Vera Rubin, the "Mother of Dark Matter"

Vera Cooper Rubin (National Academy of Science medal, 16 January 2004)

The American astronomer Vera Rubin (born  23 July 1928) died on Christmas day of this year, and unlike so many women about whom I've posted over the years since beginning this blog, her death (and, more important, her life) did not go unnoticed. 

Vera Rubin, 2009

Major news outlets highlighted her death, with sources like The New York Times and The Washington Post publishing significant stories prominently in both print and digital editions. PBS and NPR also broadcast stories about Rubin's life and work, as did the BBC, major American networks, and online sites like Slate and The Huffington Post.

Mashable, the self-styled "global, multi-platform media and entertainment company," eulogized her as a "badass astronomer and feminist icon," while the more restrained Astronomy Magazine confined itself to calling her a "pioneering physicist." 

Rubin's great contribution was to the theory of dark matter--and after reading all the announcements of her death, I had to admit to myself that my background in literature and history did't really give me the ability to grasp the concepts with which she was working, much less to assess her work. I'll let Dennis Overbye, writing for the Times, give you a sense of her accomplishments: through her work, she "helped usher in a Copernican-scale change in cosmic consciousness, namely the realization that what astronomers always saw and thought was the universe is just the visible tip of a lumbering iceberg of mystery."

What I did notice, in every article, was the reference to Rubin as "breaking" or (in the words of the Sarah Kaplan, writing for the Post, "toppl[ing]") gender barriers, a woman who (in Overbye's words), "opened doors for women," and (in Kaplan's words), "changed science." 

Well, okay, I guess. But what also became increasingly clear, as I worked my way through the pages on Google, was that for all this talk of breaking (or toppling) barriers, changing science, and "clear[ing] the way for countless other women," Rubin faced the same old same old: barriers, obstacles, sexism, suspicion, and ridicule.

And I also noticed something else. Once I got past the most recent mentions of Rubin, all written on the occasion of her death, I found an array of earlier pieces, written during her lifetime, and written recently, showing how little things had changed even for this most brilliant of women.

In noting Rubin's death, Rachel Feltman, writing for Popular Science, made the point in the title of her piece: Rubin was "the woman the Nobel Prize forgot." She was never recognized in this most prestigious forum for "her work on dark matter."

Last year, in a June 2016 article in Astronomy Magazine, Sarah Scoles asked, "This famous astronomer carved herself a well-deserved place in history, so why doesn’t the Nobel committee see it that way?" 

And in October 2016, writing in Scientific American, Jesse Emspack asked, "Are the Nobel Prizes Missing Female Scientists?" Here's Emspack's answer to that question: "A total of 203 people have won the Nobel prize in physics, but only two were women (Marie Curie in 1903 and Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963). Many scientists say those numbers point to a fundamental problem with the prizes and how they are awarded."*

Vera Rubin, photo from the
National Space Grant Foundation website,
distinguished service award, 2010

There was a Facebook page, "A Nobel Prize for Vera Rubin" created in 2015. Even today, two weeks after Rubin's death, the page has a mere 220 likes. The page was part of a "grassroots campaign" to garner recognition for Rubin's work. There is/was also a Twitter hashtag: #NobelforVeraRubin. 

In reading these pieces, I note that Rubin was something of a "favorite" for winning a Nobel as early as the 1980s--and that in 1990, in an interview in Discovery, her response to the question was diplomatic: "My numbers mean more to me than my name. If astronomers are still using my data years from now, that's my greatest compliment." 

I won't add more complaints or bitchiness here--that doesn't seem to be in the spirit of Rubin herself. And I won't list her many accomplishments and awards--you can easily find them for yourself.

But I will quote here from the commencement address she delivered at Berkeley some twenty years ago, on 17 May 1996. This seems to represent the true spirit of Vera Rubin and her own words offer the best tribute to the woman herself:

And now, you must turn your chairs to face the future. You are concerned tonight with more than the fate of atoms. You need jobs, admissions to graduate schools, research support; you want a healthy planet, space, choices. Individually, you will be called by many names: spouse, partner, teacher, professor, writer, representative, president, CEO, doctor, judge, regent. Some will be called scientists. For those of you who teach science, I hope that you will welcome, as students, those who do NOT intend to be scientists, as well as those who DO. We need senators who have studied physics and representatives who understand ecology.

