The MadaMe Curie CoMplexThe Hidden History of Women in Science

Julie des Jardins

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some fathers tell their kids about mythical home run hit- ters who won the World Series, or of courageous expeditions to

Antarctica or the moon. My father’s story to me was about Enrico Fermi and the scientists who created a nuclear chain reaction beneath the stands of the football stadium at the University of Chicago during World War II. As a lifelong Chicagoan, Dad preferred this story to those about heroic men at Los Alamos. It was at this moment under Stagg Field, he believed, that brilliant men had convened for some greater scientific purpose. The only story as awe inspiring was the one he told of the Founding Fathers, who converged on Philadelphia in 1776 to estab-lish, as Dad put it, the most enlightened democracy in the world. Both stories were so often told in our house that I could even remember the pauses built into their telling for dramatic effect. Whether he knew it or not, the message Dad conveyed was not only that science, like states-craft, bred greatness, but also that those talented enough to change the course of history were inevitably male.

My father was in awe of the great men of politics and science, and I wanted to awe my father. I never aspired to run for office, but I did have fleeting thoughts about becoming a scientist. I started out on the right path, and early on I proved to be a whiz at math. In elementary school I performed arithmetic leaps and bounds better than my peers. I remember my fourth-grade teacher walking me over to the acceler-ated fifth-grade class while the other kids grappled with concepts I had already mastered. My excellence in math was short-lived, however. In sixth grade I was ahead by two grade levels, and by seventh and eighth grades ahead by only one. In high school I hit my wall, turning in a mediocre performance in advanced algebra and then doing miserably in trigonometry. Invariably, boys were involved, for the ones on which I had designs didn’t turn up in my history classes, but in math classes, where I deferred to their seeming expertise. In my senior year I opted

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out of calculus altogether. It infuriates me that I had succumbed to math anxiety at precisely the predictable moment for adolescent girls. Then, although I performed brilliantly in advanced biology, I had so little confidence in math that I avoided other science classes. In the one chemistry course I was forced to take, the teacher seemed openly hos-tile to girls, so I didn’t approach him for help. Although I could have pursued biology in college, I decided that I didn’t have a mind capable of serious science.

My dad once confided to me that he thought things would have been different had I been a boy; he sensed that I had fallen prey to the prevailing tides. In his honor, here are the stories of scientists, ones that I hope will also inspire awe. Of course, they are necessarily different from his, since I am asking new questions about heroism. I am asking about the girls who did what I didn’t, who felt social pres-sures not to pursue science but did anyway. I am asking about the lives they led once they became women and certifiable scientists, and I am asking about how it was that many of the best female scientific minds were ignored largely because they never were certified as “scientists.” These stories describe scientists my father never heard of, though some of them might have been under Stagg Field had the culture of science been different.

This book is not overly laudatory of female accomplishment in sci-ence, but it isn’t a victimology either. To pity women of the sexist past or to celebrate women’s progress in the enlightened present is to write without context. To find compelling stories in the twentieth century, I had to leave Stagg Field and sometimes professional labs and insti-tutional science altogether. I had to write outside the narrative con-ventions of “great” history, too, for when you boil them down, they are masculine to the hilt and perpetuate the invisibility of women I aim to remedy. Women can never be the true heroines of “great science,” just wannabes and impostors, since the cast of such science is male by default. Twentieth-century science has been buoyed by myths that cre-ate prestige in masculine terms, and thus it is not enough to provide a laundry list of the women who nevertheless managed to earn entrance and accolades into its elite circles. Such stories could never be anything more than fragmentary and compensatory history, filling yet another volume of “exceptional women who performed outside their skins.” I’ve had to question the concept of scientific heroism and define it by other

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means. The drama of women’s stories lies less often in extraordinary discovery than in overlooked details—details that pertain to women’s scientific work but also to their private lives, since both are inextricably linked. Feminists have long insisted that the personal is political, and I extend that truism to assert that the personal and professional, private and scientific, are intertwined in these pages.

