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it was an interview to relish: the reclusive madame curie agreed to sit with American editor Marie Mattingly Meloney for a profile to be published in Meloney’s magazine, the Delineator. Stéphane Lauzanne, editor-in-chief of Le Matin, had been following the Nobel laureate’s story for years. “She will see no one,” he warned Meloney. “She cannot understand why scientists, rather than science, should be discussed in the press.” For all her attempts to prevent it, Curie’s had become a household name. She had not made a public appearance in fifteen years, and yet she agreed to meet this American journalist in 1920. Meloney had met famous scientists before. She had grown up near the estate of the illustrious Alexander Graham Bell, a breeder of horses that she yearned to ride. And only weeks before arriving in Paris she had stood in the laboratories of Thomas Alva Edison; eyeing the newfangled equipment at his command, she decided that one’s scientific prowess brought not only admiration, but also great financial reward. In Pittsburgh she had seen the smokestacks of the greatest radiumreduction plants in the world. And yet when she reached the physics building at the rue Pierre Curie, the originator of this technology was a pale, timid woman, surrounded by nothing that would suggest material gain for her efforts. Her office was sparse; even to an untrained eye, the facilities looked inadequate. Curie rubbed the tips of her fingers over and over the pad of her thumb, a habit she had developed while trying to regain feeling lost in her hands. For her, scientific discovery had not led to riches but physical and material sacrifice.1 That the two women would hit it off famously could not have been predicted, for Meloney was in many ways Curie’s younger antithesis. An important person in the U.S. editing world and in New York society , she had started out as a reporter for the Washington Post but had become one of the most influential women of American media. She Madame Curie’s American Tours: Women and Science in the 1920s 1 23 24 exuded social grace, money, and a penchant for publicity. Curie, a Pole who had emigrated to France to pursue science, was not interested in appearances, including her own. She dressed plainly, typically in black, and preferred to be undisturbed by anyone, at home or in the lab. Male colleagues she met at professional meetings thought her terse and disagreeable ; small talk was not her métier. Her closest confidant since her husband’s death in 1906 was her daughter Irene, a young physicist who was like her mother in interest and temperament. Despite their differences, however, Curie and Meloney were also working mothers who understood each other’s struggle to balance professional and family obligations. The interview at the Sorbonne lengthened into informal talks during Curie’s personal time. Meloney became “Missy” and Curie “Marie”; a mutual affection took root that lasted the rest of their lives. Meloney felt confident that her readers wanted to hear from the reclusive scientist, for Americans had been following her story for years. In 1904, Vanity Fair had presented Marie and Pierre as a couple, months after they had together won the Nobel Prize for radioactivity. Marie appeared to be a puzzling contradiction: a brilliant scientist who was, nevertheless, also the “woman behind the man” in the Curie partnership . Although she was the codiscoverer of radium, she was also the person responsible for family domesticity, an image confirmed by another woman journalist who covered “The Curies at Home” for The World ToDay the same year.2 The domestic image may have seemed to diminish her as a scientist; yet young women with career aspirations saw her differently , as a model of grace and competence outside the home. When Curie won her second Nobel Prize in 1911, science editor James McKeen Cattell cast her in Science and Popular Science Monthly in an overtly feminist light, calling her rejection from the Académie des Sciences a tragedy for women scientists and science alike.3 The journalistic treatment of Curie was startling, given the paucity of coverage on women scientists generally in the American press. Taking into account scientists both as authors and biographical subjects , male scientists were fifteen times more visible than their female counterparts in mainstream magazines. Journalists described science as an endeavor requiring culturally virile attributes—emotional detachment , intellectual objectivity, even physical strength at times. In 1920...

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