And for those of you who choose to be scientists, I have one piece of advice. Don’t give up. Science is hard and demanding, but each of you must believe that you can succeed. It may seem unlikely tonight, but there is not one among you who cannot make important, major contributions to the world of science. At my commencement on May 17, 48 years ago, the probability that I would be addressing you tonight surely was zero.

In addition to the obituaries, I recommend Lisa Randall's op-ed, "Why Vera Rubin Deserved a Nobel, published in the 4 January 2017 New York Times (click here).

*The numbers for other fields aren't much better. Emspack's is only one of numerous assessments of the dearth of women among Nobel laureates:

Physics isn't the only field with a dearth of female Nobel laureates. According to the Nobel Committee website, 171 people have won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, and only four have been women: Marie Curie (1911), her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie (1935), Dorothy Hodgkin (1964) and Ada Yonath (2009).

Women have fared a bit better in medicine and literature. Out of the 211 total recipients of the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, 12 have been women. And of the 112 total recipients of the Nobel Prize in literature, 15 have been women. Women have picked up 16 Nobel Peace Prizes of the 129 that have been awarded to either individuals or organizations. The Nobel Prize in economics, which has existed only since 1969, has honored only one woman of the 76 laureates.

Update, 11 January 2019: The National Science Foundation has just renamed its newest observatory in honor of Vera Rubin. For Dennis Overbye's "Vera Rubin Gets a Telescope of Her Own," New York Times, click here.

Update, 1 February 2025: Here is some real assholery, thanks to he who shall not be named. In its efforts to scrub any references to the discrimination hatred that women have faced for millennia, all references to Vera Rubin’s advocacy for women in science have been scrubbed from the website of the federally funded observatory named in her honor.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory,

on Cerro Pachón, in Chile

(photo from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory website)

Update, 22 June 2025: Katrina Miller, science reporter for the New York Times, writes about the "troubled scientific landscape" for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory under the Trump regime--for the depressing picture of what's going on, click here. (Although the observatory is in Chile, it is funded by the US Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.)

Doris Lessing: "Epicist of the Female Experience"

Doris Lessing (Nobel lecture, 7 December 2007)

Born on 22 October 1912, British novelist Doris Lessing published her first novel, The Grass Singing, in 1950.

Doris Lessing, from the
Nobel website

In 2007, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. On 7 December, her Nobel lecture, titled "On Not Winning the Nobel Prize," was delivered in a ceremony in Stockholm.

The title suggests that a grumpy, disgruntled old woman (at the age of eighty-eight, she was the oldest winner of the prize in literature), repeatedly passed over the by Nobel committee, might be prepared to launch a diatribe against those who awarded--or failed to award--her the prize. 

The title was as playful and provocative as the work of Lessing. Instead of a personal complaint, however, Lessing's speech was a brilliant explication of global inequities--about all of the writers who, denied opportunity, would not win a Nobel prize.

In her lecture, Lessing seems to recall Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One's Own when she poses what she calls "the essential question": "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you. . . ?" she asks.

She continues, "When writers talk to each other, what they discuss is always to do with this imaginative space, this other time. 'Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?'"

Lessing's words, read originally to members of the Swedish Academy in 2007, speak to us here, now, in a different context, one where women have struggled for so many centuries to find their place in the world: "And we, the old ones, want to whisper into those innocent ears. 'Have you still got your space? Your soul, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold onto it, don’t let it go.'"

You can read the text of her lecture at the Nobel website--you can also listen to an audio recording as well. (Since she was unable to travel at the time, Lessing's lecture was read by Nicholas Pearson, her publisher.) And while you're at the site, you can read a biography, view a complete bibliography, see the Nobel awarded to her in a presentation in London in January of 2008, view photos, watch a wonderful interview with her from April 2008, and explore "other resources."

