This is part of a performance called Lady Scientists Stitch and Bitch that Illicit Ink arranged. Initially, we performed it at the Edinburgh Science Festival, later at a couple of other occasions to. I wrote and played Marie Curie. She spoke after Mary Sommerville. We’d got together with a number of other scientists, brought whatever craft we were working on and were having a chat. Here’s my dialog.
Like you, Madame Sommerville, I had to see to my own education. My parents were teachers and I was encouraged to learn, but at the time, universities in Poland did not accept women. For a while, I studied at the clandestine ‘Flying University’ in Warsaw, but I wanted to study in the open.
My sister went to Sorbonne and I worked to help pay for her studies. When she was finished, I joined her in Paris and signed up at the University to study chemistry. It was scary at first, I was out of touch with learning, but I caught up quickly and enjoyed using my brain again. I became a scientist, heart and soul.
People used to find that strange.
“Oh,” they would say, “you’re a lady scientist?”
Yes, I am. A lady scientist. A lady, daughter, sister, wife, mother, widow, mistress, foreigner scientist. I focus on the science: it’s given me some of my best moments.
Take seeing the colour of a new element, for example.
In the early days, after Pierre and I married, we worked in a rickety shed. It had been a dissecting room, and wasn’t used anymore. The ceiling was high and the studio windows let in lots of light. It was sweltering in summer, freezing in winter, and leaked terribly, but we didn’t care: it was ours. When we weren’t teaching, we were in the shed. I think we were at our happiest there.
The shed is where where I wrote my first paper and where, after years of teeth-grindingly hard and dull work, I calculated the atomic weight of radium.
That day we were almost giddy with excitement so after eating dinner and putting Iréne to bed, we returned to the shed. We entered without putting the light on and in the dark, we saw the radium glow. It was so beautiful, an ethereal but steady radiance. For several hours we sat close together, my love and I, talking, bathed in the faint blue-green light of our efforts. It was a glorious feeling.
Did you know that Pierre was run down by a cart? Such a stupid way to die. Such a stupid way to leave me.
Radium became very fashionable in all kinds of cosmetics and panaceas. It shed its light everywhere. Fripperies. But it was used to heal too. Doctors used radium salts to cure cancers, from external growths to cancers of the throat and womb.
One day, radiation will eradicate cancer, you’ll see.
We haven’t seen all its benefits yet. That’s why the research is so important. But my stocks run low. I always need more. It’s difficult studying something there’s so little of.
But life is not easy for any of us. What of it? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained. I didn’t spend years grinding pitchblende, dissolving it in acid, straining, boiling, purifying the solution, again and again, over and over, to win prizes.
Oh, the Nobel prizes. You know I have two, in physics and chemistry? I could have had none.
The first prize was awarded to Monsieur Becquerel and Pierre. Pierre wrote to the Academy saying that he could not accept the prize if I was not included. So I was. After all, he joined my research, not the other way around, I wasn’t his assistant, his little lady. I was a scientist and that first paper was mine and mine alone. Pierre was still working on crystals.
I almost didn’t get the second Nobel prize either, the one for my “services to chemistry”. A jealous woman sent love letters allegedly between her husband and me to some so-called newspaper. The scandal was tremendous. The papers were outraged that a foreign woman would use her scientific wiles to seduce a gentle family man away from his children.
As if science was ever considered seductive!
The Swedish Academy wrote to me to say that had they believed that the letters were real, they would not have awarded me the prize. Apparently, the title of mistress cast doubt on the quality of the work the scientist had pursued for decades. What’s the relevance? In science, we must be interested in things, not in persons.
Of course, things can help persons. In the great war, I turned from scientist to engineer and driver. I sent the girls to safety, took my radium out of Paris and hid it so I wouldn’t have to worry about someone stealing it.
I had other problems to solve: France’s soldiers were dying for the lack of X-ray units. If a doctor can find a piece of shrapnel, he can remove it. If he doesn’t it poisons the whole limb, the whole person. Without X-rays, doctors can’t do their best work. So I collected cars and vans, kitted them out with X-ray equipment and found drivers. We drove from Paris to where ever we were needed, set up the machine, X-rayed soldiers, developed the plates, packed up and went home. It was exhausting but important work. I’m sure you in particular understand how important, Madame Nightingale. Soldiers need people like us to look after them.
