The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science Book

A beautifully written and extremely well-researched book. The best non-fiction book I've read in ages. I loved des Jardins' developed of the "Curie Complex", as captured on the final page of the book: "The persistent presumption that women must be more devoted, more myopic, more talented than men is a sign that modern womanhood is still defined by traditional domesticity to some degree, and modern science is still defined as its antithesis". Amen. This book educated me about the historical details rarely told in popular science books, aside from the story of Rosalind Franklin. Sad to say, I had never heard of Gilbreth, Cannon, Mayer, Yalow, Keller or Galdikas before I read this book. Now I know their stories, and recognize that women's struggles to break through the laboratory technician's "glass ceiling" into the realms of the principal investigators/"big thinkers" date back at last as far as the "computers" at the Harvard Observatory in the 1880's. Des Jardin's explains so clearly the reasons behind some fields' (for example, primatology) historical openness to women, and other fields' historical disregard for women (i.e. physics, mathematics, engineering). I only wish Des Jardins had included my own field, geological sciences. Maybe in her next book.....