The "other resources" link includes a video of reporters delivering the news to Lessing that she'd won the Nobel prize in literature--she is ambushed just as she's returning home with her grocery shopping. "Oh, Christ," she replies, adding "well, it's has been going on for thirty years." Having paid her cab driver and put her groceries onto the sidewalk, she turns to one reporter: "Right. I'm sure you'd like some uplifting remarks." Then, in some irritation, she tells another, pestering her for her reaction, that she's trying to think of something "suitable" to say. "What do you think I should say?" she asks him, a bit testily."Look, you tell me what you want me to say, and I'll say it."

Lessing in 2008,
interviewed in her London home

The phrase I've used in the title for this post--"epicist of the female experience"--comes from the Nobel organization's statement of "motivation" for the awarding of the prize in literature to Lessing.

Lessing died on 17 November 2013.

Selma Lagerlöf, the First Woman to Win a Nobel Prize in Literature

Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf (born 20 November 1858)

Well, I was planning to write just a quick paragraph or so about Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in Literature. I didn't know much about her beyond the fact that she had won the Nobel in 1909, and for whatever reason I didn't feel like writing much today. So, I thought, for once, why not just snag a bit of info from Wikipedia, slap together a quick paragraph, and be done with it? 

Selma Lagerlöf at her desk

That was my plan, anyway.

But then I started reading, beginning with the biographical information at the Nobel website and moving on to the extraordinarily long list of novels and short-story collections. I am not qualified to write more, but I know that I definitely want to read more.

So, as an introduction to the writer Selma Lagerlöf and her work, I do recommend starting with the Nobel website. There you will find biographical information, a bibliography, the Presentation Speech delivered on the occasion of the award, the full text of Lagerlöf's acceptance speech (which makes for wonderful reading), and a photo gallery. The "Other Resources" tab links you to a 1926 video of Lagerlöf at her home as well as to the Selma Lagerlöf Society.

There is also excellent information in Ulla Torpe's entry on Lagerlöf at The History of Nordic Women's Literature website. Torpe notes that Lagerlöf's  work "focuses on strategies for young women to survive physically, mentally, and morally in a patriarchal society."

And, although her "official image" portrayed her "as an unmarried author whose sole passion was writing," Torpe indicates that Lagerlöf's correspondence, made widely available only in the 1990s, reveals her intense and enduring relationships with women, including Valborg Olander, a Swedish suffragist, and with the Swedish-Jewish writer Sophie Elkan. There is now a well-informed literature about Lagerlöf's sexuality.

Selma Lagerlöf died on 16 March 1940. Shortly before her death, she managed to help secure the release of the German-Jewish writer Nelly Sachs and her mother from Nazi Germany. Sachs would win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966.

English translations of Lagerlöf's work are freely available at sites like the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg, but there is also a handsome Penguin edition of her first great work, The Saga of Gösta Berling, published in 2009, on the centenary of Lagerlöf's Nobel Prize, and a Dover edition of her children's classic, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils.

Fun fact: Greta Garbo's first screen role was in the 1924 silent film version of Gösta Berlings saga.

Update, 20 November 2023: The History of Nordic Women’s Literature seems to be no longer online—I’m hoping this is a temporary absence. In the mean time, I’ve changed the link to a preserved version of Torpe’s essay at the Internet Archive. 

Marie Curie, Nobel Prizes for Physics and Chemistry

Marie Skłodowska Curie (born 7 November 1867)

Marie Curie in 1934,
the year of her death

Marie Curie is distinguished not only as the first woman to win a Nobel Prize (in physics, 1903), but also as the only scientist, male or female, to have won in two Nobel prizes in different fields--she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911.

For an excellent overview of her life and career, I recommend the Nobel website--where you'll find biographical information, a brief documentary from 1923, a photo gallery, and her 1911 Nobel lecture, among other resources.

And, by the way, Marie Curie's daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935.

