The real dates
Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911. She had already shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, with her husband Pierre Curie and with Henri Becquerel, which made the 1911 award her second. Dorothy Hodgkin won the chemistry prize in 1964, and Curie’s daughter Irene Joliot-Curie had won it in 1935. Nothing of the kind happened in 1967: no woman won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry that year.
Marie Curie’s two prizes
Curie was born Maria Sklodowska in Warsaw in 1867 and moved to Paris to study. Her early work on radioactivity, a term she is credited with helping to establish, led to the discovery of two new elements, polonium and radium. The 1903 prize in physics recognised the study of radiation phenomena. The 1911 prize in chemistry was awarded for the discovery of those two elements and for the isolation of radium and study of its compounds.
She is generally described as the first person to win Nobel Prizes in two different scientific fields, and the first woman to win a Nobel Prize of any kind. After Pierre’s death in a street accident in 1906, she took over his teaching post at the Sorbonne, which is reported to have made her the first woman to teach there. She died in 1934, and the fuller story of her physics prize belongs with the radioactivity discoveries covered elsewhere on this site.
Irene Joliot-Curie and Dorothy Hodgkin
Irene Joliot-Curie shared the 1935 chemistry prize with her husband Frederic Joliot for the synthesis of new radioactive elements. The two Curie prizes therefore make a mother-and-daughter pair in the chemistry record.
Dorothy Hodgkin won in 1964, awarded to her alone, for determining the structures of important biochemical substances using X-ray techniques. Her work included penicillin and vitamin B12, and she later worked on the structure of insulin, which was solved in 1969. Hodgkin was British, and her prize came just three years before 1967, which is part of why the year is sometimes mistakenly linked to women in science.
Later women laureates in chemistry exist, but they are outside the scope of this period. Anyone interested in the wider pattern may also want to look at the other Nobel disciplines, such as Gerty Cori in medicine or Elinor Ostrom in economics, each covered in a separate article.
What the science of 1967 actually looked like
Real scientific news in 1967 was elsewhere. In the summer and autumn, Jocelyn Bell, then a graduate student at Cambridge working under Antony Hewish, noticed an unusual signal in the chart recordings from a new radio telescope. The signal repeated at very regular intervals. After checking for interference, the team announced the source in early 1968, and the objects were soon recognised as rapidly rotating neutron stars. The pulsar discovery is one of the standout stories of the year, and it involved a woman at the centre of the observation.
The Nobel committee later gave the 1974 Physics prize to Hewish, together with Martin Ryle, for different aspects of radio astronomy, and Bell was not included. That decision drew a good deal of comment at the time and since. It is a reminder that credit for scientific work, especially for women, was not always assigned fairly.
Elsewhere in science, the year brought the first human heart transplant in December, performed in Cape Town. In space, the Apollo programme suffered the Apollo 1 fire in January, which killed three astronauts, and the Soviet Union lost cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov in April. None of these involved a Nobel Prize for a woman, but they show how busy the year was.
Why the title’s premise is wrong
There are two common reasons for a mix-up. The first is that popular lists of “firsts” often leave out the date, so a milestone from 1911 gets attached to a year that is better known for other events. The second is that the many 1960s milestones in civil rights and space exploration create an impression that all “firsts” belong to that decade. In fact, the record of women in Nobel science began with Curie more than a half-century before.