The Science View is The View re-imagined, if it covered the science milieu. It returns below, to celebrate women’s history month. The first segment was a hypothetical discussion about women who received Nobel Prizes last Fall. Below is a mix of the unreal and real; hypothetical hosts interview a real author about her book.

ESTELLE: There’s a new book out about women and science called The Madame Curie Complex. The Feminist Press has just published it, and we’re so pleased to have the author with us today. Welcome, Julie Des Jardins.

JULIE: Thanks for talking with me, ladies.

ESTELLE: Julie is a professor of history at Baruch College, here in New York. Many of us know that Marie Curie was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize. And that she and her husband won for the theory of radiation. She later won a second Nobel for the discovery of the elements radium and polonium. But what’s the Curie Complex?

JULIE: Sadly, it’s a sort of inferiority complex American women have had ever since Curie came to the United States and seemed to be all things to all people—a world-class scientist, and a perfectly maternal, altruistic, domestic woman. She wasn’t necessarily all that, by the way, but that’s how Americans perceived her.

CHELSEA: Oh wow, I don’t get that. Do you think women today would have seen her as a role model?

JULIE: Women scientists have always seen her as a role model, in large part because her myth gets made over and over again to resonate with the times.  The Nobel scientist Rosalyn Yalow truly envisioned herself in the Curie mold, as have so many women who watched depictions of Curie on the movie screen during World War II. Or they read her daughter’s biography of her, which created an iconic Curie that lasted for 70 years.

FAITH: Why write about women and science now? I mean, the book is really interesting, but there are quite a few books on the subject already.

CHELSEA: Faith, what a question.

FAITH: No really, with all due respect…

JULIE:  There are plenty of biographies of women scientists out there and academic works that problematize the gender of science. But the scholarly books are highly theoretical and don’t reveal the workings of gender through compelling human-interest stories. The bios don’t question masculinist assumptions about science. I try to do both—to see gender in science, offer alternative ways of envisioning gender in science, and yet make this resonate through the stories of fascinating, identifiable women.

TANIKA: You write about how these women were acceptable to male scientists and the public so long as they could also see them as married women and mothers. Are we over that yet?

FAITH: I don’t see anything so wrong with that.

JULIE: Things have changed, but historically, single women have had better fortunes in science because employers have presumed that these women don’t carry the same domestic baggage. The only times when marriage was a professional asset were in rare elite contexts in which prominent husbands shared their connections to other men in high places. This was so with the brilliant physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer. She was so competent, but she needed her husband to put her in places where she could do her science.

ESTELLE: It seems that the women in your book adopted several strategies to succeed. Some partnered with their husbands, others worked within the system…would you outline them for us?

JULIE:  Well, a lot of these strategies are historically and contextually specific, so it’s hard to classify them across the board. The important thing is that women have always felt pressure to negotiate social expectations in ways that men have not. Few people accuse men of being neglectful of their children as they burn the midnight oil in the lab, or of not being committed enough to their science when they play a more active role at home. Women, however, have been stigmatized at either extreme.

FAITH: You know, there are men who say really smart women everywhere figure out the ropes and find ways to succeed. Is there something different about what women in science face compared to other professions?

JULIE: There is institutional chauvinism in lots of professional environments, but in science women especially fall prey to a false veneration of youth. The great scientists are supposed to do their most ground-breaking work when they are in their twenties and thirties, so the myth goes. These of course are years when women often want to have children, when they may need more flextime or acceptance of competing responsibilities. Tenure clocks often compete with biological clocks more fiercely in science.

ESTELLE: That’s so interesting. And now we have to pause for a word from our sponsor.

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ESTELLE: We’re back with Julie Des Jardins, author of The Madame Curie Complex, a fascinating look at the hidden history of women in science—how they succeeded, what worked and what didn’t. I thought the sections about the Harvard Observatory and the way you connected how those women were treated with the women on The Manhattan Project was really an eye-opener. Just used as just calculators, mere observers. And then the head of the lab didn’t give them any credit.

CHELSEA: Yeah, that was just outrageous. I’d never heard anything about those women. Other than that, I can think of few popular references to these important women scientists. Part of the problem is that few people have remembered these women as “scientists” at all. Often they are passed down to posterity by some other name.

FAITH: Do you think there’s a feminine way of doing science?

TANIKA: What do you mean? Like there’s a black or Latino way of doing science?

ESTELLE: Actually, it’s a legitimate question, given that enduring metaphor of conquering Mother Nature…

CHELSEA:  Well, Faith could have asked if there’s a feminist way of doing science.

ESTELLE: OK, OK. Do women do science differently?

JULIE: I do think women can do science differently—not all women all the time, but some, some of the time. They do science differently not because of their biology but because often their roles as mothers, domestics, and marginalized scientists have given them different perspectives on scientific subjects. Sometimes they ask different questions and come to science with different methodologies.

TANIKA: I really got into the section about Rachel Carson and Silent Spring. I mean, how she saw nature as a major force effecting man’s survival versus the idea that men control nature. That debate seems totally relevant today.

JULIE: You can’t see what’s happening with climate change and not think the debate is relevant today.

ESTELLE: You also write that she refused to “see science as rarified, boxed off from nature, art, women, and the rest society.”

JULIE: Yes, she broke down many of the boundaries defining traditional science. Science has been seen as empirical, nature as random; science as objective, art as subjective; women as emotional, science as disinterested. Scientists have been perceived as people in a privileged realm of knowing that the rest of us can’t participate in. Carson broke down all these assumptions.

ESTELLE: What’s the best way to overcome The Madame Curie Complex? What do you want young women who read your book to come away with?

JULIE: I want women and men to consider a differently gendered scientific enterprise Women would get more traction in science if we thought of culturally feminine traits as assets, but it would also be good for science as a whole.

ESTELLE: Julie, thank you so much for being with us today.

More Information: The Madame Curie Complex