Paper short abstract:

This paper will analyze the changing presentation of Marie Curie to the Japanese public through articles published in various magazines from 1910s to 1930s. In particular, it will deal with the intersection of the two images of Curie as a scientist and as a woman.

Paper long abstract:

Long before the translation of her biography was published in the late 1930s, the Japanese public was well acquainted with the name of Marie Skłodowska Curie (1867-1934). References to her work and achievements appeared no less than twenty times between 1910 and 1912 in "Mukudori tsūshin" (The Starling's Reports), the column about world's news that Mori Ōgai wrote in the literary magazine "Subaru". As the discoverer of radium, she was featured in several articles, starting in 1912 with the ones by physic Nagaoka Hantarō (1865-1950), who had met her in person in Paris. Moreover, from the 1920s, in addition to scientific magazines, portrayals of 'Madame Curie' (Kyurī fujin) began to appear in women's magazines as "Fujin no tomo", emphasizing her significance not only as a scientist but as a woman one. Her death in 1934 and the biography written by her daughter Ève in 1937 whipped up further interest in her life and work in the late 1930s, which took shape in a number of articles and even in a drama by playwright and stage director Kitamura Kihachi (1898-1960) in 1940.

This paper will analyze the changing presentation of Marie Curie to the Japanese public through articles published in various magazines from 1910s to 1930s. In particular, it will deal with the intersection of the two images of Curie as a scientist and as a woman, which took shape in different combinations depending on time and target audience, to show to what extent her gender was perceived as an asset or as an obstacle to her successfulness as a scientist. Winner of two Nobel prizes and internationally renowned as a scientist of distinction, Marie Curie embodied an intersection of gender and science that was unique for Japan, where women were not admitted at universities before 1912 and where the first woman to receive a doctoral degree in science, Yasui Kono (1880-1971), earned it not before 1927.