To tell a connected story of women in science, my historian’s lens pans out to reveal the contours of women’s science careers generally, but it zooms in to look at representative figures up close—some iconic, and others not successful in the traditional sense. Marie Curie, Jane Goodall, Rosalind Franklin, Evelyn Fox Keller, Lillian Gilbreth, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, Dian Fossey, Annie Jump Cannon, Biruté Galdikas, various Nobel laureates, and women of the Manhattan Project appear separately and as part of a whole to shed light on the ways American sci-ence has been experienced and imagined over the past century. While it might sound strange to bring together scientists from the lab and the field, the Nobel podium and the back room, the physical and life sci-ences, academic and popular venues from the turn of the century and today, I tell their individual and collective stories to show how cultural ideas of gender have shaped the methods, structure, and meaning of science itself.

Some may wonder how intrusive gender ideology has been of late, for sheer numbers seem to indicate that women have made progress in scientific institutions over the past century and that the trend contin-ues. As I scan the admissions website of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), I see that it currently boasts an undergraduate population that is nearly half female, and even a female president. When seen in the light of the ratios of women to men in the U.S. Naval Academy’s class of 2009 (19 to 81 percent), it seems that the culture of MIT and science generally has already changed in ways that the American military—yet another historically male bastion of prestige—has not. And yet I couldn’t help but also notice the data that was con-spicuously missing on the MIT website. I wonder about the fields in which female students succeed most, and what their outcomes are in graduate school or the job market after college. The website boasts of 197 female faculty members, but fails to inform us how this compares with numbers of men or at which levels of promotion women congre-gate. Although it pays homage to MIT’s first female doctorate holder

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in chemistry, the site fails to convey that she never achieved the pay or promotion of her male peers and to mention that she was relegated to the “women’s work” of domestic science. More important, it indicates nothing about the types of scientific questions pursued at MIT. How have women, whatever their numbers, actually changed the culture of the institution and the social ramifications of the work done there?1

I’m guessing that the data on female bodies walking the grounds at MIT looks better to prospective applicants than some of the data I want to know, but history tells me that deeper meaning lurks in these and other cultural silences beyond scientific institutions. In recent decades we’ve applauded the heightened female presence in American politics, for instance, and yet antifeminist legislation gets passed under women’s watch all the time. The 2008 vice presidential run of Sarah Palin un-derscores the point that peopling institutions with women will be no hard-and-fast way to change the sexist culture that pervades them. And thus, while no one disputes that more women occupy institutional sci-ence than ever before, I think that we need to pay more attention to the gendering of scientific culture in the end. Luckily for us, the personal and professional lives of women provide a lens for seeing this process over time. The stories in this book will enlighten, and at the same time they may also inspire.

I have written these stories as the problem of “women in science” continues to rear its head in twenty-first-century popular discourse. Naively, I had at first assumed that “the problem” was no longer a prob-lem at all and that a general consensus had been reached: that women are adept at science and that they simply need the opportunity to prove it. I’ve since learned, however, that present attitudes are more complex. Most people I know think that women can be good scientists; but they also believe, consciously or not, that what makes women good scien-tists is the extent to which they deny their true selves to think like men. Knowing this, I’m afraid the “women in science” problem is far from licked. In January 2005 Larry Summers, then the president of Harvard University, managed to stir the pot when he remarked to an audience including scientists that women’s relatively poor showing in science could be linked to innate biological difference. When I heard the early media reports I was outraged, but transcripts reveal more ambiguity in Summers’s statements than what the media first claimed. He attributed women’s lower numbers in science to any number of factors, discrimi-

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nation included. The essence of what he said is probably less relevant than the charged reaction that ensued, since it tells us so much more. Women’s position in science will never be resolved so long as gender itself remains a hotly contested social problem.2

It seems that everyone has opinions on whether or not women have scientific ability, and some opinions are more informed than others. My intention is simply to bring the past to bear on them. Few of the women scientists who feature in this book entered these debates di-rectly, but their work speaks for itself, dispelling claims that men are inherently better than women at science. With their limited access to the professional training, resources, mentoring, and social networks of men, women have occasionally asked different questions, used different methods, and come up with different explanations for phenomena in the natural world. For many, their marginal status in institutional sci-ence afforded their altogether different relationship to the nature they observed. As some became stewards and advocates for women, animals, and the environment, they expanded definitions of appropriate scien-tific work in the twenty-first century.

