"Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? 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."
- Marie Curie
Beautifully Flawed
Marie Sklodowska Curie, with blonde hair, passionate desires (she had lovers in a time when women were institutionalized for "hysteria" attributed to excessive desire or lack thereof and a "tendency to cause trouble", among other things), and an equally passionate intelligence (also at a time when most women never progressed past a 4th grade education) epitomizes what has become the standard for expectations we have of ourselves: smart, successful, and having it all - beauty/intelligence, lovers/devoted life-mates, and career success/domestic bliss.
Her towering talent and amazing achievements have been celebrated and mythologized - from the fairy light flashes of her beloved radium (she kept a vial of radium salts at her beside so that she could observe its beautiful glow and also referred to radium as her "child") to the ahistorical popular film depiction of her as the seamlessly perfect mother stitching her daughter's shoes by hand.
But the dark roots to the blonde halo crowning her head usually go unmentioned: the dark roots of obsession and depression. In focusing on these usually overlooked aspects of Curie's personality, I want to show that even our best sheroes are flawed - like ourselves - imperfect but still radiant and, in Curie's case, as strong as the radium that she discovered.
Background
Marie Sklodowska was of Polish lineage and descended from lower aristocracy, known as Szlachta. These Szlachta, glorying in the memory of faded glory and intellectual achievement, were elitist and felt vastly superior to the richer peasant class which measured its worth in worldly goods. Throughout her life, Marie prided herself on intellectual achievements rather than material possessions.
Her youth was impoverished and sad. Her mother was reduced to making shoes to help support the family and she grew up in the anti-Polish sentiment of Tsar Alexander's regime. When she was seven, she lost her sister from typhus and, four years later, she lost her mother as well.
After these two deaths she experienced a profound depression, a depression that was to become a recurring phenomenon throughout her life.
Education/Career
Marie was known for her remarkable capacity for memorization and her diligence in work tasks, a diligence that ceded the task at hand to nothing as mundane as food or sleep. She obsessed so entirely on her studies that following her graduation from high school she suffered a mental breakdown for a year. She stayed in bed in her darkened room and refused to speak and ate very little. While she made light, in later years, of these recurring episodes, calling them "fatigue" or "exhaustion" they bear the clear hallmarks of depression.
Due to the prevalent attitudes towards women and higher education, but also due to the anti-Polish reprisals following the January Uprising in Russia, she was not allowed admission to any of the universities in Russia. It was during the time following her nervous breakdown and before going on to study at the Sorbonne that she worked as a governess. It was also during this time that she took her first lover, Casimir Zorawski.
Eight years later, and with the financial aid of her elder sister Bronia, Marie moved to Paris and registered at the Sorbonne where she studied chemistry and physics. She became the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne. It was at the Sorbonne she met and married another instructor, Pierre Curie.
Marie Curie was the first major female scientist of modern times. She pursued her scientific career as a chemist both before - and after - coming into contact with Pierre Curie who was in fact, after learning, the love of her life.
Personal Life
The happy marriage and union that she found with Pierre provides much of the storybook appeal of her story. They were a perfect match. Working together they studied radioactive materials and they were able to isolate radium chloride and two new chemical elements, polonium and radium.
Something that usually goes unmentioned is that Marie employed an entirely new method to discover these elements by measuring their radioactivity. It was her precise and relentless methodology that facilitated her discovery of polonium (named for her beloved Poland) and radium (a name that Marie derived from the Latin radius, meaning "ray").
In the fiercely competitive field that she was in it was a very unusual move but in keeping with her principles that Marie - intentionally - did not patent the radium isolation process. She generously left it open to the scientific community at large to pursue unhindered.
When the Curies won the Nobel Prize in Physics, in 1903, along with and Henri Becquerel: ".in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena." She was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize.
The press turned its hot bulb flash of attention mostly on Marie, depicting her as:
...a beautiful, poor immigrant, a Cinderella who lived in a garret. Cold and hungry, she studied deep into the night. Then she met her Prince Charming in the person of Pierre Curie. Finally after years of toil in miserable conditions, she discovered a luminous, magical substance that might prove to be a panacea for the world's ills. - From" Obsessive Genius" By Barbara Goldsmith
Marie and Pierre were international celebrities and did live happily ever after - for a while.
In April of 1906, on a rainy day in Paris, Pierre was struck down by a heavily loaded wagon in the busiest intersection in Paris, the corner of Pont Neuf and rue Dauphine. The left wheel of the wagon crushed Pierre's skull and he died immediately. He was 49.
Marie was plunged into a depression bleak and immobilizing. The only thing that seemed to galvanize her was taking over Pierre's chair at the University of Sorbonne and carrying on for him in that way. Marie's daughters had always known her as remote - even in the best of times she was undemonstrative with caresses or kisses. Now she was absolutely unavailable emotionally and said, "My children... cannot awaken life in me."
