GREAT WOMEN IN HISTORY
EDITION: 3
SECTION: ENCORE
Thumb through school history books and the ratio of "Great Men" to
"Great Women" must be about 100 to one. Is this because women's experiences
and achievements are not worth including in the record? Or is it because
no one has taken the time the trouble to collect and publish them
in a volume. Great Women in History, by Ian Guthridge, includes 70
portraits of great women from Ancient Egypt to early this century.
We bring you 10 edited extracts today.
Guthridge says the main reason he wrote the book was "to fill a gap"
. He believes it is time to set the record straight and give readers
a look at the other side of history - "herstory".
MARIE CURIE (1867-1934)
MARIE Curie became the first woman to be awarded a doctorate, the
first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris, the
first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first person of either sex
to win two Nobel Prizes.
Marie (Marya, in Polish) Sklodowska was the youngest of five children.
Both parents were teachers on low incomes. In Poland, girls were not
taught classical languages and, so, they were prevented from attending
university.
Marie worked for six years as a governess while studying languages,
physics and chemistry. At 24, with money from her older sister, Bronya,
she began studies at the Sorbonne.
Gaining a physics degree in 1893 and another in maths the next year,
Marie had planned to return to Warsaw after her studies, but she
married Pierre Curie in 1894. Pierre was a brilliant physicist. A
bachelor of science at 16, a master of science at 18, he became chief
laboratory assistant in the Sorbonne's school of physics and chemistry
in 1883.
By 1897, undaunted by the fact that no woman had been awarded a doctorate,
Marie set out to do a doctoral thesis. The X-ray (a ray that could
pass through matter) had just been discovered. Meanwhile, Henri Becquerel
had found that uranium salts emit rays which penetrate matter, producing
similar effects to X-rays.
That was Marie's clue. If uranium was inert matter, how could it
produce radiation and what was the source of the energy produced?
She measured emissions produced by mineral samples, concluding radiation
"was not the outcome of some interaction between molecules . . . it
has a different origin and must come from the atom itself . . .
radiation must be an atomic property".
Science could now define the structure of the atom and understand
atomic structure.
Marie also found several uranium ores (notably pitchblende) were
two to four times more radioactive than uranium. She developed a precipitate,
which she called polonium, that was 150 times more active than uranium.
Working in primitive conditions, Marie and Pierre discovered radium,
which was 900 times more radioactive than uranium. They produced
one-tenth of a gram of radium and measured its atomic weight, proving
that radium was, indeed, a new element.
It was a major finding. Radium and polonium were new elements and
radioactivity was atomic in character. The Curies had shown that the
atom was not inert, but that it was full of energy which it gave off
as heat and radiation.
For Marie, the discovery led to new questions about the source of
the energy and why it was given off as heat and radiation.
Famous abroad, but unrecognised at home, the couple continued working
in poor conditions. Scientists were now excited by the potential of
radium as a cancer cure.
By June, 1903, Marie's doctoral thesis was presented and she was
awarded her degree with the mention tres honorable. Months later,
she lost her second child who died soon after birth.
In November, Marie and Pierre and Henri Becquerel were awarded the
Nobel Prize, with its mixed blessing of cash and publicity. Pierre
was appointed a professor at the Sorbonne with a laboratory and staff
including Marie as laboratory chief. At last she had a salary.
In mid-1905, despite his rejection three years earlier, Pierre was
accepted into the Academy of Sciences. The couple had "made" it, but
on April 19, 1906, Pierre was killed in an accident.
Marie became assistant professor at the university, then a full professor
- France's first. But sexism seemed to prevent her from being accepted
into the Academy of Sciences.
Worse was to come. She became attached to fellow scientist Paul Langevin,
whose marriage was on the rocks. The Curie name was muddied with
vile gossip.
