CuricaturesPatricia Fara

Clare College, Cambridge, UK, CB2 1TL

Marie Curie challenged many conventions when she left

Poland, became a world-famous French scientist and

took X-ray machinery to the front line in World War I.

Although she was the first person to win two Nobel

prizes, many critics found it hard to believe that she

could simultaneously be a caring mother and a brilliant

researcher. As mythological accounts of Curie’s success

grew, photographs and caricatures of her reinforced

traditional stereotypes of male and female roles in

science.

Marie Curie, the first person to be awarded two Nobelprizes, rapidly became the scientific heroine of France;when admirers converted her into the patron saint ofcancer nurses, she acquired an additional iconic appealsimilar to that of Florence Nightingale. Curie is oftendepicted as a unique female genius, photographed alone ina laboratory – a solitary worker who cares little for herhealth or her appearance as she dedicates herself to thecause of science. Ironically, this celebratory versionprovides a negative role model for schoolgirls because itconfirms the prejudice that female scientists are neces-sarily freakish women who care little about their appear-ance, diet and sexual relationships. But other picturesserve other ideological ends: portrayed either with herhusband, Pierre, or her children, she has been epitomizedas her husband’s help-mate and a charismatic maternalbeacon for early feminists.

Soon after the couple isolated radium chloride in 1902,an industrial chemist – Armet de Lisle – established afactory outside Paris to produce radioactive salts. He alsofounded a new journal, Le Radium.The front page of thefirst issue was dominated by a photograph showing Pierre,Marie and an assistant grouped together in their dark,cramped laboratory that was cluttered with equipment. Incontrast to this image of three research collaborators, afewmonths later the English society magazineVanity Fairpublished a caricature of the married couple, with Pierrefeatured as the lone discoverer [1] (Figure 1). As part of aseries called ‘Men of the Day’, this image reinforcestraditional stereotypes. Marie is a diminutive figure whogazes from behind her husband’s shoulder at the miracu-lous source of light, which radiates the glory of genius onto his exaggerated forehead. Although Marie publishedtheoretical papers independently, here Pierre clasps abook while she – the practical subordinate – leans on thetable of apparatus. Chemistry had long been associatedwith cooking and, at the end of the 18th century, MariaEdgeworth (a fervent campaigner for female education)

Corresponding author: Patricia Fara (pf10006@cam.ac.uk).Available online 27 July 2004

www.sciencedirect.com 0160-9327/$ - see front matter Q 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

wrote that ‘Chemistry is a science well suited to thetalents and situation of women [with] no danger ofinflaming the imagination’ [2]. In the collective Curiemythology, Marie appears as the domestic drudge whodevotedly sifts through tons of dirty pitchblende, amechanical process requiring little mental activity; whilePierre, as in the Vanity Fair illustration, stands as a 20th-century alchemist triumphantly holding up the tinyglowing crystal.

Before they met, Pierre had worried that, becauseclever women were so rare, finding a wife might have a

Review Endeavour Vol.28 No.3 September 2004

Figure 1. Caricature of Pierre and Marie Curie by Julius Mendes Price, Vanity Fair,

1904. Reproduced by, and with permission from, The British Library (shelfmark

P.P.5274.h.).

. doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2004.07.002

Figure 2. Photograph of Marie Curie and Irene Curie-Joliot at the military hospital in

Hoogstade, Belgium, 1915. Reproduced, with permission, from the ACJC-Curie and

Joliot-Curie fund.

Review Endeavour Vol.28 No.3 September 2004102

detrimental effect on his scientific career. He saw in Mariea ‘good little student’ but, although they complementedone another, their intellectual abilities were the reverse ofthose conventionally attributed to men and women – hewas slow and cautious, whereas she thought quickly, wascompetitive and sought publicity [3]. She was responsiblefor the domestic arrangements of their family, but theyboth agreed that science came first. Their mutual choice ofa frugal lifestyle became legendary, and fueled romanti-cized horror stories about their sordid working conditionsand their struggle for recognition [4].

