Ava Helen Pauling: Partner, Activist, Visionary

5. "The Second X Chromosome"

133 chapter 5 “The Second X Chromosome” We think that the situation in the world is somewhat better now although there is still very much to be done. The Peace Movement in the United States as you know, is badly fragmented and we still many of us spend most of our time proving how anti-communist we are. —AHP to John N. Dragoumis, November 27, 19631 You know, of course, that if the WIL and the AFSC were to do really effective peace work, they would become subversive too. The appellation of organizations as subversive is one of the most wicked and cruel unjust things that has ever happened in this country and it should be resisted by everyone who believes in human dignity. This is one of the criticisms that I have of the WIL who are themselves guilty of going around in their whisper campaign against people and organizations. —AHP to Vally Weigl, October 25, 19632 No woman wants to be up on a pedestal (substitute shelf for pedestal) where she can be easily ignored and neglected. She wants to be taking and doing her part in the affairs of the world with her feet on the ground and sharing in and contributing to the life around her. —Ava Helen Pauling, “The Second X Chromosome” “A modern feminist,” Ava Helen called herself in 1963, in an interview with The Advertiser. She was well launched on two projects: promoting Women Strike for Peace, the new organization that had already made its mark in Washington, D.C., and articulating a platform for women’s improved status. The celebration of Linus’s second Nobel was bittersweet for both Paulings. Friends wrote from all over the world to congratulate him. Several Ava Helen Pauling 134 echoed Janet Stevenson’s plaint: this should have been an award for both Paulings. Ava Helen was appropriately modest and generous. To Blanche Murphy she admitted that many people had said the prize should have been for both of them, but “I am afraid I cannot concur in that. Of course, any man who has lived or shared his life with his wife the number of years my husband and I have been together, must surely share his honors with her. We feel that this is a prize to the Peace Workers of the world and as such we are happy to represent them at this ceremony.”3 However, in less guarded moments her comments acknowledged some feeling of personal entitlement. As she wrote to Stanislawa Zawadecka in response to her letter of congratulations: “We think that this Nobel Prize is a vindication of the rightness of our position over many years.” But she went on to credit Linus: “My husband’s great courage and knowledge and his almost sublime faith in truth seems now to have some vindication.”4 She used the term “vindication” not once, but twice in that letter—a choice that underlines long years of struggle against their opponents. And indeed, along with the reporters and television cameras came whispers and grumbles of dissent. “Not everyone seems to be as happy as you,” wrote Ava Helen wryly to Stuart Innerst of Pasadena.5 By November the Paulings were in full planning mode for their trip to Oslo, and additional implications of the prize had sunk in. “I was going to give a talk about women in which I was to say that Madame Curie had been the only person to win two Nobel prizes,” she wrote to her friend Catherine Colburn. “Now my husband has interfered with my speech.” She went on proudly and pedantically, “Of course, Madame Curie shared the first prize so that in a sense, Linus is unique. No one else has received two full prizes in different fields.”6 Linus and Ava Helen Pauling at CIT Biology Department tea in honor of his second Nobel prize, December 1963. “The Second X Chromosome” 135 The bitter part of bittersweet was generated close to home. The California Institute of Technology was unenthusiastic about the global honor bestowed on its most famous chemist. In the end, in fact, it was the biology faculty rather than his chemistry faculty that celebrated Pauling with a formal tea. By then it was too late to do anything except pretend to smile; the die had been cast in October, when President DuBridge responded to news of the Nobel Peace Prize by saying publicly that...