The immutable conflict: reconciling the laboratory and the heart for women of science

“ This laxity of morals in the female world is certainly more captivating to a libertine imagination than the cold arguments of reason, that give no sex to virtue. If beautiful weakness be interwoven in a woman's frame, if the chief business of her life be (as you insinuate) to inspire love, and Nature has made an eternal distinction between the quaities that dignify a rational being and this animal perfection, her duty and happiness in this life must clash with any preparation for a more exalted state. ”

“ We have, to say the least, no more necessity for it than yourselves; only we have nothing else to do with our hearts. When women have other objects in life, they are not apt to fall in love. I can think of many women distinguished in art, literature, and science,—and multitudes whose hearts and minds find good employment in less ostentatious ways,—who lead high, lonely lives, and are conscious of no sacrifice so far as your sex is concerned."
"And Hilda will be one of these!" said Kenyon sadly ”

“ A thousand distractions divert man. Fame, riches, power, pleasure, all struggle in his bosom to displace the sentiment of love. They are its rivals, not rarely its masters. But woman knows no such distractions. One passion only sits enthroned in her bosom; one only idol is enshrined in her heart, knowing no rival, no successor. This passion is love! This idol is its object.
This is not fancy, not rhetoric; it is the language of cold and exact science, pronounced from the chair of history, from the bureau of the statistician, from the dissecting table of the anatomist. ”

“ Ramage, by a hundred skilful hints had led her to realize that the problem of her own life was inseparably associated with, and indeed only one special case of, the problems of any woman’s life, and that the problem of a woman’s life is love. ”

“ I have been frequently questioned, especially by women, how I could reconcile family life with a scientific career. Well, it has not been easy; ”

“ Her confidence that honour for a woman can signify only a means of winning love; her complaint that life denies to the woman of genius the fulfilment of her most beautiful dream, love in marriage, were the prologue to innumerable tragedies during woman’s century. ”

“ But it was a painful and unnatural conflict between an ingenuous character and a taunting pride—a war between thought and tenderness. Wo to the heart that dares such a struggle! Aspiration may bring a temporary solace, excitement a momentary balm; but never yet, in all the tear-chronicled records of genius, has woman found peace in praise, or compensation in applause. It is enough for her to obtain, in the dangerous arena of competition, a brief refuge, a transient forgetfulness; love once branded with those words—in vain, may win nothing more enduring this side of heaven. ”

“ But, my Chevalier Bayard, one thing I do intend to say most decidedly, and that is, that your lunge at female intellect was as unnecessary and ill-timed and ill-bred as it was ill-natured. The mental equality of the sexes is now as unquestioned, as universally admitted, as any other well-established fact in science or history; and the sooner you men gracefully concede us our rights, the sooner we shall cease wrangling, and settle back into our traditional amiability. ”

“ She thought that women were not made for the struggle and turmoil of life—their place was the little world, the home; that their power lay not in votes but in influence over men and in making the minds of their children fine and splendid.
“Women should understand men’s affairs, perhaps,” said Miss Garvice, “but to mingle in them is just to sacrifice that power of influencing they can exercise now.”
“There IS something sound in that position,” said Capes, intervening as if to defend Miss Garvice against a possible attack from Ann Veronica. ”

“ She felt that he didn't love her more than he loved his science, and science exacted an uninterrupted and undivided service. One life hadn't room enough for two such loves, and he might not have done so much if she had been there, calling back his thoughts, drawing his passion to herself. ”

“ Can we fully imagine the regret of an enthusiastic and disinterested worker in a great work, who is retarded in the realization of his dream by the constant lack of means? And can we think without a feeling of profound grief of the waste—the one irreparable one—of the nation's greatest asset: the genius, the powers, and the courage of its best children?
Pierre Curie had always in mind his urgent need for a good laboratory. ”

“ She learned of his longing for his laboratory, of the sacrifice it had cost him to abandon it, of his despair about the Sanatorium, money worries, all the irk domestic life held for him. What was more terrible, she gleaned in broken fragments, halting and disjointed, as though even in his delirium he had an instinct to hide it, something of the way he had struggled with himself to evade her coming into his life, of his mental resistance until the last, of the pity which rather than love had moved him to ask her to marry him, of his dread of her past, and fear for their future. ”

“ For the admirable gift of himself, and for the magnificent service he renders humanity, what reward does our society offer the scientist? Have these servants of an idea the necessary means of work? Have they an assured existence, sheltered from care? The example of Pierre Curie, and of others, shows that they have none of these things; and that more often, before they can secure possible working conditions, they have to exhaust their youth and their powers in daily anxieties. Our society, in which reigns an eager desire for riches and luxury, does not understand the value of science. ”

