Author: Eve Curie
When Maria was 16, she graduated at the top of her class and made a pact with her sister Bronya. They both desperately wanted to study science and medicine, but at the time, women weren’t allowed to attend university in Poland. The next option was Paris – but they were broke. And so they cooked up a plan to work for a few years, save every extra penny, and study in secret.
While working as private tutors, they attended Poland’s “Floating University” – an illegal academy for the higher education of women, with ever-changing clandestine locations throughout Poland. They never got degrees, of course, but they met dozens of other strong and brilliant women during their studies.
Though Maria and Bronya scrimped and saved, the money just wasn’t enough. Maria changed their plan and sought a position as a live-in governess in the country, where room and board was free. She urged Bronya to go to Paris to study medicine and promised she’d send half of her salary. Once Bronya could work as a doctor, she would then support Maria.
After a hard day’s work as a governess, Maria would retreat to her room and study obsessively into the night: physics, sociology, anatomy, physiology . . . and though her interests were broad, she found that math and physics interested her most. Her father supported her efforts from Warsaw and would regularly send her complex math problems. He advised her to never stop learning, or she’d fall behind.
But Maria’s life in the country wasn’t all work and no play. She became close to Bronka, a daughter of the family she was living with, and together they illegally taught Polish peasant children to read. Twenty shy but eager children would regularly attend night classes in the family’s kitchen.
Maria and the family’s oldest son, Casimir, another math wiz, fell deeply in love and decided to marry. But Kazimierz’s parents were furious and refused to let their firstborn son marry a penniless employee. Maria’s positive relationship with the family soured, and Kazimierz retracted his proposal.
Maria, humiliated and heartbroken, fell into a long depression, but she didn’t quit the job. She worked, saved, and sent money to Paris until Bronya finished her degree – as one of only three women of a thousand med students. Bronya kept her word and urged Maria to come to Paris as soon as she had an income of her own. And so, in 1903, after eight long years, Maria packed her bags and boarded the train to Paris. She was finally off to the Sorbonne.
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