Curie's younger daughter, Ève Denise Curie Labouisse, did not pursue a career in science, but also had a distinguished career as a writer, as a war correspondent during the Second World War, and supported her husband, the American diplomat Henry Richardson Labouisse, who became the director of UNICEF--the Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded to UNICEF in 1965, with Labouisse accepting the award and delivering the acceptance speech. (She also published a biography of her mother, Madame Curie.)

Ève, Marie, and Irène Curie,
1903

Grazia Deledda, "The Voice of Sardinia"

Grazia Deledda (born 27 September 1871)

Born in Nuoro, Sardinia, Grazia Maria Cosima Damiana Deledda ended her formal education by the time she was eleven--but after her schooling ended, she was tutored by a local teacher and, on her own, read widely in Italian, Russian, French, and English literature. She also studied the people around her. As she later wrote, her father frequently invited guests into their home: "[w]hen these friends and their families had to come to Nuoro on business or for religious holidays, they usually stayed at our house. Thus I began to know the various characters of my novels."

Grazia Deledda's Nobel portrait

She began publishing stories and poems when she was just thirteen, much to the dismay--and opposition--of her family and the inhabitants of Nuoro. She published her first novel, Fior di Sardegna (Flower of Sardinia), in 1892. 

After she married, Deledda moved to Rome with her husband, where she remained for the rest of her life. She died there on 15 August 1936.

Grazia Deledda was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1926 (awarded in 1927) and is the only Italian woman, to date, to have won this international recognition.

Margaret Kern's excellent biographical essay on Deledda is available here, from the Italian Women Writers website. At the same site is an amazing array of digitized works by Deledda.

You can find biographical information, the presentation speech, a brief documentary, a short story, and a host of other information at the Nobel Prize website by clicking here.

Happily, many of her works have been translated into English and are accessible and affordable.

Jane Addams, Reformer and Activist

Jane Addams (born 6 September 1860)

It's astonishing just to list the many roles of Jane Addams: social worker, social reformer, and co-founder of Hull House; teacher and member of Chicago's Board of Education; international peace activist; women's rights and suffrage activist; philosopher; and lecturer and writer.

Jane Addams, c. 1910-1915

In 1931, the Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded to Jane Addams and Nicholas Murray Butler. Addams was recognized for her role as president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, an organization she founded in 1919. The Nobel committee also noted her role in helping the poor and, in particular, her efforts in relationship to child labor and for her aid to immigrants at Hull House.

One of Jane Addams's long-time partners was Ellen Gates Starr, whom she met when they both attended the Rockford Female Seminar in Rockford, Illinois. Although Jane Addams is better known as the founder of Hull House, the settlement house project was co-founded with Starr, both of them inspired by their trip to Europe and, in particular, their contact with the English settlement-house movement.

Addams's most enduring intimate relationship was with Mary Rozet Smith, with whom she had a thirty-year committed partnership. For Jennifer Brandel’s excellent article on their relationship, click here. The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum recently included a Gender and Sexuality Tour, addressing the question, "Was Jane Addams a Lesbian?" (You may also appreciate this interview on Addams and Hull House education programs, including the LGBTQ+ tour.)

Jane Addams died on 21 May 1935, a year after Smith's death.

Some of the best information about Addams is available through the Nobel website, including a biographical essay, complete bibliography, a photo gallery, and links to useful online resources (click here).

Hull House

Nadine Gordimer, Nobel Prize Winner

Nadine Gordimer (died 13 July 2014)

On 13 July 2014, the South African writer and anti-apartheid activist Nadine Gordimer died in Johannesburg. 

Nadine Gordimer in 2010.

Her body of work included novels and short fiction, plays, political essays, and literary criticism. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991 for her "magnificent" writing of "great benefit to humanity."

There is a great deal of information about Gordimer and her work as well as the full text of her Nobel lecture, "Writing and Being," at the Nobel website. For a sense of the full scope of her career, I've linked here to her obituary in the New York Times.

Maria Goeppert-Mayer: Theoretical Physicist, Nobel-Prize Winner

Maria Goeppert-Mayer (born 28 June 1906)

In 1963, Maria Goeppert-Mayer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics--just the second woman to win this award, after Marie Curie (in 1903).

