On that Election Day morning, Susan B. Anthony went to a polling station in Rochester, New York, and became the first woman in America to successfully insist on exercising her right to vote. She cast her ballot for President Grant, whose Republican party had announced its willingness to listen to the ladies in the run-up to the election. Two weeks later, Anthony was also behind bars for attempting to cast a vote. Woodhull closed her campaign with a prophetic letter to the editor of the New York Herald, “To the public I would say in conclusion they may succeed in crushing me out, even to the loss of my life: but let me warn them and you that from the ashes of my body a thousand Victorias will spring to avenge my death by seizing the work laid down by me and carrying it forward to victory.”
Post-prison life took her on a downward spiral, and Victoria and Tennie left for London, where they “decided to use draconian measures to sanitize their images.” And sanitize them they did. As with their other outlandish schemes, their desire at reinvention worked. Within a few years, Victoria had taken her third husband, John Biddulph Martin, a wealthy banker; Claflin wed Sir Francis Cook and became Lady Cook. The newly minted Mrs. Martin—one of the first women in England to own a car—lived in a manor house on a 1,200-acre estate in the Cotswolds. She was a generous contributor and fundraiser for the restoration and purchase of Sulgrave Manor, the home of George Washington’s ancestors. As did Mrs. Banks in Mary Poppins, she worked for British suffrage. She died in 1927, age eighty-eight, a year before English women won the right to vote.
Mrs. Woodhull-Blood-Martin was a woman of contradictions: a stockbroker who embraced Marxism, and a denouncer of traditional marriage who spent her final years as the wife of a member of the British landed gentry. How a rebel woman—in today’s parlance a nasty woman—traversed such an extraordinary road remains Victoria’s secret.
In 1888, Alfred Nobel read his obituary, “Le Marchand de la mort est mort” (“The Merchant of Death is Dead”). The article stated that the dynamite king, who had “become rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.” The journalist had erred; it had been Ludwig, Alfred’s brother, who had passed away. The headline served as Nobel’s clarion call; to alter his legacy, he bequeathed his staggering fortune to those who had conferred the “greatest benefit on mankind.” The most revered people in history have journeyed to Sweden; among them was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize, a lady of many firsts: Marie Curie.
Curie, one of the world’s most eminent mathematicians, was born in Warsaw in 1867, the daughter of Dr. Sklodowski, a teacher at the Lycee of Warsaw, and Bronsitawa Sklodowska, a principal of a girls’ school. Their daughter Marya was a serious child whose favorite pastime was playing with test tubes. The family were members of the Polish intelligentsia fighting against occupation by Czarist Russia, and several extended family members were in exile in Siberia for acts of resistance.
Marya Sklodowska became Marie Curie as a result of Warsaw University’s ban on female students. As hungry for knowledge as Dr. Faustus, she participated in her city’s Flying University, an underground women’s school whose members met clandestinely. A chance at the Holy Grail of education presented itself when Bronya, her older sister, suggested she work to support Bronya, who would study medicine at the Sorbonne first, and then upon graduation would return the favor to Manya, as her family called Marya. Accordingly, Marya took a job as a governess, and in her spare time, she worked on solving mathematical problems received by post from her father. The “homework” helped distract Marya from the severe depression she had suffered since she was ten and had lost her mother to tuberculosis. What also proved a distraction was the older son of her well-to-do employers; they vetoed marriage due to her low social status.
After five dismal years, Marya’s prospects changed when Bronya sent her a one-way ticket from Poland to Paris. In 1891, at age twenty-three, she traveled forty hours in fourth class; that entailed bringing her own food and a stool on which to sit. The young woman displayed fortitude by traveling alone, an activity associated with prostitutes. The obsessive workaholic rented a sixth-floor garret in the Latin Quarter, studied French, and earned money cleaning glassware in labs. Begrudging every penny, she rationed her intake of food; on more than one occasion, she collapsed from weakness. She enrolled in the Sorbonne as one of only twenty-three women out of the two thousand science students and only one of two women to work for a degree in science. Marie—as she chose to be called in her adopted country—came in first in her examinations and berated herself for coming in second in mathematics. She was the first woman to graduate from the Sorbonne.
After four years in Paris, Marie met Pierre Curie, and they bonded over his invention, the quadrant electrometer—what woman could resist? Marie was not husband-hunting, and the older Pierre was a committed bachelor who had once written, “Women of genius are rare.” However, as no one was more brilliant than Marie, he wrote in a letter, “It would…be a beautiful thing to pass through life together hypnotized in our dreams: your dream for your country; our dream for humanity; our dream for science.” They were married in 1895 in a civil service attended by family and a few friends. For the occasion, Marie wore a blue cotton dress, one practical enough to wear in the laboratory post-ceremony. Their unofficial vow, as Marie put it, was to forge a life, “consecrated entirely to scientific research.” In the day, Pierre worked as a physics professor, and Madame Curie taught physics at a girls’ school in Sevres. The evenings were dedicated to research. Consumed by their experiments, they frequently forgot to eat, and meals consisted of bread washed down with coffee in a shed that served as a makeshift laboratory. After the birth of her first child, Marie took breaks to breastfeed and eventually hired a wet-nurse; her recently widowed father-in-law, Eugene, a retired physician, helped with child-rearing. Colleagues viewed putting work before maternal nurturing and child-rearing as reprehensible.
Madame Curie needed to come up with names for two daughters—Eve and Irene—as well as the two substances she discovered: radium, named for the rays it emitted, and polonium, named in tribute to Poland. Working as always until the small hours of the night, she once collapsed in front of Eve from exhaustion. Neither she nor her husband suspected—nor wished to—that radioactivity carried harmful side effects. Radium, as with fire and water, proved a two-edged sword.
In 1903, the year Madame Curie defended her doctoral position, she and Pierre received the Nobel Prize in physics, thereby making her the first woman to be so honored. In an era when the male-dominated scientific establishment made it clear that females were not welcome, Marie was at the vanguard of her field and changed the world’s perceptions about the nature of atoms, cancer treatments, and nuclear power; her theories also aided in the birth of the atomic bomb. The President of the Swedish Academy introduced the laureates with a biblical quotation, “It is not good that man should be alone. I will make a helpmeet for him.” Only Monsieur Curie delivered the acceptance speech (as the podium was the province of males alone), and thus he garnered the glory. Pierre was generous with spousal credit and took the opportunity to praise his wife and to clarify she was far more than his “helpmeet.”
The most successful collaboration and love affair in the history of science ended in 1906 when Pierre died as he crossed a rain-slicked street and a horse-drawn wagon ran into him on the Pont Neuf. The thirty-eight-year old widow wrote, “I lost my beloved Pierre, and with him all hope and all support for the rest of my life.” The single mother took over her husband’s Sorbonne faculty position, an act that made headlines in the Paris newspapers. Artists, journalists, and society ladies joined students to hear the first woman on the Sorbonne faculty deliver a lecture.
In