The United Nations named this year the Intenational year of Chemistry in honor of the amazing Marie Curie, who won her second Nobel Prize a century ago this month. She shared her first Nobel prize in 1903, the first ever awarded to a woman. That same year, she was the first woman to earn a physics PhD in France. Smithsonian looks back at the life of this inspirational scientist:
The marquee event of her six-week U.S. tour (in 1921) was held in the East Room of the White House. President Warren Harding spoke at length, praising her “great attainments in the realms of science and intellect” and saying she represented the best in womanhood. “We lay at your feet the testimony of that love which all the generations of men have been won't to bestow upon the noble woman, the unselfish wife, the devoted mother.”
It was a rather odd thing to say to the most decorated scientist of that era, but then again Marie Curie was never easy to understand or categorize. That was because she was a pioneer, an outlier, unique for the newness and immensity of her achievements. But it was also because of her sex. Curie worked during a great age of innovation, but proper women of her time were thought to be too sentimental to perform objective science. She would forever be considered a bit strange, not just a great scientist but a great woman scientist. You would not expect the president of the United States to praise one of Curie’s male contemporaries by calling attention to his manhood and his devotion as a father. Professional science until fairly recently was a man’s world, and in Curie’s time it was rare for a woman even to participate in academic physics, never mind triumph over it.