Maria Goeppert-Mayer, 1963

Educated at the University of Göttingen, Maria Goeppert studied mathematics but became interested in physics; she completed a Ph.D. in physics in 1930. In the same year she married Joseph Mayer, an American student studying in Göttingen as a Rockefeller Fellow and moved with him to the United States.

Her academic biography is an interesting study in the career limits for a woman at the time. She received a "very modest assistantship" at Johns Hopkins, where her husband landed a job as a faculty member; she did have access to lab facilities and, after some time, was able to offer "some lecture courses."

She briefly returned to Göttingen, during the summers of 1931, 1932, and 1933 to continue work with the German physicist Max Born, but that work ended once the Nazis came to power. 

After her husband left Johns Hopkins (he was fired--Mayer attributed his termination to a dean's misogyny, believing that the dean didn't like having Maria Goeppert-Mayer in the lab), she followed him to Columbia, where again he held a faculty position and where she had a position that was "even more tenuous" than the one she had had at Johns Hopkins. She got an office, but "no appointment."

In 1941, she was offered her first real academic job, a half-time position, teaching science, at Sarah Lawrence College. She taught there, "on an occasional basis," throughout the war. She also taught part-time for Columbia. Although she briefly worked for the Manhattan Project in 1945, after the war, when her husband took up a position at the University of Chicago, she was offered another "voluntary" position. (Her "voluntary" work included "lecturing to classes, serving on committees, directing thesis students, and participating in the activities at the Institute for Nuclear Studies.")

A part-time job at the Argonne National Laboratory, beginning in 1946, led to the work on the nuclear shell model for which she won the Nobel. In 1960 she was finally offered a regular faculty appointment, one that recognized her as a professor "in her own right," at the University of California at San Diego.

She died in San Diego on 20 February 1972.

While I generally love the insight, information, and supporting material found at the Nobel web site, the biography of Maria Goeppert-Mayer posted there makes me gag. (About the situation at Johns Hopkins, for example, you'll find this: "This was the time of the depression, and no university would think of employing the wife of a professor. But she kept working, just for the fun of doing physics.") But you can read her Nobel lecture, watch a video clip of her receiving the award, and access a photo gallery at the Nobel site by clicking here. 

A much better biographical essay is at the American Physical Society website. A longer piece, from which I've quoted here, is a "biographical memoir" written by Goeppert-Mayer's student, Robert G. Sachs, for the National Academy of Sciences.* There is a biography, Joseph P. Ferry's Maria Goeppert Mayer: Physicist. But I don't know whether to laugh or cry that the only biography of the second woman to have won the Nobel Prize for Physics is a children's book.

And, as you consider the obstacle to employment Goeppert-Mayer had to negotiate, consider that she won her Nobel the very year that Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique.

*Update, 28 June 2025: Thanks to the war on women being conducted by the current regime, Sachs’s biography of Goeppert-Mayer is no longer available at the NAS website. The link I’ve provided here now takes you to the piece as preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. 

Sigrid Undset, Nobel Prize Winner

Sigrid Undset (born 20 May 1822)

Today is the birth day of Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset, who won the 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature. 

Sigrid Undset, 1928

The most well-known of Undset's novels comprise the trilogy known as Kristin Lavransdatter, published between 1920 and 1922. This epic historical series focuses on the life experiences of a fourteenth-century woman, the title character Kristin. The series generated controversy--and Nobel attention--for its frank descriptions of female sexuality. (Undset's work also illustrated her engagement with literary modernism.)

Her next series, known collectively in English as The Master of Hestviken, was published in two volumes (1925-7), but it appeared as a tetralogy in its English edition. Like Kristin Lavransdatter, it is set in medieval Norway, and it connects up with the earlier books by incorporating Kristin's parents at the end of the final volume of this later work.

To access a great deal of information about Undset, the first place to start might be the Nobel website; there you will find information about the 1928 prize, the award-ceremony speech, Undset's autobiographical account of her life, the entire text of Undset's speech at the Nobel banquet, a bibliography, and "other resources."