As a single mother, she "did it all" - a personality so driven to succeed that she went without eating, without sleeping, and was known to pass out from hunger and fatigue. She instilled strength, education and independence in her two daughters but she did not provide soft caresses or comforting smiles after Pierre's death.
It was said that, after her husband's death, she had an affair with Paul Langevin, a physicist and married man who had left his wife. This resulted in scandalous press. The former princess was now depicted as a witch. Enemies within the academic community used the scandal to damage her credibility.
It was during this time that Marie was to receive her Nobel Prize in Chemistry, in 1911 ".in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element".
Because of the scandal, the Nobel committee wrote to her and asked her not to travel to Sweden to receive her prize. They said that "If the academy had believed the letters. might be authentic it would not, in all probability, have given you the prize."
Marie wrote back that:
You suggest to me... that the academy of Stockholm, if it had been forewarned, would probably have decided not to give me the Prize, unless I could publicly explain the attacks of which I have been the object. I must therefore act according to my convictions.The actions that you advise would appear to be a grave error on my part. In fact, the Prize has been awarded for the discovery of Radium and Polonium. I believe that there is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of private life.I cannot accept the idea in principle that the appreciation of the value of scientific work should be influenced by libel and slander concerning private life. I am convinced that this opinion is shared by many people. - From "Obsessive Genius" By Barbara Goldsmith
Marie attended the Nobel ceremony. King Gustav awarded the prize and no mention was made of private matters. Following this, she returned to Paris and shortly thereafter was rushed to the hospital. Various reasons were given for this, one of them being kidney ailment. What was not said, and what was certainly the case, was that Marie had fallen into another one of her depressions - the worst one of her life. She contemplated suicide and refused to eat. Her weight dropped dangerously from 123 to 103. Her daughters did not see her for almost a year. They were now left without, in effect, a mother or a father, and were in the care of a Polish governess.
Through the help of a friend, Hertha Ayrton, a nurse and champion for women's rights, Marie was able to recover from her great depression. It is also a testament to her own inner strength that she was able to rise again.
She went on to pursue her career, raise her two daughters, and have an active role in helping the wounded troops who fought the Germans in WWI. After the war she achieved iconic status and toured the United States lecturing and raising money for scientific inquiry and research.
Her daughter, Irene Joliot-Curie was the next woman scientist to win a Nobel Prize. She received it in 1935, along with her husband, Frederic Joliot-Curie, for the discovery of artificial radioactivity.
Accomplishments/Legacy
Marie Sklodowska Curie:
- The first woman to teach at the Sorbonne University, France.
- The first major female scientist of modern times.
- The only person ever to win the Nobel Prize in two different sciences (physics and chemistry.)
- Devised the idea of "mobile X-ray units" in battle front hospitals to diagnose the wounded before treatment. The mobile X-ray units, Les Petites Curie, were invaluable in treating the wounded during WWI.
- During WWI, Marie Sklodowska Curie, a lifelong pacifist, accepted and successfully completed a special assignment that put her at great personal risk, to ensure that the advancing Germans would not capture France's supply of radium bromide. She traveled by train from Paris to Bordeaux, where the government had been relocated. She carried the dangerous substance in a suitcase and hand delivered it to officials at the University of Bordeaux, where it was stored in a vault.
Marie Sklodowska Curie's fingers traced discoveries that won her a Nobel Prize not once, but twice - were beautiful, long and tapered and tirelessly diligent in their explorations. But those beautiful fingers were also literally cracked and burnt from the radium that she worked with - left insensate/without feeling. She was known to rub her fingertips with her thumb, a nervous habit that acknowledged in repetitive rotations the lack of life in her fingertips. Marie eventually died from working with radium. She developed leukemia and died in 1934.
...the skin on Marie's fingers was cracked and scarred. Both of them constantly suffered from fatigue. They evidently had no idea that radiation could have a detrimental effect on their general state of health. Pierre, who liked to say that radium, had a million times stronger radioactivity than uranium, often carried a sample in his waistcoat pocket to show his friends. Marie liked to have a little radium salt by her bed that shone in the darkness. The papers they left behind them give off pronounced radioactivity.
If today at the Bibliothèque Nationale you want to consult the three black notebooks in which their work from December 1897 and the three following years is recorded, you have to sign a certificate that you do so at your own risk. People will have to do this for a long time to come. In fact it takes 1,620 years before the activity of radium is reduced to a half.
Marie Sklodowska Curie is the myth-shaped but real foremother of our own expectations for ourselves, flawed but beautiful, and inspiring; she has left her fingerprint on the minds and psyches of generations of women.
Annette Marie Hyder is a freelance journalist/editor, artist and author.
She sees life as a poem that is constantly altering its form to accommodate one's world view/experiences: sometimes a sonnet, sometimes haiku, sometimes graffiti on a wall. She believes that in love you should not say it with flowers, you should say it with words. Diamonds, however, are always acceptable.
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Beautifully Flawed 
Annette Marie Hyder is a freelance journalist/editor, artist and author. 
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