How the World Works, 1930s Version

Here is a bit from a reminiscence by Charles Hirshberg, son of Joan Feynman, sister of Richard Feynman. I find this interesting because it recalls the historical fact that women were much more limited in career choices until "the culture wars" of the 1960s led to a new wave of feminism that final broke the stranglehold male dominance of academia and technical careers:

One night, he roused her from her bed and led her outside, down the street, and onto a nearby golf course. He pointed out washes of magnificent light that were streaking across the sky. It was the aurora borealis. My mother had discovered her destiny.

That is when the trouble started. Her mother, Lucille Feynman, was a sophisticated and compassionate woman who had marched for women's suffrage in her youth. Nonetheless, when 8-year-old Joanie announced that she intended to be a scientist, Grandma explained that it was impossible. "Women can't do science," she said, "because their brains can't understand enough of it." My mother climbed into a living room chair and sobbed into the cushion. "I know she thought she was telling me the inescapable truth. But it was devastating for a little girl to be told that all of her dreams were impossible. And I've doubted my abilities ever since."

The fact that the greatest chemist of the age, Marie Curie, was a woman gave no comfort. "To me, Madame Curie was a mythological character," my mother says, "not a real person whom you could strive to emulate." It wasn't until her 14th birthday-March 31, 1942-that her notion of becoming a scientist was revived. Richard presented her with a book called Astronomy. "It was a college textbook. I'd start reading it, get stuck, and then start over again. This went on for months, but I kept at it. When I reached page 407, I came across a graph that changed my life." My mother shuts her eyes and recites from memory: "'Relative strengths of the Mg+ absorption line at 4,481 angstroms . . . from Stellar Atmospheres by Cecilia Payne.' Cecilia Payne! It was scientific proof that a woman was capable of writing a book that, in turn, was quoted in a text. The secret was out, you see."

The catalog of abuse to which my mother was subjected, beginning in 1944 when she entered Oberlin College, is too long and relentless to fully record. At Oberlin, her lab partner was ill-prepared for the advanced-level physics course in which they were enrolled, so my mother did all the experiments herself. The partner took copious notes and received an A. My mother got a D. "He understands what he's doing," the lab instructor explained, "and you don't." In graduate school, a professor of solid state physics advised her to do her Ph.D. dissertation on cobwebs, because she would encounter them while cleaning. She did not take the advice; her thesis was titled "Absorption of infrared radiation in crystals of diamond-type lattice structure." After graduation, she found that the "Situations Wanted" section of The New York Times was divided between Men and Women, and she could not place an ad among the men, the only place anyone needing a research scientist would bother to look.

At that time, even the dean of women at Columbia University argued that "sensible motherhood" was "the most useful and satisfying of the jobs that women can do." My mother tried to be a sensible mother and it damn near killed her. For three years, she cooked, cleaned, and looked after my brother and me, two stubborn and voluble babies.

One day in 1964 she found herself preparing to hurl the dish drain through the kitchen window and decided to get professional help. "I was incredibly lucky," she remembers, "to find a shrink who was enlightened enough to urge me to try to get a job. I didn't think anyone would hire me, but I did what he told me to do." She applied to Lamont-Doherty Observatory and, to her astonishment, received three offers. She chose to work part-time, studying the relationship between the solar wind and the magnetosphere. Soon she would be among the first to announce that the magnetosphere-the part of space in which Earth's magnetic field dominates and the solar wind doesn't enter-was open-ended, with a tail on one side, rather than having a closed-teardrop shape, as had been widely believed. She was off and running.

It is sure nice to read a story with a happy ending.

You would have thought that having a world famous physicist as an older brother would have helped her to find a job. But I'm guessing that the job market for researchers had no place on the form for "world famous brother". And even if it did, that wouldn't cut any ice. She had to make it on her own. And she did.

But it wasn't all a simple come-from-behind heroic tale of triumph. There were potholes for Joan Feynman. Here's one:

It was 1971 and my mother was working for NASA at Ames Research Center in California. She had just made an important discovery concerning the solar wind, which has two states, steady and transient. The latter consists of puffs of material, also known as coronal mass ejections, which, though long known about, were notoriously hard to find. My mother showed they could be recognized by the large amount of helium in the solar wind. Her career was flourishing. But the economy was in recession and NASA's budget was slashed. My mother was a housewife again. For months, as she looked for work, the severe depression that had haunted her years before began to return.

I guess the lesson is that everybody has a few potholes waiting for them in life. Success is how you manage to get round or over or through them.

By the way, do go look at the original article with a picture of Joan Feynman. I get a kick out of the strong family resemblance with her brother.

And, here are the slides from a talk given this year by Joan Feynman on the recent solar minimum.

Also, if you are looking for something different, something interesting to read, try reading Richard Feynman's "biography", Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!