But maybe the best thing to do is get a copy of the three-volume Kristin Lavransdatter, available in Tina Nunnally's excellent new English translation for Penguin (you can buy all three novels in one volume or separately, The Wreath, The Wife, and The Cross--I've linked to the one-volume version here. Be cautious--you should make sure you're getting Nunnally's translation rather than the first English translation by Charles Archer in 1927.)

And, just in case you're interested, after Undset's "scandalous" conversion to Catholicism in 1924, she wrote a biography of the fourteenth-century mystic and theologian Catherine of Siena, about whom I posted last month. Undset's life of the Catholic saint is also available in an affordable paperback edition. (Like Catherine of Siena, Undset lived as a third-order Dominican.)

One further note: during the last semester I taught, I was fortunate to have in class two young women from Norway, studying abroad in the U.S. Their project on Kristin Lavransdatter inspired several class members to buy the book for their summer reading. Thank you, Cornelia and Hilde!

Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate

Toni Morrison (born 18 February 1931)

Today is Toni Morrison's birthday. Her many honors include a Presidential Medal of Freedom (2012), recognition with the French Légion d'honneur (2010), the Pulitzer Prize (1988), and, as noted in the headline of this post, a Nobel Prize in Literature (1993).

Morrison at a 2008 tribute to Chinua Achebe
and his Things Fall Apart

Among her most well-known novels are The Bluest Eye (1970), Beloved (1987), and, most recently, Home (2012).

The best way to celebrate Morrison's birthday is, of course, to read one of her novels--she herself recently described her reading (or rereading) of The Bluest Eye on The Colbert Report. It was a wonderful interview--funny and insightful--and you can watch it by clicking here.

You can read Morrison's Nobel lecture and listen to an audio recording of the lecture by clicking here. The Nobel site also includes biographical and bibliographical information, as well as excerpts from her work and a photo gallery.

Update: Toni Morrison died on 5 August 2019.

Edith Wharton, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Edith Wharton (born 24 January 1862)

Born to wealth and privilege, Edith Jones married Edward Wharton in 1885. The first years of their marriage were spent with the kind of social engagements and travel that filled the lives of the men and women of their class, though the travel ended after Edward Wharton began to manifest signs of mental disorders. Wharton divorced her husband in 1913. After her divorce, Edith Wharton moved to France, where she lived until her death there in 1937.

Edith Wharton,
photograph from c. 1889-90

Many of Wharton's early novels and stories, including The House of Mirth (1905) and Ethan Frome (1911), were written at The Mount, the large country house she designed and built and where she lived from 1902 to 1911. In addition to her fiction, Wharton was interested in and wrote about French and Italian architecture, landscape architecture, and design--her first book, in fact, was not a work of fiction but a manual of interior design, The Decoration of Houses (co-authored with architect Ogden Cogman), published in 1897: "arguably the most influential book ever published by an American on interior decoration and design." (For this quotation and on Wharton's less-well-known contributions to American art and design, see Julie Lasky's "Appreciating Edith Wharton's Other Career.")

But it is as a novelist that Wharton is most well-remembered today. From The Touchstone (1900) to The Buccaneers (1938), Wharton published twenty-one novels (a final novel, also published in 1938, was actually Wharton's first, written in the late 1870s) and thirteen short-story collections. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times: in 1927 (by a group of seven Yale professors), in 1928 (by William L. Phelps, one of those Yale professors), and again in 1930 (this time by Tor Hedberg, a member of the Swedish Academy). 

While she may not have won the Nobel, Wharton did become the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Literature, in 1921, for The Age of Innocence.

In addition to her design work and her writing, Wharton devoted herself to a variety of charitable endeavors, particularly in aid of refugees, while she was in France during WWI. This work is briefly summarized in her New York Times obituary:

When the World War broke out she was in Paris and she plunged at once into relief work, opening a room for skilled women of the quarter where she lived who were thrown out of employment by the closing of workrooms. She also fed and housed 600 Belgian refugee orphans. In recognition France awarded her the Cross of the Legion of Honor and Belgium made her a Chevalier of the Order of Leopold. Meanwhile she wrote stories and articles on the war. . . .

