“Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win twice, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different sciences (Physics and Chemistry).”
Clearly, Marie Curie stands among the most decorated scientists of all time. But what of her forgotten husband, Pierre?
“They met in 1894 when Marie Curie worked in Pierre Curie’s lab; they were married the following year. [Pierre] had dedicated his life to his dream of science: he felt the need of a companion who could live his dream with him.”
And it was out of that need that Pierre groomed Marie into a scientist companion. So, what were Marie Curie’s accomplishments?
“1898 Discovered polonium and radium with her husband, Pierre Curie. 1903 Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Henri Becquerel and Pierre Curie, for the discovery of radioactivity and radiation. 1911 Awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her discovery of polonium and radium.”
Though Curie remains the only scientist awarded a Nobel Prize in two different sciences, arguably, the prizes were given for the same accomplishment. Read about Marie Curie and you’ll read about the special hurdles she had to jump and prejudices she had to overcome. You’ll read that “Marie was almost excluded from winning the award, simply because she was a woman.” Maybe so, but wasn’t she mentored, lauded, defended and promoted by a man, her husband? Weren’t they equal partners, equally dedicated to science? And didn’t she end up WAY more famous and lauded than he? Is it possible that, overall, being a woman aided her reputation more than hindered it?
Perhaps the extra recognition she’s received is justified by the fact that her study of radioactivity lead to her death by radiation poisoning. Wasn’t Marie a martyr to science? And aren’t martyrs regularly lauded? Yes and yes. But, it would have been the same for her husband Pierre except that he died in a street accident before the radiation poisoning got him.
Perhaps Curie truly was a high-order genius, smarter than Einstein some say. Though he never took an IQ test, somehow, 160 has become Albert Einstein’s “official” IQ. Meanwhile, Marie Curie’s IQ is “estimated” at between 180 and 200. But I don’t see the likes of the Dirac equation or Bell’s theorem, let alone Einstein’s virtually superhuman field equations on her resume. She’s often credited with the discovery of radioactivity, but Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity. In partnership with Pierre, she discovered two radioactive elements. But this is hardly the intellectual equal of, say, Bernhard Riemann inventing the geometry of curved three-dimensional space long before such a thing was known to exist. Is it possible that “Marie was almost excluded from winning the award, simply because” her intellectual achievements were only borderline strong enough?
“When Marilyn vos Savant was 10 years old, an adult-level Stanford-Binet test revealed she had an IQ of 228, which later landed her a Guinness World Record until the company removed the category in 1990 because the numbers are considered inexact.” In fact, in her case, the number is believed to have been “miscalculated” (“…the psychologist who came up with an IQ of 228 committed an extrapolation of a misconception, thereby violating almost every rule imaginable concerning the meaning of IQs.”). Her recalculated score was 132. Nevertheless, Google “smartest person in the world” and there she is.
Is there evidence of lauding female scientists just because they are female?
“In California the state education code demands that wherever reading presents achievements in science, history or other fields, “the achievements of women and men should be represented in approximately equal numbers.” As a result, one widely used history text gives more attention to Maria Mitchell, a nineteenth-century astronomer who discovered a comet, than to Albert Einstein.”
I really take no interest in tarnishing female heroes. I understand how historically important Madame Curie is and how important she is to women. I’d rather be out there lauding her like everyone else. But feminism’s ruthlessness forces our hand. Feminism’s “men have the power and women are the victims” ManBad (the “over-empowered oppressor”) WomanGood (the “innocent victim”) falsehood has brought out the desperation in us. There’s a strain of hateful feminism that would grind men into the dirt. It is all hostility and no integrity. And men must defend themselves from it. We owe it to ourselves and we owe it to society. We desperately need for the rational and objective to take a stand and set limits on the subjective and emotional.
Out one side of its mouth feminism claims women as natural born scientists and out the other side of its mouth it will decry math and science as “phallocentric thinking” and claim “women’s ways of knowing” as the new standard of scientific inquiry.
I don’t know what The Truth is about Madame Curie. We’re told that she did a great deal toward furthering our knowledge regarding cancer treatment. But the sad thing about flattering women and inflating female accomplishments is that there’s no way to separate fact from hype. She might be everything she’s presented to be, or not. Who knows?
I believe that women are and have always been equal partners in the human system, equally responsible for outcomes. For example, women can be honestly credited with the evolution of human parenting. I think the evolution of parenting has been the evolution of human empathy, emotional intelligence, and mental health. I believe that we have women to thank for raising average human compassion to levels that have made possible the invention of human rights. What could be more important than that? True female achievement has had little to do with women beating men at their own game. It has been women playing their own female game, plying FemalePower and female force of influence through female channels. But you’ve never heard about this theory of female influence because feminism doesn’t want to know about FemalePower. Feminism denies the existence of FemalePower. It only wants to know about MalePower and how it can get its hands on as much of it as possible.
Marie Curie once wrote, “In science, we must be interested in things, not in persons.” Very true, and let’s not forget that, according to the bell curves, that’s primarily men she’s describing. Gender Equalism is all about gender equality—Balanced equality, not unisex equality. Each sex has its strengths and its weaknesses. We oppose female-ism’s efforts to make the world perfect for females, males be damned. We oppose feminism’s ManBad/WomanGood brand of “equality.” We oppose efforts to create a world in which women are often more-than, but never less-than in anything, ever. We oppose FORCING female-only “equality.”
– Tim Goldich
Gender Equalists