“ But modern love does not only seek to combine all human relationships; it would fain include work, recreation, art. The instinctive jealousy of every occupation which she does not share with her lover, is nothing more than a loving woman's fear that the things which belong to him exclusively may become a danger to the unity of love. Whether such an all-absorbing love is possible in richly-endowed natures, and whether it will not be the cause of new conflict, are questions which cannot here be entered upon. But one thing is certain: the great love cannot find its consummation on earth. ”

“ No more will then be heard of her being made of a finer material than man is made of; and, on the contrary, no more will then be heard of her being but the complement of man, and of its taking both a man and a woman (the woman, of course, but a small part of it) to make up a unit. No more will it then be said that there is sex in mind—an original sexual difference in intellect. What a pity that so many of our noblest women make this foolish admission! It is made by the great majority of the women who plead the cause of woman. ”

“ Though through the dim past we find women still making discoveries, and in the feudal ages possessing knowledge of both medicine and surgery, it is but recently that they have been welcomed as practitioners into the medical profession. Looking back scarcely a hundred years, we find science much indebted to woman for some of its most brilliant discoveries. In 1736, the first medical botany was given to the world by Elizabeth Blackwell, a woman physician, whom the persecutions of her male compeers had cast into jail for debt. ”

“ Ramage had said; “a woman comes into life thinking instinctively how best she may give herself.”
She noted that as a good saying, and it germinated and spread tentacles of explanation through her brain. The biological laboratory, perpetually viewing life as pairing and breeding and selection, and again pairing and breeding, seemed only a translated generalization of that assertion. And all the talk of the Miniver people and the Widgett people seemed always to be like a ship in adverse weather on the lee shore of love. ”

“ He was always doing his best to call her attention to the fact that he was a man of spirit and quality and experience, and she a young and beautiful woman, and that all sorts of constructions upon their relationship were possible, trusting her to go on from that to the idea that all sorts of relationships were possible. She responded with an unfaltering appearance of insensibility, and never as a young and beautiful woman conscious of sex; always in the character of an intelligent girl student.
His perception of her personal beauty deepened and quickened with each encounter. ”

“ We lived a very single life, interested in common, as we were, in our laboratory experiments and in the preparation of lectures and examinations. During eleven years we were scarcely ever separated, which means that there are very few lines of existing correspondence between us, representing that period. We spent our rest days and our vacations walking or bicycling either in the country near Paris, or along the sea, or in the mountains. ”

“ In all creative scientific work the influence of the surroundings in which one works is of great importance, and a part of the result is due to that influence. For more than twenty years I have worked in the School of Physics and Chemistry. Schützenberger, the first director of the School, was an eminent scientist. I remember with gratitude that he procured for me opportunities for my own investigations when I was yet but an assistant. Later, he permitted Madame Curie to work beside me, an authorization which was at that time far from an ordinary innovation. ”

“ Even if such a woman chooses this partial life and gives herself entirely to work, she will nevertheless be still disturbed, in the domain of personal self-assertion, by the woman’s nature she has in the main suppressed; for she will often be confronted by the choice of not succeeding at all or of succeeding by the means of man, the means she abhorred in him before she herself discovered that it is the struggle for existence which gives the bird of prey its beak and claws. ”

“ And with the other poor, weak, and “sensual” creatures the blood will no doubt continue to be “a strange sap,” which makes the head hot with anguish when it ought to be cool for thought; which forces the heart to beat with longing, when it ought to be still for deciding; which makes the nerves quiver with anxiety, when they ought to be tense for creation.
And it is the consciousness of this which in her innermost heart makes the new woman shy of the love for which she longs. ”

“ She has slept the sleep of death-in-life, for you have willed it so,—and in that sleep she has imperceptibly passed from childhood to womanhood. You—cold as a man of bronze or marble,—have made of her nothing but a ‘subject’ for your science,—and never a breath of love or longing on your part, or even admiration for her beauty, has stirred the virgin-trance in which she lies. And I have marvelled at it—I have thought—and I have prayed;—the gods have answered me, and now I know! ”

“ I hold that, if need be, a man should toil seven years—as Jacob did for Rachel—ruling his passions, to make the home fitting and sweet for her . . ."
"Get the hutch for the pet animal," said Dunkerley, "No. I mean to marry a woman. Female sex always has been in the struggle for existence—no great damage so far—always will be. Tremendous idea—that struggle for existence. Only sensible theory you've got hold of, Lewisham. Woman who isn't fighting square side by side with a man—woman who's just kept and fed and petted is . ”

“ Join heart with heart and hand in hand, and pray for the perfect gift of love to be the spirit and the life of all your work.
Can there be any higher work than this? Can any woman wish for a more womanly work? Can any man think it unworthy of the best of women?
When the greatest men of science devote a large part of their lives to bring in simple language within the reach of all the results of their deepest study, the women of the highest cultivation and of the deepest sympathy may well take up such work as we have attempted here to sketch out. ”