Wharton's wartime magazine articles, originally printed in Scribner's Magazine, were published in 1918 as Fighting France: From Dunkirk to Belfort.

The Mount,
photo by David Dashiell, 2006

The movies and TV miniseries made from Wharton's novels are fun, but why not read the books if you haven't yet? Many of Wharton's novels and short-story collections are available through Project Gutenberg; to access them, click here. (There are free Kindle versions as well.) There are several good biographies--you might like Hermione Lee's recent Edith Wharton or Shari Benstock's older, but still excellent, No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, an African President

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia (inaugurated 16 January 2006)

Born in Monrovia, Liberia in 1938, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became the first elected female head of state in Africa and is, notably, the first black woman elected to the office of president anywhere in the world.

In 2011, Johnson Sirleaf was one of three women awarded the Nobel Peace prize: "the Nobel Peace Prize for 2011 is to be divided in three equal parts between Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee [a Liberian peace activist,] and Tawakkul Karman [a Yemeni journalist and politician] for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work. We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society."

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf with her Nobel diploma,
December 2011

About the nomination of Johnson Sirleaf, the Nobel committee wrote: "Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is Africa’s first democratically elected female president. Since her inauguration in 2006, she has contributed to securing peace in Liberia, to promoting economic and social development, and to strengthening the position of women."

There is a wealth of information about Ellen Johnson Sirleaf at the Nobel website, including a detailed biography, a video of her Nobel lecture, as well as a complete transcript of the text, an interview, and a photo gallery. You can access this material by clicking here.

During her years as president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has struggled with a series of enormous difficulties, including ongoing economic issues, the need for reconciliation within a country racked by decades of civil conflict, government corruption, and the contested issue of gay rights within Liberia. Most recently, the country she heads has been faced with the disaster of the Ebola epidemic. (For an interesting historical perspective on the relationship between the U.S. and Liberia, access the article in Slate by clicking here.)

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's memoir, This Child Will Be Great, was published in 2010.

For a thoughtful op-ed about the "backlash against women" in a continent where so many women, like Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, are achieving political power, educational success, and economic advancement, you can read Sisonke Msimang's recent New York Times op-ed, "The Backlash against African Women," by clicking here.

Remembering Rosalind Franklin--and Forgetting James Watson

A Case Study of the Difficulties Faced by Women in Science

As The Guardian reports today, the Nobel-prize winning scientist James Watson--who is also a notable racist and sexist bigot--is having to sell his Nobel medal because he is "poor." He is quoted as saying that, despite his "academic income," he is so poor in fact that he can't afford to buy a David Hockney painting. (In 2009, a Hockney painting sold at auction for £5,235,328, so I'm pretty sure most people can't afford paintings by Hockney.)

Although Watson has brought all his problems on himself, he still feels he is misunderstood--as reported in the Financial Times, "Mr Watson, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for uncovering the double helix structure of DNA, sparked an outcry in 2007 when he suggested that people of African descent were inherently less intelligent than white people." To Watson's surprise, he became an "unperson"; or, as he says, "no one really wants to admit I exist." 

Unfortunately, Watson's 2007 comments are just part of a much longer history. As Laura Helmuth writes, Watson has a history of making "ignorant" and "prejudiced" comments, in particular racist and sexist comments, throughout his career. For Watson's bigotry, and for the "outcry" about it that he decries, you can check out the stories in the Financial Times or in The Guardian (where the headline says Watson "deserves to be shunned"). My interest here isn't in wasting more time on Watson but on taking this opportunity to remember the crucial work of Rosalind Franklin. 

Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and Watson were jointly awarded the Nobel prize in 1962 for their "discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material." But their contributions to understanding the structure of DNA were based on Rosalind Franklin's research. As The Guardian notes, "The story of the unveiling of the double helix is messy and complex, just like all biology. It has been pored over and studied and embellished and mythologised. But simply, the race was won by Crick and Watson, and in April 1953 they revealed to the world the iconic double helix. The key evidence, however, Photo 51, was produced by Rosalind Franklin and Ray Gosling, at King’s College London. Franklin’s skill at the technique known as X-ray crystallography was profound, and was indubitably essential to the discovery. Crick and Watson acquired the photo without her knowledge" (emphasis added).