In Figure 1 Pierre’s rumpled trousers and carelesslybuttoned jacket signal his absorption in his work, whereasMarie’s plain dress indicates her renunciation of the usualfeminine interests in fashion. At the time the caricatureappeared in Vanity Fair, Marie was pregnant with theirsecond daughter, but the accompanying article describesthem as ‘a notable pair [whose] child is radium’ [5]. Theproud parents gaze in wonder at the radium salt blazingwith the power of a divine light. Marie’s demure blue dressrecalls imagery of the Virgin Mary, but six years later,after Pierre’s death, her morality was internationallycastigated because of her affair with another physicist,Paul Langevin. Critics accused her of being a marriage-breaker and a second-rate scientist who relied on thesuperior guidance of a man; it seemed impossible toimagine that a woman could – like her male colleagues –be both intellectually brilliant and sexually active.

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After 1910, Marie turned to her sister, Bronia, andother women for support. When World War I broke out in1914, Marie raised funds to set up mobile X-ray units forfield hospitals, and was soon joined by her older daughter,Irene. In Figure 2 both are chastely dressed in pure white:Irene as a nurse, although she went to the front lineafter only one month’s training; and Marie in thesmock that covered her habitual dark dress but providedscant protection against the radiation that was alreadyenfeebling her. Marie also developed a strong bond withanother woman, the American journalist Marie Meloney,who visited Paris in 1920. After some shrewd bargaining,Curie agreed to embark on a strenuous publicity tour inthe USA to win a gram of radium for her laboratory.Meanwhile, Meloney gained a new figurehead: disillu-sioned with American feminists who were promotingcareers over motherhood, Meloney publicized Curie asa woman who had successfully combined science andfamily.

Although Marie Curie broke many conventions duringher own life, her daughter and grand-daughter conformedto the powerful role model she had established. AfterWorld War I, Irene continued to collaborate with hermother and herself married a scientist, Frederic Joliot.Like Pierre and Marie, these scientific partners wereawarded a joint Nobel prize for their work on radioactivity.Moreover, their daughter Helene not only decided toresearch in the same field, but also chose her husbandfrom France’s scientific elite: she married Langevin’sgrandson [6].

In the unusual Curie household, the rebel was Marie’syounger daughter Eve, who followed national rather thanfamily conventions by preferring art over science andadopting a nurturing role. Like Irene, she acted as a nurse– but her patient was hermother, who painfully died of thecancer induced by her work. Eve was also keen to preservetheir mother’s saintly image. In her influential biography,Eve glorified Marie as an exemplary martyr to science andsimply omitted to mention the affair with Langevin [7].Pierre features as a jealous husband who resented thetime Marie devoted to her children and was incapable ofthinking clearly without his wife.

Eve seemed to resent her parents’ absorption in theirresearch because, like the Vanity Fair caricaturist, shesaw radium as their favourite offspring. Envisaging ascene that took place before she was born, Eve describedhow they left her older sister behind during a night-timevisit to their laboratory: ‘Marie took up again the attitudewhich had been hers an hour earlier at the bedside of hersleeping child.She was to remember for ever this eveningof glow-worms, this magic’ [8].

AcknowledgementsI am grateful to Isabelle Adams for our illuminating discussions.

References

1 Dry, S. (2003) Curie, Haus Publishing (London, UK), pp. 44–522 Edgeworth, M. (1993) Letters for Literary Ladies, J.M. Dent (London,

UK), p. 213 Pycior, H.M. (1996) Pierre Curie and ‘his eminent collaborator Mme

Curie’: complementary partners. In Creative Couples in the Sciences(Pycior, H.M. et al., eds), pp. 39–56, Rutgers University Press

Review Endeavour Vol.28 No.3 September 2004 103

4 Pycior, H.M. (1987) Marie Curie’s ‘anti-natural path’: time only forscience and family. In Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women inScience, 1789–1979 (Abir-Am, P.G. and Outram, D. eds), pp. 191–214,Rutgers University Press

5 Junior, J. (1904) Monsieur and Madame Curie. Vanity Fair Album 36,number 945

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6 Bensaude-Vincent, B. (1987) Star scientists in a Nobel family: Ireneand Frederic Joliot-Curie. In Abir-Am, P.G. and Outramm, D eds(1987), pp. 57–71

7 Wagner-Martin, L. (1994) Telling Women’s Lives: The New Biography,Rutgers University Press, pp. 107–108

8 Curie, E. (1938) Madame Curie, William Heinemann, p. 185

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