The daughter of one of the most famous female scientists in history, Irène Joliot-Curie was a successful researcher and campaigner for gender equality in her own right.
In 1936 Irène Joliot-Curie was appointed as Undersecretary of State for Scientific Research, making her one of the first three women to hold a role in the French Government. Although Joliot-Curie wasn’t personally passionate about entering a political post, she thought she “must accept it as a sacrifice for the feminist cause in France” and took on the role to ease the way for other women to enter Government.
Throughout her life Joliot-Curie was used to male-dominated environments that were not openly accepting of women. After Irène and her husband and research partner Frédéric Joliot-Curie became the first people to accurately measure the mass of a neutron in 1933, they presented their findings at the Seventh Solvay Conference in Brussels. The audience of 46 distinguished scientists contained only two women - her mother and first woman to win the Nobel Prize, Marie Skłodowska-Curie, and the physicist who helped discover nuclear fission, Lise Meitner.
Born on 12 September 1897, Joliot-Curie was exposed to scientific research from an early age. She finished school not long before the start of the First World War and she gained her diploma as a radiological nurse to support her mother’s efforts to deploy radiology centres close to the front line. At age 18, Joliot-Curie was travelling alone to Amiens and Ypres to set up X-ray equipment in military hospitals and teach surgeons how to use the X-rays to isolate shrapnel for extraction. Her contribution to saving soldiers’ lives was recognised with a military medal after the war ended.
After the war, Joliot-Curie returned to Sorbonne University where she continued her studies, successfully defending her doctoral thesis on the properties of the alpha (α) -rays of Polonium in March 1925. She married her colleague Frédéric Joliot in October 1926, both so dedicated to science that they returned to the laboratory for a few hours after the ceremony.
The Joliot-Curies continued to work together at the Sorbonne and in 1934 published their most important work. By bombarding aluminium foil with alpha particles, they had been able to induce radiation in the previously stable aluminium atoms. This discovery was revolutionary in the field of nuclear medicine; making it possible to create radioactive elements in large enough quantities to treat cancer patients and develop new treatments that are still used today.
In recognition of their work in creating artificial radioactivity, six months later Irène Joliot-Curie became the second woman (after only her mother) to be awarded the Nobel Prize in a science subject, and with her husband, became the second married couple to be awarded the Nobel Prize. This contributes to the five Nobel Prizes received by the Curie family.
Joliot-Curie used her success to help campaign for women’s rights, saying that if the Nobel Prize had put her “a little more in the limelight than on other days, I feel it is my duty to affirm certain ideas that I believe useful for all French women.” She would highlight areas where women did not have the same rights as men, including presenting herself several times to the French Academy of Sciences to draw attention to their refusal to admit women for membership, and was a key speaker at early International Women’s Day conferences.
Joliot-Curie died on 17 March 1956 of a leukaemia that was likely caused by a lifetime spent around radiation. While her achievements have no doubt been overshadowed by those of her mother, her contributions to medicine and feminism still have an impact today.
