Marie Curie and Her Daughters is author Shelley Emling’s fascinating biography of the renowned Polish-French scientist Marie Curie and her two daughters, Irène and Ève, who, though not as famous as their mother, led very interesting lives and deserve to be remembered. Emling begins her book in 1906, with the death of Marie’s husband Pierre, with whom she shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics, in an accident in Paris, when he was run over by a horse-drawn carriage. She assumes knowledge, on the reader’s part, of the facts of Marie’s early life: how she came from Warsaw to Paris as a young woman to study at the Sorbonne, where she met Pierre, and their discovery of radium, which changed the world. For readers who are unfamiliar with those facts, there are many other biographies of Marie Curie which cover them in detail.
Pierre’s death left Marie to bring up her two daughters alone. Irène was eight at the time and had fond memories of her father, and always honored his memory later in life, but Ève was just over a year old and had no memory of her father. Marie obtained her husband’s professorship at the Sorbonne, becoming the first female professor there, and she insisted that she earn it in her own right, rather than being given the professorship out of charity. However, she was denied membership in the French Academy of Sciences, simply because she was a woman. Much later, her daughter Irène also tried and failed to obtain membership in the Academy. It was not until 1962 that a woman, one of Marie’s students, became a member of the French Academy of Sciences.
Marie was devoted to her research and was often separated from her daughters. They frequently wrote letters to each other, and these letters are a major source for Emling’s book. The author had conversations with Irène’s daughter Hélène (also a scientist), who shared previously unpublished letters with her. From an early age, Irène showed a strong interest in science, and her mother encouraged it, sending math problems to her in her letters. Ève’s interests lay elsewhere, particularly in the arts. At first Marie showed a certain amount of disappointment that Ève didn’t share her passion for science, but Ève always said that her mother never tried to force her or her sister into science. It just happened to be that that was where Irène’s interests lay.
In 1911, Marie had a love affair with physicist Paul Langevin, who was formerly an assistant to Pierre. Langevin was married, and several years younger than Marie. When his wife found their love letters and gave them to the newspapers, it caused a scandal, which almost cost Marie the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her discovery of radium. People threw rocks at her house and told her to go back to Poland. (Marie frequently faced discrimination in France for being foreign-born, as well as a woman). In spite of the scandal, she received the prize, becoming not only the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, but also the first person to win two, in two different fields. The Nobel Committee discouraged her from traveling to Sweden to accept the prize, but she went nevertheless, and gave her acceptance speech to great acclaim.
During World War I, Marie brought mobile radiography units (vehicles with X-ray machines) to the front lines, which saved the lives of many soldiers, since it became much quicker to diagnose their wounds, and it also meant fewer men had to have limbs amputated. Irène, who had taken a nursing course, went with her. She trained other women as her assistants, and it is estimated that the mobile radiography units treated over a million soldiers.
One of the most fascinating parts of Emling’s book is her account of Marie’s visits to the United States, and her friendship with the American journalist Missy Meloney. Marie, who hated publicity, usually refused to give interviews to the press, but Meloney, who became the editor of the predecessor of New York Magazine, managed to obtain one with her, and the two women became friends. Meloney’s views on the role of women were different from Marie’s. She said she didn’t believe in women having a career outside the home, although her own life was a contradiction of that belief, as was, of course, Marie’s. Meloney held conservative political views, even though, later in life, she became a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, and she supported women’s right to the vote. Marie was largely non-political, believing that scientific research should have nothing to do with politics, even though she did express an opinion, privately, that women should have the vote (which they did not get, in France, until 1944), and, toward the end of her life, she expressed hatred for fascist dictators.
After World War I, Marie had very little money for her Radium Institute in Paris. France, in general, was in terrible economic shape following the war, and there was no money to be spent on scientific research. Marie decided to turn to the United States for the funding she needed. She also had very little radium left. At the time, the United States was the largest producer of radium. No one knew yet, about how destructive radium could be to people’s health. Marie was often ill herself, but did not make the connection until it was too late. Of course, she focused on radium’s benefits in treating cancer. In the 1920s, there was a craze for radium in the United States, and it was used in many commercial products, including makeup, toothpaste, and watch faces. Dancers on Broadway wore costumes covered with radium so they would glow in the dark.
In 1921, Meloney was instrumental in organizing Marie’s first visit to the United States. She accompanied her on the voyage, on the sister ship of the Titanic, and Marie’s daughters, twenty-three-year-old Irène and sixteen-year-old Ève, went with them. Marie was a celebrity in the United States, much more so than in France, and as soon as the word came out that she was coming, many organizations associated with the women’s suffrage movement gave her money for her Radium Institute, and raised the funds for her supply of radium. But Marie hated all the receptions and social events she was forced to attend. They exhausted her, and her already poor health took a turn for the worse. Her daughters often had to stand in for her. Irène, who shared her mother’s retiring nature, didn’t particularly enjoy the social events but attended out of duty. Ève, who was much more sociable than her mother and sister, truly enjoyed the events and became very popular. She loved the United States, and, as we will see, eventually became a citizen.
Marie was awarded many honorary doctorates in the United States, even though Harvard refused her one because she was a woman. It wasn’t until many years later that Harvard finally gave an honorary doctorate to a woman. One of the highlights of Marie’s visit was her tour of the women’s colleges, including Smith and Vassar. She was very happy to see the number of women in the United States who chose a career in the sciences—many more than in France. Marie’s stay in the United States culminated in a visit to the White House, where she was presented with the supply of radium for her institute.
