Marie Curie: Don't Call Her Madame!
"Don't Call Her Madame!" was the title of Susan Quinn's talk at the symposium on "Marie Curie and the Centenary of the Discovery of Radioactivity" at the New York Academy of Medicine on 8 October 1998. Author of Marie Curie - A Life, Quinn said she shunned the title "Madame" -- which was instilled by the title of the 1934 biography by her daughter Eve -- because it makes Marie Curie a "Mrs." -- and not a person in her own right -- or an icon.
The icon image of Marie Curie was promoted by newspaper headlines portraying her work with radioactivity as a cure for cancer. At the same time, other newspaper articles commending her activism minimized her role as a scientist. What she should be credited for, Quinn maintained, was the work she and her husband Pierre did to apply the radiation discovered by Becquerel -- which they named "radioactivity" -- to atomic structure.
Quinn related how she sought Eve Curie as a source and inspiration for her biography. She found Eve gracious but offering nothing not already in her book. "I wrote my book," she said; "you write yours," as if to wonder why another biography of her mother needed to be written.
Quinn later discovered that Madame Curie had been the inspiration to many women, but she also realized that it waltzed over the prejudices of men. Eve Curie emphasized the seriousness and hard work of her mother -- but Quinn noted that these descriptions of women are not always complimentary, often suggesting lack of insight. Indeed, in her interviews, Quinn found that people thought of Pierre as the thinker, Marie the worker. It was easier to see women as hardworking than as brilliant and original.
In fact, Marie Curie had minimized the gender discrimination she had experienced in writing her own autobiography, and this was not mentioned in Eve's biography, either. Perhaps no gender discrimination was more severe than her rejection by the French Academy. Though she was ostensibly unperturbed by this, Marie did not publish her results there for another eleven years; meanwhile, she went on to found her own Radium Institute.
Quinn relayed how she sought to penetrate the minimization of the hurt that had pervaded the literature thus far on Marie Curie -- in effect, to get closer to her than anyone, with the exception of her closest loved ones. She benefitted from the opening of the Curie papers in 1990 and found that intimate connection in two of Marie Curie's journals, one begun right after Pierre's death in 1906, in which she despaired that her last sentence to him was not one of love and tenderness. The second journal recounting the progress of her daughters portrays Marie Curie as a mother.
Documents at another French library revealed firsthand accounts of a love triangle of Marie Curie, Paul Langevin, and his jealous wife -- an episode which in its own time had brought forth the wrath of the French rightwing press. This revealed why Eve Curie had told Quinn that her biography of her mother was published swiftly so that no one else would write it first and not "get it right." In other words, Quinn saw it as a preemptive strike.
The Langevin scandal broke right after the announcement of Marie Curie's 1911 Nobel Prize. A member of the Nobel committee requested that she not come to Stockholm without first resolving the problem. She responded that she would come, because she felt the Prize was given for her scientific work, not for her personal life. The courage exhibited by this episode is one of the reasons, Quinn felt, to tell the Langevin story.
Marie Curie - A Life is available in paperback for $15 from Perseus Books, c/o Westview Press, Customer Service, 5500 Central Avenue, Boulder, CO 80301-2877, (800)-386-5656, FAX: (303)-449-3356
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