Marie Curie is widely regarded as a talented scientist whose work has changed the world. She is best known for her discovery of radium and polonium and her work with radioactivity. Curie encountered times of adversity in her career due to prejudice against women in her field, but she met her challenges and overcame them. Marie Curie exceeded the barriers put on women in her time to become one of the world’s most famous scientists and used her knowledge to the benefit of humanity.
Marie Curie was still young when she started breaking barriers. She was born as Marya Salomee Sklodowska on November 7, 1867 in Russia controlled Poland. From an early age, Sklodowska showed a great memory and exceptional intelligence (Yannuzzi 12). Her father encouraged her to see everything as a learning experience. This motivated her to focus on her education and receive the most value from it. (Huso 2). In Poland, not many institutions, including the University of Warsaw, welcomed women. She wanted so desperately to further pursue an education that she attended the Floating University or Flying University, an illegal underground school that admitted girls. It is was at the Flying University that she developed an interest in science and mathematics (Yannuzzi 23).
Even as she continued her education in Paris, she was blazing a path for women as she succeeded in a male dominated academic field. When Sklodowska registered for classes at the University of Paris, she used the French equivalent of her name, Marie. At La Sorbonne, women were the minority, with only 23 out of the two thousand students being female (Yannuzzi 37-38). With perseverance and little money, she got her master’s degree in physics as she graduated at the top of her class. Sklodo...
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...she was a woman in the early twentieth century. Marie Curie clearly conveys her stance on the issue when she proclaimed, “First principle: never let oneself be beaten down by persons or by events” (Huso 3).
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The androcentric view of history often fails to acknowledge the achievements of notable women who have made profound impacts that have revolutionized the way in which we see the world, as well as the universe. Although the modernized 21st century society is more apt to recognize the achievements of women with an equivocal perspective with men, it was not always so. During the early 20th century, women were consistently denied equality with men due to a perverse androcentric, male-dominated perspective that deemed women as subordinate and insignificant. This androcentric perspective limited the opportunities available to women at the time, leaving them only with domestic occupations that were deemed acceptable for women such as nurses, teachers or clerics. Very few women aspired for higher education, and even fewer achieved it. There were very few colleges that accepted women at the time, save for those erected for women alone. It is because of this, women rarely e...
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Pollack, Eileen. “Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?” The New York Times. The New York Times, 05 Oct. 2013. Web. 05 Mar. 2014.
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