Of course the title of this book begs the question of Marie Curie’s effect on these stories about American women and science. She wasn’t American, yet the sheer number of American books and films written about her suggests that she is a presence we cannot ignore. In my ado-lescence I remember reading one of these biographies and thinking that if she could immigrate to another country and stave off death to study science, I could stick out Intro to Physics. Many biographers of women scientists treat her as the first and most inspiring female role model of the modern era, and I, too, introduce her first in the stories that follow, but not for the same purpose. No doubt, her work helps to make the case that science is made to be manly rather than being inherently so. But Curie’s myth haunts these pages and the psyches of succeeding gen-erations of women more completely than her real-life example, for it has both empowered and stigmatized women, liberated and constrained them, often at the same time. The historian Margaret Rossiter noted an inferiority complex in women after Curie’s tours of the United States in the 1920s, and for generations the Curie complex has continued to allow men to disqualify women—and women to disqualify themselves—from science. Women scientists have felt as though they cannot measure up to Curie, and of course how could they, when this mythical measure of

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female competence has morphed in the American mind over and over again? It’s like trying to hit a moving target.3

I have organized my stories of women around three historical “hubs” that coincide roughly with the first, middle, and final third of the twen-tieth century. The first is characterized by scientific professionalization, the second by World War II and the postwar veneration of masculine science, and the third by the rise of second-wave feminism. Regardless of the historical backdrop, the stories contained herein speak to ques-tions about women in science that continue to be relevant in the twenty-first century: Can women be both “womanly” and “scientific?” How do women balance their home life and scientific careers? How do men and women collaborate in the lab? Are certain scientific environments bet-ter for women than others? Do women “do” science differently from men? Is there such a thing as “feminist” science? Rarely did the women in these pages ask such questions explicitly, and yet their stories make us reflective about possible responses.

In Part I, “Assistants, Housekeepers, and Interchangeable Parts,” the masculinizing effects of professionalization redefine women’s relation-ship to science in ways that reverberate today. The very definition of “professional science” relies on its antithetical concept—amateur sci-ence, defined in its methods and orientation as quintessentially domes-tic. In professional settings women performed science in relative ob-scurity or occupied niches in pedagogy, popularization, and domestic research. When they made inroads into men’s labs it was almost always as assistants, technicians, and helpmeets. In Chapter 1, Marie Curie found herself negotiating American expectations of womanhood when she toured the United States to obtain radium for her research in the 1920s. Her admirers could not idolize her as a scientist, except to assume that domesticity and maternal benevolence motivated her work. In the American press she did not discover radium for the sake of science, but rather to minister to victims of cancer, as good women would.

In Chapter 2, Missy Meloney, the American journalist who orga-nized Curie’s radium tours, asked the Nobel Prize winner to nominate the industrial engineer Lillian Gilbreth for a Nobel Prize in 1932.4 Curie told Meloney that she would oblige if she knew which Nobel Prize to nominate her for, for Gilbreth was not a chemist, physicist, or medical scientist. Indeed throughout her life Gilbreth defied the facile catego-

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ries of others. She was mother and wife—and hence a domestic woman, and yet she also made a living in the most virile of scientific fields. Male industrial engineers sometimes ignored her, if not her work, and yet she became one of the most popularly recognized American women of the twentieth century. What makes her story emblematic of so many other women scientists is that few of her admirers recognized her as a scien-tist at all. Women scientists in these years often went by other names, whether they liked it or not. In Chapter 3, for example, the first genera-tions of women “computers” at the Harvard Astronomical Observatory suffered similar sexist semantics: though they worked in university buildings where serious research presumably took place, they were tol-erated as “scientific housekeepers”—custodians of records, cleaners of equipment, boosters of morale for the important men in their presence. Records viewed today amply demonstrate that the work of the Harvard computers was often more interpretive and groundbreaking than its categorization as “busy” or “domestic” suggested. Still, Annie Cannon’s embracing of her status as a womanly helpmeet to male astronomers won accolades for her as well as the ability to establish funding for women in future pursuits of science. When we examine the career path of her younger co-worker Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, we see advantages and drawbacks to both assimilation in masculine professional culture and capitulation to traditionally female positions in science. In this in-stance history complicates as much as it clarifies.

