Marie Curie: The Doors That Would Not Open for Her
Barred from university in her own country because she was a woman, she studied at a secret one. Then she became the first person to win two Nobel Prizes.
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The name that fell off the nomination
Maria Skłodowska was born in Warsaw in 1867, when Poland was under Russian rule. Women were not allowed to enter the university. So she studied at the “Flying University”, a secret network of classes that moved from house to house to avoid the authorities, and which accepted women.
In 1891 she went to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. There she met the physicist Pierre Curie; they married and worked together in a damp shed on the radiation Henri Becquerel had discovered. They discovered two new elements: polonium, which she named after her homeland, and radium.
In 1903 the Nobel committee decided to award the physics prize to Becquerel and Pierre Curie alone. Marie’s name was not on the nomination. A member of the Swedish Academy alerted Pierre, who wrote that he would not accept a prize for joint work from which his partner was excluded. Her name was added, and she became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.
In 1911 she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry alone. But that same year she was refused election to the French Academy of Sciences by a vote or two, and the press waged a vicious campaign against her, calling her a foreigner. The chairman of the Nobel committee even wrote suggesting she not attend the award ceremony. She replied that the prize had been given for the discovery of radium and polonium, and that there was no connection between her scientific work and her private life. She attended.
Source: The Nobel Foundation; Ève Curie, “Madame Curie” (1937); archives of the Institut Curie, Paris.
Marie Curie’s story is usually told as a story of genius. It is one. But from the angle of pushing back it is the story of a woman who faced three closed doors: the university door to women in Poland, the scientific establishment’s door to women in France, and the door of acceptance to a foreigner in a society of rising nationalism.
﴿يَرْفَعِ اللَّهُ الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا مِنْكُمْ وَالَّذِينَ أُوتُوا الْعِلْمَ دَرَجَاتٍ﴾[المجادلة: 11]
“God will raise those of you who believe and those who have been given knowledge, by degrees.” (Al-Mujadila 58:11)
Excellence as an instrument of pushing back
Marie Curie was not a political activist for women’s rights in the usual sense. She gave few speeches and wrote no manifestos. Her instrument of pushing back was simpler and harder: to do her work so well that it could not be ignored. Her name could be dropped from a nomination, but radium could not be dropped. This is a form of pushing back known to many marginalised groups: when political doors are shut, the door of achievement that imposes itself remains.
Yet excellence alone was not enough, as the story itself shows. Had Pierre not refused an incomplete prize, her name might not have been added in 1903. This recalls a lesson from the second issue: the weaker voice sometimes needs someone with a place in the room to say “no” alongside it.
Science in the service of the wounded
When the First World War broke out, Marie Curie put her science at the service of the soldiers. She developed mobile X-ray units, carried in cars that reached close to the front, so surgeons could locate shrapnel and fractures. In the first year of the war she oversaw the equipping of twenty cars and some two hundred fixed units in field hospitals, trained women to operate them, and drove some of the cars herself. The soldiers called the cars “little Curies”.
At the very moment she could have retreated to her laboratory after what the French establishment had done to her, she chose to serve the country that had not done her justice.
The limits of the life
Marie Curie and her generation were unaware of much of the danger of radiation; she carried tubes of radium in her pockets and kept them in her desk drawer. She died in 1934 of aplastic anaemia, most likely caused by her long exposure to radiation. Some scholars think she was slow to acknowledge the danger of what she worked with, and that this harmed her assistants too. It is a reminder that scientific courage needs scientific caution to match it.
But her legacy remains: the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win it twice, and still the only one to win it in two different sciences. She opened the way not only for herself but for her daughter Irène, who also won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, in 1935.