Amid the storm, she was awarded a second Nobel Prize which biographer
Robert Reid wrote was "the most important recognition given any scientist
so far in the 20th century (for) she was the first person - not merely
the first woman - to be awarded two Nobel Prizes in science". World
War I was on the horizon so Marie used her precious radium supply
to meet the need for X-rays on a vast scale.
After the war, Marie visited the United States and was hailed as
the woman who "had discovered radium, the cancer cure".
Meanwhile, her elder daughter, Irene, had continued her research
into the atom and with husband Frederic Joliot was awarded a Nobel
Prize in 1935, a year after Marie's death at 66.
On July 6, 1934, Marie Curie was buried with Pierre at Sceaux, outside
Paris. The gravestone simply carried her name - Marie Curie-Sklodowska,
1867-1934.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE (1820-1910) FLORENCE Nightingale, the quintessential
symbol of nursing and succour, usually is represented as the "lady
with the lamp", the "angel of the Crimea".
But these portraits were softer, gentler and more amiable than the
original contemporary photographs of her.
Even in her own time, Florence Nightingale's strange mixture of gentleness
and ruthlessness was apparent.
Charlotte Bronte's biographer, Mrs Gaskell, was rapt by the "sweetest
smile I ever saw" - only to say a week later that beneath the charm
lay "the hard coldness of steel".
This image emerges in her "selected letters", Ever yours, Florence
Nightingale. They reveal the great Englishwoman was no angel.
She was devilishly manipulative and drove those who worked for her
- cowed and beaten into submission by her iron-willed determination
- to resignation or exhaustion.
But Nightingale changed the world in which she lived, and we remain
indebted to her.
She was born on May 12, 1820, into a wealthy and well-connected family
in Florence.
But they restrained her from embarking on her chosen career for 16
years.
Her parents were opposed to her nursing. Hospitals were filthy and
nurses were said to be immoral and undisciplined. They believed patients
(and nurses) were safer at home than in a hospital.
In 1851 she spent three months at a hospital run by a Protestant
community at Kaiserworth in Germany.
Two years later she visited hospitals in France. She already had
formidable knowledge from the secret study of every book and report
she could find on nursing.
She was appointed matron of a small private hospital at Upper Harley
St, London. At last, her family consented.
She moved on to be superintendent of King's College Hospital, where
she embarked on her ambition to train nurses - but it was to be brief.
In 1854, England, France, Turkey, Austria and Prussia declared war
on Russia.
British soldiers died in droves - of cold, starvation, scurvy, dysentery
and cholera.
Secretary for War and Florence's old friend and confidant Sidney
Herbert appointed Florence superintendent of the Female Nursing Establishment
of the English General Hospitals in Turkey. Six days later, she left
with 38 nurses and 7000 pounds donated by readers of The Times.
Men in the hospital were lying on unwashed, rotten floors that were
crawling with vermin.
British army doctors refused to allow the women to work in the hospital.
But, when it was realised she had, by then, 30,000 pounds, they allowed
her nurses to work - in the storeroom. Florence worked day and night.
In 18 months - and of the 97,800 British soldiers who served - 2700
were killed, 1800 died from wounds . . . and 17,600 died from disease.
Florence returned home - exhausted, emaciated, a haunted woman -
and retired to her bed, convinced she was dying. She remained on couch,
bed or wheelchair as a semi-invalid for more than 50 years until
her death in 1910 at the age of 90.
Despite her withdrawal, Florence set up a midwives' school at King'
s College Hospital in 1861. The year before she had established the
Nightingale School of Nursing. Ten years later her direction of nurses'
training at St Thomas' Hospital was to leave its immortal mark on
nursing.
However, Florence Nightingale fought interminably with her family
and with most of the people with whom she worked.
She refused to accept Pasteur's theory that germs were the source
of most diseases; she had no time for the women's rights movement;
and she rejected the idea of women as doctors.
Despite her wishes, a big crowd attended her funeral, "paying homage
to a woman who broke the code of upper-class Victorian womanhood to
do service to humankind".
END OF STORY