Part II, “The Cult of Masculinity in the Age of Heroic Science”—addressing the period of the middle third of the century—describes a time when science enjoyed its highest esteem in American life as well as its most virile identity. While Albert Einstein was a popularly recognized figure in the 1920s and 1930s, during and after World War II, when the ramifications of atomic science became widely apparent, the image of the male physicist became still more venerated. Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi became larger than life in the American mind, revered in ways no woman scientist has been in the postwar era. In Chapter 4, cultural amnesia regarding women of the Manhattan Project is seen as one consequence of the masculine mythology of these years. Another is the devaluation of women’s Nobel-caliber science. Chapter 5 illumi-nates how Gerty Cori and Maria Goeppert Mayer benefited from their close proximity to scientific men and were acknowledged as Nobel-worthy scientists, and yet being married to prominent men also meant

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tolerating decades of underemployment. They treaded close enough to men to be supported and protected, while keeping an arm’s distance so as also to be distinguishable in their own right. The Nobel’s snubs of single women Lise Meitner and Rosalind Franklin represent more cau-tionary tales, but the qualified success of Nobel winner Rosalyn Yalow, treated in Chapter 6, suggests that succeeding in institutional science in the postwar years required a crafty adaptation of the masculine role for legitimacy and the womanly role for acceptance.

Part III, “American Women and Science in Transition,” covers scien-tists during the last third of the twentieth century, with the rise of sec-ond-wave feminism. In this period, professional science began to shed its masculine trappings, at least in the work of Louis Leakey’s “Lady Trimates”: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas. In Chapters 6 and 7, I relate how Barbara McClintock, Rachel Carson, and others seized on and facilitated this moment of flux. They rejected man’s pre-sumed dominance over nature as well as beliefs in “masculine” objec-tivity to embrace scientific work as popularizers, naturalists, and advo-cates—bearing willingly, even boldly, labels that had long been placed on women so as to reduce them to scientific “amateurs.”

In this postatomic age, both male and female scientists have come to understand the importance of bringing nonscientists into their work, for decisions about nuclear bombs and gene replication have social ramifications that cannot remain secret. Women’s ability to make sci-ence accessible takes on new significance going into the twenty-first century.

I concede that my pigeonholing women scientists into tidy histori-cal categories—of which they themselves were never aware—may be fraught with problems. But I trust that this volume makes clear that I want, not to reduce women, but rather to position them to be seen anew, perhaps even for the first time. I also want to create a useful frame-work through which to see many facets of gender in science. Several women practiced science across my sometimes arbitrary chronologi-cal divisions, and certainly women’s lives and thoughts transgress the generalizations I have made about them as members of generational, disciplinary, or ideological cohorts. Still, there is a larger picture that the individual stories of women can clarify when the narratives are put together and seen as a whole. Suddenly the historical lens changes too, and we can see women practicing science when it wasn’t in the lab, the

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university, or under Stagg Field. We can even flesh out the one woman who did stand witness to the nuclear reaction my father talked so much about. Her name was Leona Woods Marshall, later Leona Marshall Libby. In this volume, she is more than a footnote: she is a fresh pair of eyes on the culture of American science.

notes

1. Http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/life/women_at_mit/; http://www.usna.edu/Admissions/classprofile.htm, April 6, 2009.

2. “The AAUP’s Committee on Women Responds to Lawrence Summers,” Academe, July/August 2005, 59; “Summerstime, and the Living Ain’t Easy,” Economist, February 26, 2005 (http://www.the-economist.com/research/articlesbysubject/displaystory.cfm ?subjectid=2743324&story-id=E1.PGJVJPP); Amanda Ripley, “Larry Summers,” Time, April 18, 2005, 104.

3. Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1982), 126–27, 130, 216.

4. Marie Curie to Missy Meloney, January 29, 1931, Box 1, William B. Meloney-Marie Curie Special Manuscript Collection, Columbia University Libraries, New York, NY.

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