For many years Franklin's contributions were largely unrecognized--they may have been acknowledged or understood among some in the scientific community, but they were not widely known. And Franklin's untimely death of ovarian cancer in 1958, when she was just thirty-seven years old, contributed to her obscurity. 

The first real public acknowledgment of Franklin's contribution was made by Watson, in his 1968 autobiography The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA. There, as The Guardian reports, Watson "patronisingly refers to Franklin as 'Rosy' throughout, despite there being no evidence that anyone else ever did. Here’s a sample of how he described her in the first few pages: 'Though her features were strong, she was not unattractive, and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not.'''

And here is what Watson had to say about Franklin some forty years later, in a 2007 interview:

He smiles. "Rosalind is my cross," he says slowly. "I'll bear it. I think she was partially autistic." He pauses for a while, before repeating the suggestion, as if to make it clear that this is no off-the-cuff insult, but a considered diagnosis. "I'd never really thought of scientists as autistic until this whole business of high-intelligence autism came up. There is probably no other explanation for Rosalind's behaviour.”

Rosalind Franklin's English Heritage plaque
was placed in 1992
outside the Chelsea home she occupied,
1851-58

Watson's reduction of Franklin to the diminutive "Rosy" in his autobiography, his sexist references to her appearance and clothing there, and his failure to acknowledge sufficiently her critical contributions to his work inspired Anne Sayre's corrective, Rosalind Franklin and DNA, published in 2000.

The last three decades have brought Franklin the recognition she so richly deserves; for those of us who are not scientists, the PBS Nova broadcast from 2003, Secret of Photo 51, offers an excellent introduction. The program website offers biographical information, articles, interviews, and online galleries and slideshows. Of particular note is an interview with Lynne Osman Elkin on Franklin's legacy. (You can watch the original Nova episode on YouTube by clicking here.)

I might also recommend Brenda Maddox's Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA for its analysis of the sexism, egotism, and anti-Semitism that Franklin faced. Beyond her particular case, you might also check out Julie des Jardins' The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science. There is a chapter on Franklin, subtitled "The Politics of Partners and Prizes in the Heroic Age of Science."

Over the last few years, while increasing focus has been on Franklin, I've heard a fair number of people try to excuse Watson by saying that all the attention on Franklin is misplaced, since she couldn't have been included in the Nobel because the scientists weren't recognized until 1962, after Franklin's death, and the Nobel is never awarded posthumously. That's not the issue at all--the issue isn't whether she "won" a Nobel, but whether her life and work have been recognized, or whether she, like so many women, has simply been written out of history. 

Thankfully, that has not happened. 

So too bad for poor James Watson.

Update, 5 December 2014: As has been widely reported, Watson's medal sold for $4.1 million at the Christie's auction.

Update, 9 December 2014: Again, as it has been widely reported, the anonymous buyer of Watson's Nobel medal has revealed himself as Alisher Usmanov, described by Forbes as the "richest man in Russia." Usmanov has has accumulated a fortune estimated at $15.8 billion, garnered through steel and mining interests, telecom interests, and "investments." Usmanov plans to return the medal to Watson. Maybe Watson will be able to sell it again.

Update, 22 February 2018: For a fascinating discussion of the life, career, and contributions of Rosalind Franklin, you may want to listen to this In Our Time podcast, "Rosalind Franklin."

Update, 1 January 2019: One more, in the continuing "Ugh" that is James Watson--this time on Watson and race. From The New York Times: Amy Harmon, "James Watson Had a Chance to Salvage His Reputation on Race. . . .”

Update, 25 April 2023: An excellent new report on Rosa Franklin's contribution to the discovery of DNA. I'm linking here to the article by Emily Anthes in today's New York Times, "Untangling Rosalind Franklin’s Role in DNA Discovery, 70 Years On."