I teach general and physical chemistry at a small liberal arts college for women, and every fall a handful of students come to my office hours with the same question, phrased slightly differently each year: "Were there any?" Any women, they mean, who did this before them. The answer is yes, of course, and more than the textbooks let on. I got tired of scribbling the same half-dozen names on the backs of problem sets, so over the summer I put this page together. It is meant for students first, but I have tried to write it so that any curious adult with a library card can use it.

Two ground rules I set myself. First, every fact below is something I have checked against at least one of the books in the reading list; where the sources disagree, or where I simply don't know, I have left the detail out. Second, no invented quotations. The women here said plenty of memorable things in their lifetimes, and you can read those in their own words in the books. I would rather send you to the source than paraphrase it badly.

The biographies are short on purpose. They are meant to make you want the whole story, which is what the reading list is for.

Marie Curie (1867–1934) — physics and chemistry
Born Maria Sklodowska in Warsaw, in the part of Poland then ruled by Russia, she could not attend university at home and moved to Paris in 1891 to study at the Sorbonne. In 1895 she married the physicist Pierre Curie, and together in 1898 they announced two new elements, polonium (named for her homeland) and radium, extracted from tons of pitchblende ore in a leaky shed. She coined the word "radioactivity." In 1903 she shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre and with Henri Becquerel, the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize; in 1911 she won a second, in Chemistry, alone, and remains the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. Pierre was killed in a street accident in 1906, and she took over his professorship, the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne. She died in 1934 of aplastic anemia, almost certainly brought on by years of exposure to radiation. Her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry the following year.

Lise Meitner (1878–1968) — physics
Born in Vienna, she became in 1906 only the second woman to earn a doctorate in physics from the University of Vienna. She moved to Berlin, where for three decades she worked alongside the chemist Otto Hahn, at first unpaid and in a basement workshop because women were not permitted upstairs. Being of Jewish descent, she fled Germany in the summer of 1938 with the help of friends and settled in Sweden. That winter, in letters and on a walk in the snow with her nephew Otto Frisch, she worked out the physics of what Hahn and Fritz Strassmann had just observed in Berlin: the uranium nucleus was splitting. Meitner and Frisch published the explanation in early 1939 and gave the process its name, "fission." Hahn alone received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery. She refused to take part in the wartime bomb project. Element 109, meitnerium, is named in her honor.

Emmy Noether (1882–1935) — mathematics
The daughter of a mathematician in Erlangen, Germany, she was allowed at first only to audit university lectures, and earned her doctorate at Erlangen in 1907. In 1915 David Hilbert and Felix Klein invited her to Göttingen, then the center of the mathematical world, but the faculty would not let a woman lecture under her own name, so for several years her courses were announced under Hilbert's. Her 1918 theorem, now simply called Noether's theorem, shows that every continuous symmetry in the laws of physics corresponds to a conserved quantity; it is one of the foundations of modern theoretical physics. In the 1920s she essentially created modern abstract algebra, and "Noetherian" rings are named for her. In 1933 the Nazi government dismissed her along with the other Jewish faculty, and she went to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. She died there in 1935 after surgery, at the age of fifty-three.

Barbara McClintock (1902–1992) — genetics
Born in Hartford, Connecticut, she took her Ph.D. in botany at Cornell in 1927 and spent her life studying the chromosomes of maize (Indian corn), which she could grow, cross and read under the microscope herself. From 1941 she worked at the Cold Spring Harbor laboratory on Long Island. In the 1940s she found that certain genetic elements in maize could move from one place on a chromosome to another and switch neighboring genes on and off; she published the work around 1950, and most geneticists did not know what to make of it. Only in the 1970s, when similar "jumping genes" turned up in bacteria, did the field catch up with her. In 1983 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, unshared, the first woman to win that prize alone. She was eighty-one, and still walking to the lab every day.

Grace Murray Hopper (1906–1992) — mathematics and computing
A New Yorker by birth, she earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale in 1934 and taught at Vassar until the war. In 1943 she joined the Navy's women's reserve and was assigned to Howard Aiken's Mark I computer at Harvard, one of the first programmable calculating machines in the country. After the war she joined the company building UNIVAC, and in 1952 wrote the A-0 system, generally counted as the first compiler, a program that translates a human-readable language into machine instructions. She was a driving force behind the business language COBOL (1959), still running on many of the very mainframes that people are now frantically checking for the Year 2000 problem. She retired from the Navy in 1986 with the rank of rear admiral, at the time the oldest officer on active duty. The Navy commissioned the destroyer USS Hopper in 1997. She is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Rachel Carson (1907–1964) — marine biology and writing
Born in Springdale, Pennsylvania, she studied biology at the Pennsylvania College for Women and took a master's degree in zoology from Johns Hopkins in 1932. For most of her career she wrote and edited publications for the federal Bureau of Fisheries and its successor, the Fish and Wildlife Service, while writing books about the sea at night. The Sea Around Us (1951) won the National Book Award and let her leave government work; The Edge of the Sea followed in 1955. Her last book, Silent Spring (1962), laid out the evidence that synthetic pesticides, DDT above all, were accumulating in soil, water, wildlife and people. The chemical industry attacked her personally, but the book was read at the White House and she testified before Congress in 1963. She died of cancer in 1964, before DDT was banned in the United States in 1972. Many people date the modern environmental movement to her book.

