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She tells her story with careful pacing and precise detail, illustrating each injustice with jaw-dropping quotes and solid facts. While, at this point, you may feel the need to take a break and knock a hole through a wall, Zernike’s excellent reporting forces you to read on. And lest you think we’re still stuck in the 1960s, this was 1992 - “the Year of the Woman.” He and another scientist had a plan to make millions from textbooks, videos and CD-ROMs - all based on seven years of joint work.

Her popular Introduction to Biology course was commandeered by a trusted co-developer of the class. Then, as Zernike relates, came yet another blow. Reading the litany of indignities she suffered - a tiny lab space, a salary well below that of her male colleagues, her name omitted from papers - you’ll find yourself wondering not just why she stayed for decades, but how.

Even when she had to choose between science and marriage (spoiler alert: Science won), she still found herself laboring under a sexist system. Or at least the bench.īecause despite Hopkins’s belief that science should be meritocratic, it was not. amended the law to include the word “sex.” For women like Hopkins, it was a signal that the playing field had been leveled. In 1964, the Johnson administration prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, religion or national origin. They will fail in their present roles as women if they do.”īut Hopkins also believed in the promise of affirmative action. They are not, in my opinion, going to stop getting married and/or having children. In 1969, the assistant Harvard dean Francis “Skiddy” von Stade wrote, “I do not see highly educated women making startling strides in contributing to our society in the foreseeable future. Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” had just been published, famously identifying this conflict as “the problem that has no name.” Hopkins assumed “that by diagnosing the problem the books had solved it - they had made it possible for her and the other young women of 1964 to have a life outside the home.”

Later, she was sexually assaulted by a colleague.Īnd yet, Hopkins believed things were changing, maybe quickly enough to allow her to be both a scientist and a wife and mother. Her introduction to Francis Crick started not with a handshake, but with his placing his hands on her breasts. While she loved her work, it was not without its regular humiliations. As the years ticked by, Zernike shows us Hopkins numbering her days in the lab with a palpable resignation. She was enthralled with Watson he’d not only given her a position in his lab but encouraged her to pursue a Ph.D. Hopkins hadn’t yet heard Franklin’s side of the story. For many years, Franklin received no credit. He would later go on to claim that she had no idea what her photograph contained - implying that she wasn’t bright enough to understand her own work. And Watson knew it - he’d been shown her photograph without her permission.Īccording to Watson, Franklin was “something of a termagant”: unpleasant, unfeminine, stubborn, lacking lipstick.

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It’s there she was first introduced to the double helix, “the code that gave form and function to all of nature.” The next year, Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins would win the Nobel Prize for their discovery of DNA.īut their groundbreaking discovery had already been made by somebody else it was Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray crystallography that first revealed the double helix. She found her calling in James Watson’s introductory biology course. A fate she thought of as a kind of death by privilege.” Without such a regimented plan, Hopkins knew that she, like so many bright women of her generation, could, as Zernike puts it, “easily slide from graduation to marriage, a dog, children, the suburbs.

Then she’d move into Phase 2: marriage and children. Hopkins set a timeline: She wanted to do something to alleviate human suffering within 10 years. But it was the early 1960s women at high levels of science were as rare as snow leopards.

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