Pioneering Physicist Lise Meitner’s Only Direct Discussion of Gender in Science
“For what human problems do ideal solutions exist?”
By Maria Popova
“The female mind has demonstrated a capacity for all the mental acquirements and
Pioneering Physicist Lise Meitner’s Only Direct Discussion of Gender in Science
“For what human problems do ideal solutions exist?”
By Maria Popova
“The female mind has demonstrated a capacity for all the mental acquirements and achievements of men, and as generations ensue that capacity will be expanded,” Nikola Tesla asserted in his prescient and then-countercultural 1926 vision for women’s intellectual empowerment. The average woman, he predicted, “will be as well educated as the average man, and then better educated, for the dormant faculties of her brain will be stimulated to an activity that will be all the more intense and powerful because of centuries of repose.”
Tesla was born a generation before the great Austrian physicist Lise Meitner (November 7, 1878–October 27, 1968), who would go on to embody his vision and pave the way for women in science.
Despite showing an aptitude for mathematics from an early age, Meitner didn’t have the same educational avenues for pursuing her passion as her male peers. When her formal schooling ended at age fourteen, Austrian universities did not yet admit women. She had to wait almost a decade — a decade filled with voracious self-schooling — before pursuing her Ph.D., which she obtained in 1905, becoming one of a handful of women to have achieved a doctorate in physics in the entire history of the world up to that point.
But when 29-year-old Meitner arrived in Berlin with her hard-earned doctorate in tow, hoping to further her studies by learning from the great Max Planck, she was shocked to find herself in a time machine — German universities were still closed to women and she had to obtain special permission to attend Planck’s lectures. Shortly thereafter she met her collaborator, the chemist Otto Hahn, and had to consent to working in the basement of a male-only building in order to collaborate with Hahn, who was allowed to climb the floors while Meitner remained confined to below ground — one couldn’t dream up a better metaphor.
This uphill battle culminated with Meitner’s exclusion from the Nobel Prize awarded for the very discovery she herself had made. She continued to fight bias with the most potent weapon there is — consistently excellent work — and lived her long life with tremendous dignity and tenacity, but almost never spoke about the systemic discrimination she encountered.
At the age of eighty, during her 1959 visit to the United States, Meitner was invited to give a series of lectures at Bryn Mawr College. One of them, originally delivered on April 5 of that year, was later published under the title “The Status of Women in the Professions” — an erudite and beautifully well-rounded rhetorical voyage that flows across geopolitics, literature, art, theology, and science. The piece, to which I was led by a footnote in Ruth Lewin Sime’s excellent biography Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics (public library), remains Meitner’s most direct discussion of gender in intellectual advancement and self-actualization. It offers a rare glimpse of a pioneer’s plight, revealing how far we’ve come and jolting us into the uncomfortable but necessary awareness of how far we have yet to go. Although it was written more than half a century ago, in its astonishing resonance to issues with which we are still grappling, it bears a resemblance to A Rap on Race — Margaret Mead and James Baldwin’s strikingly timely 1970 conversation about racial equality.
With an eye to the trailblazing anthropological work of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, who demonstrated the wide range of tasks which tribal societies assign to women, Meitner writes:
The development of the professional and legal equality of women can only be properly understood if one remembers how many accepted customs had to be overcome in the struggle for the emancipation of women.
There were sharp adversaries and passionate advocates of the emancipation and higher education of women, and both were found among men as well as women. The literature that grew up around this is understandably of great variety, since so many questions are tied up with it: political and economic conditions, cultural and moral attitudes and institutions, in brief, everything that belongs to the pattern of culture of a society.
Pointing out how greatly these arguments have varied in motivation, Meitner writes:
When we look for male supporters of the higher education of women and of their professional equality with me, then it is remarkable how few men of general reputation we find.
On the other hand, you find a considerable number of very respectable names among those men who — form the most varied viewpoints — have made strong objections to the higher education of women and to their admission to various professions. Those attacks against women’s emancipation were directed partly against training in certain professions, partly in principle against any kind of higher education for women, ambitions that got lumped together as “emancipation or women” or “feminism.”
In a vital antidote to our cultural myopia, Meitner reminds us 