to overcome them. Bug comments particularly about how hard it has been to unravel the role women physicists played in the Manhattan Project due to "cultural amnesia" which resulted in loss of even memories of their roles by the others in the project.
Check out Amy's review and then consider buying this book. It will provide a lot of food for thought for people who care about women in science.
cheers,
Laura
Marie Curie used to be extremely inspiring to me... I read her biography when I was pretty little and thought I wanted to be like her. However... my fascination stopped when I had children. I'm still looking for a good model of a good scientist (maybe not Nobel price winner) who was also a good parent. I think it's time to recognize scientists need to have a personal life to be whole, and children of scientists need... well, parents!
She is inspiring, but I always thought Rosalyn Yalow was more inspiring to me. Her situation was more similar to my own, although I never had full time child care the way she did for her kids. Kudos to you for posting about her life when her obituaries came out, Laura. I read a bio about her when I was growing up, and loved that she had won a Nobel prize for her work.
LNR
I have to admit I was mostly inspired by Curie, particularly the fact that her daughter Eva also won the Nobel prize, so she was inspired by her mom's success. The biographies don't make it sound at all inevitable that Marie would make an important discovery, highlighting the importance of luck as well as brilliance and skill in scientific success.
cheers,
Laura
I had to pick ambivalent because I read about her as a kid and found her inspiring, but when I read that book Obsessive Genius, it was so different from me that I felt like she was not a good role model after all. I'm not a wimp, but I want role models who have characteristics in common with me, not ones who seem out of my range entirely.
I just don't think women are such wimps. Why wouldn't Curie be inspiring even to women who don't make it to Nobel turf? She was an important woman scientist, one of the few scientists to ever win two Nobel Prizes, and I take pride in her accomplishments. SBM