Chien-Shiung Wu (1912–1997) — physics
Born near Shanghai, she came to the United States in 1936 and earned her doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley in 1940. During the war she worked at Columbia University on the Manhattan Project, on the problem of separating uranium isotopes. She became the great experimentalist of beta decay, the process by which a nucleus emits an electron. In 1956 two theorists, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, proposed that the weak nuclear force might not respect mirror symmetry ("parity"); Wu designed and led the experiment, using cobalt-60 cooled to near absolute zero at the National Bureau of Standards, that proved them right in early 1957. Lee and Yang received the Nobel Prize in Physics that same year; Wu did not. She went on to become the first woman to serve as president of the American Physical Society (1975) and received the first Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978.

Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958) — physical chemistry and crystallography
Born in London to a prominent family, she read chemistry at Newnham College, Cambridge, and did her doctoral work on the structure of coal. In Paris after the war she became expert in X-ray diffraction, the technique of reading the arrangement of atoms in a solid from the pattern of scattered X-rays. In 1951 she took a fellowship at King's College London to apply the method to DNA. In May 1952 she and her student Raymond Gosling obtained the photograph of the wet "B" form of DNA now known simply as Photo 51, the clearest evidence yet that the molecule was a helix. That photograph and her measurements were shown to James Watson and Francis Crick without her knowledge, and were essential to the double-helix model they published in 1953. She moved to Birkbeck College, where she did first-rate work on the structure of viruses, and died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at thirty-seven. The Nobel Prize for the structure of DNA was awarded in 1962 to Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins; the prize is not given posthumously.

All of these are in print or easy to find at a good library. I have put the ones I would hand to a first-year student at the top of each group. Our college library has every title below; ask at the reference desk for the "Women in Science" shelf, which they kindly set up for me.

Start here: general

• Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries (1993). Fourteen women, including Curie, Meitner, McClintock and Wu (who did not win, which is rather the point). If you read one book from this page, read this one.
• Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (1982), and the second volume, Before Affirmative Action, 1940–1972 (1995). Scholarly and thorough; the place to go when you want to know how the institutions worked.
• Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (1985). Harder going, but it will change the questions you ask.

Marie Curie

• Susan Quinn, Marie Curie: A Life (1995). The best modern biography, and unflinching about the years after Pierre's death.
• Eve Curie, Madame Curie (1937). Written by her younger daughter. Adoring, but a classic, and still the book most of us read first.

Lise Meitner

• Ruth Lewin Sime, Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics (1996). Definitive. Sime is a chemist, and her account of the fission work and of the 1944 Nobel decision is careful and damning.

Emmy Noether

• Auguste Dick, Emmy Noether, 1882–1935 (English translation, 1981). Short; the only biography in English. The mathematics is summarized rather than taught.

Barbara McClintock

• Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (1983). Written the year she won the Nobel, from long interviews. Wonderful on how she actually thought.

Grace Hopper

• Charlene W. Billings, Grace Hopper: Navy Admiral and Computer Pioneer (1989). Written for younger readers, but it is the most complete account between covers that I have found. A full scholarly biography is overdue.

Rachel Carson

• Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962). Read the original. It is better written than almost anything published about it since, and the science holds up.
• Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us (1951). To see why people loved her before they argued about her.
• Linda Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (1997). The full biography, and a big one.

Chien-Shiung Wu

• There is no full-length biography of Wu in English that I know of as of this writing. The chapter in McGrayne (above) is the best starting point; your library's physics section will have textbook accounts of the parity experiment.

Rosalind Franklin

• Anne Sayre, Rosalind Franklin and DNA (1975). Written by a friend, in answer to the book below. Partisan, and necessary.
• James D. Watson, The Double Helix (1968). Read it, then read Sayre, then decide for yourself. My students find this pairing the most instructive thing on the whole list.

The chemistry and history departments are co-sponsoring four talks this fall in the science center auditorium. All are Thursdays at 4:15 p.m., free and open to the public, with tea beforehand at 3:45. Bring your questions; the speakers have asked for a lively room.

Added Sept. 20: the November 18 panel will be held in the larger lecture hall, since last year's Carson talk overflowed.

You will notice a pattern in these lives: the credit arrives late, or goes to someone else, or comes after the woman is dead. It would be easy to read the page as a list of injustices, and some of it is. But notice the other pattern too. Every one of these women did the work anyway, usually for decades, usually because she found it more interesting than anything else on offer. McClintock's corn. Wu's cobalt. Franklin's photographs. That is the part I most want you to take away, and it is why the reading list is longer than the biographies.

If you read something from this list and want to talk about it, my office hours are posted on my door, and e-mail is fine too. I read slowly and answer slowly, but I answer.

Corrections are welcome and will be credited. If you find a factual error above, please tell me which book contradicts it, and I will fix it promptly.