Marie Curie's Influence On Women

Up until the age of the demand for women’s suffrage, most women would not dare to enter the male-dominated field of science, let alone find a career at all. However, Marie Curie’s discovery of radioactivity inspired women to get involved and sparked many other discoveries and inventions that are vital to how we live today. The fact that Curie was a woman from Russia-controlled Poland amazed people because her discovery was a breakthrough in science. Even today we still use her fundamental discoveries in the medical field, in everyday technology, in households, and in preventing dangerous exposure to radiation. Marie Curie’s discovery of radioactivity paved the path for technological breakthroughs and was a major accomplishment for females in

Curie was born November 7, 1867 in Warsaw, Poland. In that time, Poland was under Russian control and women had very limited educational opportunities. Both of her parents were teachers , but they were poor and her mother died when Marie was only ten years old. Despite this, Curie, as well as her sister Bronia, managed to enroll at the Paris Sorbonne University, where she achieved a degree in physics and mathematics in 1893 and 1894 and met her future husband, Pierre Curie (Griffith). She always had spectacular grades in university as well as high school despite her “nervous disorders”, as she called them, that exhausted her to the point that she felt too tired to do anything (Griffith). The obstacles Marie had to endure- being a female in a male-dominated education system, being a Pole in the 19th century, her mother’s early death, her family’s financial issues, and her battle with severe anxiety- were not enough to make her fail. This is probably due to her supportive family who believed in education for everyone, her driving motivation and work ethic, and her intelligence. These factors contributed to how she would continue with her studies to eventually make the ground-breaking discovery of the

Inventions and procedures based on radiation are still in development today. While some of this technology is 100 percent safe, others can be dangerous and have already caused serious accidents, such as nuclear weapons, which leave devastating casualties. One of the major examples of this are the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings in 1945. The bombings may have killed more than 225,000 people altogether. Scientists studying the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombing survivors found that the occurrence of mental retardation increased among children who received large prenatal doses of radiation (Noto et. al). There have been accidents with nuclear power plants as well. Although most countries have strict regulations for nuclear power plants, such as the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, there have been many devastating accidents over the years, including the famous incident in Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania in 1979 as well as another incident in Chernobyl, Ukraine (Lerner 3652). In the case of a huge accident such as these, "radioactive materials must be isolated from the environment until their radiation level has decreased to a safe level, a process which requires thousands of years for some materials" (Lerner 3650). Not all radiation inventions are so dangerous, though. Smoke detectors are a radioactivity based invention that contain a small amount of 241AM, a radioactive isotope that is involved in