Dava Sobel explains why she writes about women in their element and how the secret to power comes from passion.
Written by Liliana J. VanMiddlesworth. Graphic by Miha Palancha.
“As a woman, I didn’t think I could be accused of misogyny, but what else could you call it?”
Dava Sobel, a highly acclaimed and award-winning author of six books, including best-sellers “The Glass Universe” and her most recent success, “The Elements of Marie Curie,” has been a science writer for over fifty years. This Savannah Book Festival attendee has much to say and an overwhelming amount of accreditation on her shoulders. Yet, as I sit in the auditorium filled with hundreds of other faces—primarily women—I can’t believe the words coming out of her mouth.
“And then,” Sobel—a small woman with a big voice—continues. “The only thing worse than that was realizing how common internalized misogyny was among women.”
“For the longest time, I didn’t realize that it was an issue,” says Sobel. In Sobel’s childhood home, science was simply a part of her everyday life. Her mother had a Master’s degree in chemistry, and her father was the local doctor. “His office was in our house, so all the patients and their problems just melded with our home life.”
Growing up in New York, Sobel was fortunate enough to attend the Bronx High School of Science, which at that time admitted boys preferentially to girls in a ratio of about four to one. “Nobody thought that unfair at that time,” Sobel acknowledges. “That was just the way things were in 1960.”
Sobel had the pleasure of returning to her former high school as a commencement speaker and noticed an astounding difference in the numbers. The playing fields have leveled out significantly since the ’60s.
“No one ever made me feel like I was taking the place of some deserving boy. Throughout my entire career, I have no memory of ever being attacked, criticized or discouraged for being a woman in what could be seen as a man’s field. So, I was really ignorant of how many problems women were actually having in the sciences.”
Her first book, “The Glass Universe,” is about a group of women who worked at the Harvard College Observatory, amassing half a million stellar images on glass photographic plates from the late 1890s to the early 1900s.
“I love that title,” Sobel says. Often, there’s a lot of struggle with book titles, but everyone at the publishing house jumped at her clever play on words. After all, the reason a job as important as classifying the stars was handed over to a mere handful of women was because women were cheaper. “They could get four women for the price of one man. And they did. And they knew they would do the work.”
As she was doing research for “The Glass Universe,” a strange thing happened to Sobel. “I kept getting surprised at what they’d done. And that it happened so often that I was really horrified. And I had to admit I came to it with very low expectations. I wondered why that was, given all the advantages I had. And as a woman, I didn’t think I could be accusedof misogyny, but what else could you call it, you know?
“That became a sort of new religion to me. I really wanted to tell stories about women scientists. I wanted to write about women in their element.”
And that’s where Marie Curie—the protagonist of Sobel’s most recent biographical work—takes the stage.
“Marie Curie was a magnet,” says Sobel with a smile. “She defied the world of women in science. She lit the green flame. She was, literally, radioactive.”
According to Sobel, the room Marie Curie worked in had a leak in the glass panes above her. “She was literally working beneath a glass ceiling.”
Sobel is a bit of a power-magnet herself—during the COVID lockdown, Curie became her pandemic pet. Though Curie’sarchived journals were written in French, Sobel was able to translate them. “I’m fluent in Italian. The languages are similar enough, so I was able to make the translations quite easily.”
To this day, Curie is still cited as a heroine and a role model in the world of science and the wide web of working women. She was an amazing humanitarian that left us with a lasting legacy. “But she was really just about what she was doing,”Sobel says.
“‘I don’t know what it is that compels me to do what I do, but I fancy myself a silkworm. I have to keep spinning. Or else I’ll never metamorphose,'” Sobel reads from one of Curie’s letters—a letter that was left out of the American version of the text she translated from French.
When I stand up to ask Sobel if she’s ever experienced misogyny in the world of publishing, she asks me a question in response.
“Is that what you want to do? You want to be an author?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Well, then. What recourse do you have other than to do what you want to do?”
As I walk back to my seat, a man’s voice rises up from the crowd. “Do it! Just do it!”
Sobel is right. Women like astronomers Williamina Fleming and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, physicist and chemist Marie Curie and Dava Sobel herself have left us with legacies that demonstrate to the women of the world that they need not declare that they can do anything a man can—they’ll simply do what they want to do.
