Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The historian and author of Lillian Gilbreth examines the "Great Man" myth of science with profiles of women scientists from Marie Curie to Jane Goodall.

Why is science still considered to be predominantly male profession? In The Madame Curie Complex, Julie Des Jardin dismantles the myth of the lone male genius, reframing the history of science with revelations about women's substantial contributions to the field.

She explores the lives of some of the most famous female scientists, including Jane Goodall, the eminent primatologist; Rosalind Franklin, the chemist whose work anticipated the discovery of DNA's structure; Rosalyn Yalow, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist; and, of course, Marie Curie, the Nobel Prize-winning pioneer whose towering, mythical status has both empowered and stigmatized future generations of women considering a life in science.

With lively anecdotes and vivid detail, The Madame Curie Complex reveals how women scientists have changed the course of science--and the role of the scientist--throughout the twentieth century. They often asked different questions, used different methods, and came up with different, groundbreaking explanations for phenomena in the natural world.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction: Through the Lives of Women Scientists (p. 1)
• I Assistants, Housekeepers, and Interchangeable Parts: Women Scientists and Professionalization 1880-1940 (p. 11)
• 1 Madame Curie's American Tours: Women and Science in the 1920s (p. 23)
• 2 Making Science Domestic and Domesticity Scientific: The Ambiguous Life and Ambidextrous Work of Lillian Gilbreth (p. 53)
• 3 To Embrace or Decline Marriage and Family: Annie Jump Cannon and the Women of the Harvard Observatory, 1880-1940 (p. 88)
• II The Cult of Masculinity in the Age of Heroic Science, 1941-1962 (p. 117)
• 4 Those Science Made Invisible: Finding the Women of the Manhattan Project (p. 130)
• 5 Maria Goeppert Mayer and Rosalind Franklin: The Politics of Partners and Prizes in the Heroic Age of Science (p. 157)
• III American Women and Science in Transition, 1962 (p. 201)
• 6 Generational Divides: Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, Evelyn Fox Keller, Barbara McClintock, and Feminism after 1963 (p. 219)
• 7 The Lady Trimates and Feminist Science?: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas (p. 253)
• Conclusion: Apes, Corn, and Silent Springs: A Women's Tradition of Science? (p. 285)
• Acknowledgments (p. 295)
• Index (p. 297)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Des Jardins (Baruch College, CUNY; Women and the Historical Enterprise in America, CH, Mar'04, 41-4222) examines the work experiences of more than a dozen American women scientists and engineers in the 20th century. Her launching point is Marie Curie's tours of the US in the 1920s, which she argues enshrined the notion that women had to both outperform men in the lab and appear as perfect women in the home to gain recognition. Though she writes mainly about outstanding individuals, many of whom won Nobel prizes, she advocates for looking beyond these women's heroic attributes to understand them as fully rounded human beings. Des Jardins conducted substantive archival research, making her one of the few academics who is not a specialist in the history of science to bring scholarly analysis and feminist methods to these stories. The author builds upon scholarship pioneered in Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives, ed. by Pnina Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram (CH, Apr'88). Her chapter on the Manhattan Project concentrates on Los Alamos, complementing the chapter on Hanford in Jordynn Jack's Science on the Home Front (CH, Apr'10, 47-4382). An excellent resource for undergraduate discussion courses. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. A. K. Ackerberg-Hastings University of Maryland University College

Kirkus Book Review

How women have shaped science and vice versa. Since the early 1900s, Marie Curie (18671934), a two-time winner of the Nobel Prize, has been an inspiration for women who aspire to become scientists. Des Jardins (History/Baruch Coll.; Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Memory, 18801945, 2002) deconstructs the myth of a woman who was apparently "achieving it all: marriage, family, and career," and setting the standard: "To succeed in men's fields, women couldn't be themselves; they had to perform better than men." The author examines the lives of Maria Goeppert Mayer (19061972), winner of the Nobel for discovering the shell structure of the nucleus, and Rosalind Franklin (19201958), whose seminal work on the structure of DNA anticipated Crick and Watson's "discovery" of the double helix but was largely overlooked. While opportunities for women holding doctorates in science increased during World War II, in its aftermath "the ratios of women to men [employed] in math and physical sciences plummeted to one in twenty-five." Married women who successfully forged careers were expected to make a superhuman effort, while accepting their subordinate role to men, both in the home and in the lab. Rosalyn Sussman Yalowthe winner of the 1977 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine who was dubbed "a Madam Curie from the Bronx" for her groundbreaking work on radioactive tracersappeared to subordinate herself to physician Sol Berson, her partner until his death in 1972. She deliberately scripted her behavior to accord to the accepted portrait of Marie Curie as the "doer" and her husband Pierre as the "thinker." In her Nobel speech, Yalow spoke about how sexism in science was an obstacle for women to rise above, but she failed to challenge the basic presumptions of sexist science. Des Jardins juxtaposes Yalow's failure with the crucial role played by such luminaries as environmentalist Rachel Carson, primatologist Jane Goodall and biologist Barbara McClintock. A solid combination of a feminist critique and a fascinating discussion of the progression of 20th- and 21st-century science. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Julie Des Jardins, the author of Women and the Historical Enterprise in America, is professor of history at Baruch College, CUNY.