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3. American Memories of Madame Curie

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3. American Memories of Madame Curie JULIE DES JARDINS 3. AMERICAN MEMORIES OF MADAME CURIE Prisms on the Gendered Culture of Science INTRODUCTION In January 2005, Lawrence Summers, then the president of Harvard University, opened a Pandora’s box at a conference of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He posited that “issues of intrinsic aptitude” might be to blame for women’s disproportionately poor standing in American science. Scientists and non- scientists were astounded at his audacity when news first broke of his comments, though transcripts later made public revealed more ambiguity in them. As it turned out, Summers cited more than biological rationales for the dearth of women in science--differences in socialization and patterns of discrimination were also possible culprits. But his suggestion that biology could be involved seemed to tear off the scab of a festering wound; the nurture/nature debate in science had been reopened in a very public forum.1 Until then, there were reasons to think that the charged debate over the “women’s problem” in science was diminishing, even becoming a relic of the past. Though women still obtain science doctorates and fulltime science employment to a lesser degree than men, the trend in all science and engineering fields, aside from computer science, has been women’s increasing numerical presence. In 1958, women earned 7.9% of doctorate degrees in all science, engineering, and health fields; by 2006 women represented 40.2% of the whole. In 1973 women were 4.3% of all full professors in science and engineering fields; in 2006 they were 19.4%, by no means a majority, but increasingly a force with which to contend.2 There is no reason to think that the numbers of women in science won’t continue to rise, but are the numbers necessarily a gauge of the questions asked in science institutions or of the social ramifications of the work performed in them? One still has to wonder if the culture of science has changed, if women’s qualitative experience of science empowers them, and if they truly enrich science with what they bring to the table. The highly charged reaction to Lawrence Summers in 2005 suggests to me that while many people think women can be competent scientists, they haven’t shirked the ingrained notion that the concept of scienticity is masculine to the core. Despite women’s growing numbers in science, the culture of science—its procedures, ideologies, and social organization—is fraught with bias that prevents women from working and succeeding on their terms. M.-H. Chiu, P. J. Gilmer, and D. F. Treagust (Eds.), Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Madame Marie Sklodowska Curie’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry. 59–85. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. JULIE DES JARDINS And thus, while Summers may have inadvertently reopened debates about women and science that we hoped had been closed, he may also have done women and science a favor. He has allowed those of us observing science as culture to call for a collective refocusing of attention, to shift the crux of contentious feeling away from the classic argument of nurture or nature, to nurture or nurture: Is good science performed in the culturally feminine or masculine mode? Is there a feminine or feminist approach to scientific practice? And if there is, should there be? Though it would be foolhardy to think in essentialist terms, we cannot deny that women scientists have brought unique perspective to scientific work and the natural world. Their biology does not orient them differently; women’s perspectives of nature are often gained through the maternal, domestic, and culturally feminine work society assigns them. The converse is also true and stigmatizing: We often believe that women’s presumed femininity gives them a certain relationship to nature, a relationship deemed too close and charged to promote disinterested science. A historical look at science as culture is the only way to assess the extent to which women have been scientists on empowering terms and can be in the future. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON MARIE CURIE The legendary Marie Curie is a woman whose story has been summoned to offer historical perspective on women scientists, though not typically the perspective of cultural context asked for here. She wasn’t American, yet the sheer number of American books, films, and articles about her makes her the single best figure through which to analyze cultural constructions of women in American science. No doubt, her scientific discoveries help to make the case that science is not inherently manly. And yet Margaret Rossiter noted that when Curie came to the United States in the 1920s, her influence did less to inspire women into science than to create a strange inferiority complex in them that has not gone away. In the twenty-first century, it serves us well to be mindful of Curie’s appropriation and remaking as an icon in American life, for only then can women scientists infuse her legacy with meaning that empowers.3 Curie did little to change the masculine cast of physical science with her American tours in the 1920s, but she might have had the publicity surrounding them been different. The tours had been the brainchild of Marie Mattingly (Missy) Meloney, a New York socialite and editor-in-chief of the women’s publication, The Delineator. She had sought an interview with Curie in 1920, convinced that female readers of her magazine would want to hear from the reclusive scientist. Americans had been following Curie since Vanity Fair presented her and her husband Pierre to readers in 1904, months after they together with Henri Becquerel had shared the Nobel Prize in physics for radioactivity. In print, Marie Curie appeared to be a puzzling contradiction: Though she was the co-discoverer of radium, she was also the person responsible for family domesticity, and hence, a seemingly appropriate woman. The first American women with science degrees were presumably too domestic to be 60 AMERICAN MEMORIES OF MADAME CURIE competent scientists in the professional, academic milieu; their ties to the home, real or not, were thought to make them too scattered and sentimental to achieve the intense focus professional science required. And yet for a time domesticity seemed not to tarnish Curie’s reputation as a competent scientist. Only after Pierre Curie’s death in 1906 did men use Curie’s alleged domesticity, along with her non-marital sexuality, against her. Here we will explore why opinions of her changed, and to what extent Curie’s early acceptance was largely perception in the first place. Her story sheds light on the ways women scientists continue to be conjured in the American mind.4 Early in the twentieth century Curie, like Lise Meitner, Ida Noddack, Harriet Brooks, and others, had enjoyed relative success in the “hard” (read masculine)5 field of physics, but their success was largely in Europe, and, as we will see, made to appear to be success of another kind than what men achieved. By the 1920s and 1930s students at American women’s colleges followed the lead of European standouts and majored in physical science in proportions equal to men. But their numbers tapered off in the graduate ranks, suggesting that there was a limit to the extent to which American women believed they could successfully combine high- level science and domesticity without social repercussions. Four times more women received doctorate degrees in the seemingly “softer” biological and social sciences in the 1930s than in Curie’s field of physics, a field in which men earned 97 percent of the doctorates and won an even greater percentage of research posts afterward. Administrators cited women’s lack of experience in prestigious research institutions as one factor, their tendency to marry and leave the profession as another. And there, too, was the problem of perception: few people could imagine women as physicists. This cultural factor cannot be minimized, since it has led to the historical obscurity of women who became physicists, despite the challenges, and to other women’s internalization of the belief that they could never be monastic, cerebral, or masculine enough to enter the field.6 It’s no wonder that Curie’s tours did little to shake the virile image of physicists: women scientists were almost nowhere to be found in the publicity and events that accompanied them, and Curie herself was rarely presented to the American public in ways that altered preconceived notions about the gender and women scientists. Here I mine the work of Margaret Wertheim, Daniel Kevles, Bert Hansen, Marcel LaFollette, and others who have analyzed the making of science icons, and I engage Margaret Rossiter’s assessments of the effects of Curie’s tours on practicing women scientists in America.7 But I also tease out the various Curies imagined by American women, medical men, industrial scientists, and the popular media over decades to assess the cultural effects of Curie and her tours. The incarnations of Curie—literary, filmic, and feminist—tell us about Americans’ collective thoughts on women scientists in the twentieth century. 61 JULIE DES JARDINS CURIE’S RADIUM CAMPAIGN, 1920–1929: CREATING AN ACCEPTABLE IMAGE OF A WOMAN IN SCIENCE Curie’s First Trip to the United States When Marie Curie granted Missy Meloney the interview that led to her American tours, she had been a widow for nearly 15 years and the recipient of yet another Nobel Prize, this time in the field of chemistry. American women, meanwhile, were in the midst of winning suffrage and had come to comprise nearly half of the undergraduate population on American college campuses. Modest numbers of women had entered scientific institutions when the demands of World War I expanded research opportunities in photographic, communications, and ballistic technologies.
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