The date
The first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics was Marie Curie, in 1903. That is sixty-four years before 1967, and the prize has no link to that year. She shared the 1903 prize with her husband, Pierre Curie, and with the French physicist Henri Becquerel, for their work on radioactivity. Becquerel was honoured for the discovery of spontaneous radioactivity, and the Curies for their joint research into the radiation he had found.
She was also the first woman to win any Nobel Prize. Her second prize, in chemistry in 1911, is a separate story and is left to the history of Marie Curie and the chemistry award.
What was discovered
In 1896 Becquerel found that uranium salts gave off a penetrating radiation, even without being exposed to light. The finding came soon after the discovery of X-rays, and it opened a new field.
Marie Curie, then a doctoral student in Paris, chose the radiation from uranium as the subject of her thesis. She measured it carefully and noticed that some uranium ores were more active than their uranium content could explain. She concluded that they must contain other, more active elements. She is credited with coining the word “radioactivity” for the phenomenon.
Working with Pierre, who joined her research, the couple identified two new elements in 1898: polonium, which Marie named after her native Poland, and radium. Isolating them required processing large quantities of ore, in a poorly equipped shed that served as a laboratory, and the work was physically demanding. The discoveries of this period are what the Nobel Committee had in mind with the words “radioactivity discoveries”, and they changed physics by suggesting that atoms were not the unchangeable units they had been thought to be.
The 1903 nomination story
The best-known part of the 1903 story concerns who was originally put forward. The Academy’s committee, working from nominations, was reportedly inclined to honour Becquerel and Pierre Curie but not Marie. A member of the committee, the Swedish mathematician Magnus Gosta Mittag-Leffler, who was sympathetic to women in science, is said to have warned Pierre Curie about the proposed wording. Pierre then wrote to the committee pointing out that Marie’s role in the research was central.
As a result, the prize was awarded to the three of them together. The episode shows how fragile her inclusion could have been, and it is often cited as an example of the way women’s contributions to scientific work could be overlooked. Details of the exchange come from later accounts, so it is best described as the generally accepted version.
The ceremony and its aftermath
The Curies did not travel to Stockholm to collect the prize in 1903. Reports usually attribute this to health and teaching commitments, as both were unwell and busy. Pierre gave the Nobel lecture in 1905.
The prize brought money and public attention. It also brought pressures: the couple found the attention intrusive. In 1906 Pierre was killed in a street accident in Paris, and Marie took over his teaching post, becoming the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne in Paris.
The gap before another woman
The wait for the next woman to win the physics prize was long. The next was Maria Goeppert Mayer, who received it in 1963 for her work on the structure of atomic nuclei, sharing it with Hans Jensen and Eugene Wigner. That was sixty years after Curie.
Two more women followed much later, Donna Strickland in 2018, for work on laser pulses, and Andrea Ghez in 2020, for research on the supermassive object at the centre of the Milky Way. The sparse record has been discussed widely, and several explanations are given: the small number of women in the field for most of the century, the lag between work and recognition, and the way credit was assigned to teams.
Physics in 1967
The prize in 1967 went to Hans Bethe for his work on energy production in stars. The same year saw the pulsar discovery by Jocelyn Bell, then a graduate student at Cambridge, which was announced in early 1968 and later became the subject of a debate about credit, since the 1974 physics prize went to her supervisor, Antony Hewish, and to Martin Ryle rather than to her. That story is a reminder that questions about women’s recognition in physics continued well after 1903.
The decade also brought new technologies tied to physics, including the ruby laser, first demonstrated in 1960, a reminder of how far the field had moved since the radium experiments of 1898.
Summary
Marie Curie’s 1903 prize established that a woman could win in the field of physics, and the circumstances of her nomination show how close she came to being left out. The science, the study of radioactivity, laid foundations for nuclear physics and medicine. The decades that passed before the next woman was honoured explain why her name is still the first one given in any list of women who won the prize.