Once she returned to France, Marie’s institute became one of the major research laboratories in Europe. She insisted on hiring as many women as possible, and especially tried to recruit Polish women. Later in the 1920s, she expressed a wish to establish a second Radium Institute in Warsaw, the city of her birth, but, once again, she didn’t have enough money, or enough radium, and she decided to make a second visit to the United States. But this was 1929, when the United States was on the verge of the Great Depression, and it was much more difficult to obtain money for scientific research, especially in a country as far away as Poland. But Meloney came to the rescue, and arranged for Marie’s second visit to the United States, as well as the funds for a second supply of radium, for the institute in Warsaw. This visit lacked the social whirl of the first one, even though certain events could not be avoided, and this time Marie’s daughters did not accompany her. Irène was married, and Ève was unable to go. The Radium Institute in Warsaw opened in 1932 and became a major center for the treatment of cancer, but, sadly, Marie didn’t live much longer after this. She died in 1934, of an illness that we know now to have been caused by radiation poisoning. Ève, who had become much closer to her mother in the last years of her life, was by her side.
Besides telling the compelling story of Marie Curie’s life, Emling writes about the lives of her daughters. Irène worked closely with her mother in her laboratory, and a major interest of hers was the element polonium, which Marie had discovered along with radium and named after the country of her birth. In 1926, Irène married the physicist Frédéric Joliot, a student of Paul Langevin. At first, Marie opposed the marriage because she was concerned that Frédéric was quite a bit younger than Irène and had a very different personality from hers, being gregarious, flirtatious, and something of a ladies’ man. But it turned out that their personalities complemented each other instead of clashing, and their marriage was very successful. As Emling points out, they were very similar to Marie and Pierre. In both couples, the husband was more outgoing than the wife, and the husband’s major interest was physics, while the wife’s was chemistry. Irène and Frédéric came very close to discovering the neutron and the positron, but they didn’t realize at first what they had found, and their discoveries were credited to other scientists.
Eventually, though, Irène and Frédéric had a breakthrough, discovering artificial radioactivity, and the process of transforming elements that are not naturally radioactive into elements that are. And so Irène achieved the alchemists’ dream of transforming one element into another. She and Frédéric were awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery. Eventually, their research led to the discovery of nuclear fission and the development of the atomic bomb, although they were strongly opposed to the idea of their research being used to create weapons of mass destruction. They always meant for their discoveries to be used for peaceful purposes: energy and medical research.
Unlike her largely non-political mother, Irène became a political activist after the rise of fascism. She and Frédéric joined the Socialist Party in France because of its stand against fascism. They worked for the French Resistance during World War II, even though Irène frequently went to Switzerland because of ill health. She had contracted tuberculosis during World War I. After the end of World War II, Frédéric joined the Communist Party and expressed an increasing admiration for the Soviet Union, largely because of their support for scientists. Irène did not join the Communist Party, but her ties to Communism got her into trouble when she visited the United States after World War II. She was detained on Ellis Island, and Einstein, who was a close friend of the Curie family, helped to obtain her release. Irène eventually became the director of her mother’s Radium Institute, and she stayed involved in politics, holding a government post under a Socialist prime minister. She was instrumental in finally getting the vote for women in France in 1944. Sadly, her health, always fragile, deteriorated in the 1940s and 1950s. A friend in the United States sent her an antibiotic, which cured her tuberculosis, but she contracted leukemia as a result of her work with radioactive elements, and she died in 1956. Her husband outlived her by only two years. Their two children, Hélène and Pierre, also became scientists. Hélène married Paul Langevin’s grandson.
As mentioned earlier, Ève Curie’s interests were in the arts, not science. At first she wanted to be a concert pianist, and had a somewhat successful career, but she started too late to become a famous pianist. Then she became a writer and journalist. Her first major success was a biography of her mother, Madame Curie, which became the basis for a Hollywood film starring Greer Garson. During her research for the biography, Ève realized how little she knew about her mother’s life, especially her early life in Poland, but relatives in Poland helped her out. During Ève’s childhood, she and her mother had not been close, because they spent so much time away from each other and their interests were different. But Ève cared for Marie in her last years and, when she was researching the biography, she got to know her mother better than she ever did in life.
Ève left France during the German occupation in World War II and came to England, where she met Winston Churchill. She joined the Free French forces and became a war correspondent and traveled to many different fronts, including North Africa, India, and China. In India, she met Gandhi and expressed admiration for his doctrine of peaceful resistance, but she thought it wouldn’t work against the Nazis. She published a volume of her wartime journalism, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, but lost out.
After the war, Ève worked for NATO and married the American diplomat Henry Labouisse. They did not have children together, even though Labouisse had children from his first marriage. Ève eventually became a United States citizen. Her husband was one of the founders of UNICEF and won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1965. And so, as Ève herself commented, she was the only member of her family not to win a Nobel Prize. She and her husband traveled to more than 100 countries, giving aid to children. She died in 2007, at the age of 102.
I highly recommend Emling’s biography. She tells the lives of these extraordinary women in a way that makes the reader relate to them, and she explains the science very well, without going over the head of a reader who doesn’t have a background in science. Readers who want a biography of Marie Curie that covers her early life should look elsewhere, but this book tells the story of an aspect of her life that isn’t covered in some of the major biographies: her life after World War I, her visits to the United States, and her relationship with her daughters, as well as the stories of their lives. Emling shows the reader how Marie and Irène were discriminated against, as women in science, and how much they achieved in spite of that, and how Ève made great achievements in a very different career. This is a perfect read for Women’s History Month.
Marie Curie and Her Daughters is available from the Shapiro Science Library.