They named the mobile units after me – the ‘petite Curies‘ saved thousands of French soldier’s lives, despite being the brainchild of a Polish lady scientist.
It’s easier now. People know me. I am a scientist, role model to women and, as president Harding asserted when I visited Washington in 1922, “a perfect wife and mother” too.
I keep thinking back to the early days in the shed, and to the war. I miss the urgency work had then. I miss my youth. Not the clear-skinned and rosy-cheeked beauty of youth – that was never me – but the physical vigour of youth, the energy that let me cycle, stand, walk, or grind ore, for hours.
One of my students tried to get me to take up knitting last week. Can you imagine?
No insult intended, Madame Payne-Gaposchkin, I see you knit.
We were sitting in the garden in front of the Radium Institute where I’d been weeding between lectures. I’d hit my leg and made some complaint about it. The slightest bump gives me bruises and cuts just won’t stop bleeding. Walking the stairs to the Institute lecture hall gives me palpitations. It’s all so vexatious. I’d sat down by way of protest and Beata joined me.
“You need something new to occupy you, Madame,” she said, “something as compelling as science.”
“What do you suggest, Beata?” I asked.
“Knitting, Madame Curie, knitting,” she said. “Knitting is like science. You have materials and methods and can create almost anything by applying the latter to the former. But you need to work out how, you need to experiment and learn. There’s a lot of repetition and, in the beginning, a lot of tearing up and starting again.” She laughed. Beata is sharp but flighty.
“As soon as you’ve mastered the basics you want to do more complex patterns. I recommend lace. Lace on very fine needles, using fluffy yarns. There’s nothing to focus the mind like a yarn that can’t be unravelled if a yarn over, purl five together, make three, yarn over, goes wrong!”
I just looked at her. Repetition. Yes, that sounded like science.
“Wait here,” Beata said, and stood up in that elastic way of young people, “I’ll get my needles and show you.”
When I looked up at her all I could see was a black blot back-lit by the sun. Then she was away and the light hurt my eyes. I closed them and let the rays warm me. She came back too soon and sat down next to me with a thump that made my bones hurt.
“Here, you see,” she held a silk lace shawl towards me. It was the colour of radium. My right ear started murmuring the way it does. I could hardly hear her when she talked me through several stitches. I smiled. Smiling while the children prattle keeps them happy and lets me think about other things.
I have frequently been asked, especially by women, how I could reconcile family life with a scientific career. Well, it hasn’t been easy. It helped that Pierre’s father looked after the children for the first few years. It was hard when he died just four years after Pierre. Suddenly I was alone with a 14 year-old and a six year-old to raise. Family so easily gets in the way of work. Thankfully I could afford good governesses.
Did I ever tell you about my time as a governess at a beetroot farmer’s and the thing with his son?
No? Maybe next time.
Of course, when they were older, the girls could assist me. I’ve loved seeing them grow up into strong, independent women. I know they sometimes wished I’d been there more but the work comes first. They see that now.
Beata showed me some complicated stitch and I said “How very interesting.” We sat quiet for a moment, and then I held out my hands to her.
“Look,” I said. She took my hands in her own, gently, and turned them over.
“Madame has strong hands,” she said.
“Arthritic hands,” I said. “Hands that can’t hold a knitting needle. That’s why I get one of you girls to manipulate equipment for me.”
Her face fell, and I felt cruel. But she should have observed my condition herself. She has seen my hands often enough. They are another sign that time is running out for me. My daughters don’t like it when I talk about dying. They don’t see that nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. And I understand my end.
“I’m sorry, Beata,” I told the girl. “I can’t knit. But thank you for diverting me.” I smiled again and stood up, slowly. It was time to go inside again.
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that even if I could, I wouldn’t knit. I stitch to make and mend, not for entertainment. That’s simply not who I am.