A Singularly Unfeminine Profession

The following sections are included:

• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents

I was walking home from school, up the steep driveway, towards the very large and very old house that we shared with two other faculty families. Before, we had lived in a very large and very old faculty house all to ourselves. I don't remember, or perhaps never knew, why we had to leave it. It was a lot more fun. It had once been owned by a woman who put a large vat filled with sand in the attic to catch an atomic bomb when it fell. She was perhaps not so eccentric as one might think — those were also the days when we had to practice ducking under our classroom desks as preparation for a nuclear attack. The sand-filled vat was still in the house — an attraction that my brother and I would escort our friends to the attic to admire. The bedrooms had built-in closets with large drawers at the bottom. My friend Eleanor and I would amuse ourselves by pulling out the closet drawers in adjoining rooms and then peering at each other through the open hole in the wall. My older brother George was convinced that the house was a station on the Underground Railroad, the escape route for former slaves, and I once caught him (and promptly told our mother) dismantling the fireplace to find irrefutable evidence for his claim…

The scholarship took me to Hollins College, near Roanoke, Virginia, and the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains. It was a Proctor and Gamble four year scholarship: full tuition (which in private schools included housing and meals) plus an allowance for books. I later found out that a mistake had been made; I wasn't supposed to have gotten such a generous offer. If not for that mistake, I probably would have gone to Bryn Mawr, which at the last minute offered me a partial scholarship. It also turned out that Hollins at the time (at what today seems to be a minuscule amount: $2000 per year) was the most expensive college in the nation. As a result I was plunged into another world: debutantes, high society girls who went to college — sometimes only for a couple of years — until they found the right marriage material. Times change, and many of my classmates have excelled in real life — notably in literature. I also found a few soul-mates there, some of whom have remained close (but not frequently seen) friends throughout my life. My first roommate was Jackie Silverman, who was responsible for my acquiring a Jewish boyfriend, because of her connections with the Jewish fraternity at nearby Washington and Lee University. She left school after two years to get married the summer I was scheduled to be in Europe. My only regret was that I missed the chance to be the maid of honor in a Jewish wedding. After that I roomed with Lillian Shepherd, who was my roommate in Paris, and later in New York, along with another classmate, Peggy Marshall. Peggy is the one I have been closest to throughout the years, especially since we both ended up living in the area of Geneva, Switzerland…

Probably the best thing that Dorothy Montgomery ever did for me was to get me to apply for a summer student position at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) on Long Island during the summers after my junior and senior years at Hollins. I was very likely accepted because of her influence and because of my experience in the Paris lab, which she had previously arranged. It was the Brookhaven experience that got me hooked on high energy, or particle, physics — and changed the course of my life. Nowadays it is standard for undergraduates aspiring to do graduate studies to get such an experience, often through the National Science Foundation (NSF) program called Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU). However, I frequently get requests from undergraduates to work with me on a theory project for a summer, for which I have no means to support them, and, more importantly, no work to give them at their level of expertise. I always advise them to try to join an experimental group to find out what particle physics is really about…

Not really Paris. Orsay, a small village on the outskirts of Paris, near a metro station, but not much else. Although I was attending classes, I was also learning how to be a housewife, and was alone most of the time. I remember our friend Mel Schwartz visiting our apartment and saying: “She will make a great housewife.” Not a very encouraging remark. Years later Mel learned better, when I had become an expert on kaon physics, and a consultant to his group at the SLAC accelerator at Stanford University. Once he was railing about a woman whose writing or advocacy he objected to, saying that she'd be better off staying at home and taking care of her children. His wife Marilyn asked: “What about Mary K?” to which Mel replied: “Mary K is doing important and useful work”…

My husband Jean-Marc was offered a six-year staff position at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland. So just a year after moving to France (and then spending part of this time at Columbia), I moved once again. We drove across France from Paris in separate deux chevaux, with baby Alain parked in the back seat of mine. Again relying on my husband's connections, I got a basement office where there were up to five residents at a time. I shared it variously with such luminaries as J. M. Jauch and E. C. G. Stückelberg (and his dog), as well as other young hangers-on like myself: Cecilia Jarlskog, Jacques Soffer and his wife, and maybe others that I don't remember. I also got the chance to work with Antonio Stanghellini, an extremely nice Italian theorist who was teaching me about resonances; these are strongly interacting particles that rapidly decay into lighter hadrons; “hadron” — from the Greek word for thick or heavy — is the name for strongly interacting particles like the proton, neutron and pion, and their strange counterparts. Unfortunately, Stanghellini died three months after I started working under his tutelage. Since I was nominally enrolled as a student in Orsay, Bernard d'Espagnat, a professor there who was on leave at CERN, agreed to take me on as his thesis student. This was perhaps a fortunate turn of events, because it got me into weak interactions, the area where I first made a mild mark…

I'm not sure how it happened. I was desperate to spend some time away from CERN, where I was increasingly uncomfortable with my status. We had spent a month or two at Rutherford Lab in England, where I was invited to give several talks on my work on kaons. Those were a happy couple of months. I also wanted a longer visit to my home country than the one or two months we had been there on a few occasions since my move to Europe. Then one day we were having lunch at CERN with Leon Lederman, and I think he suggested that we spend a year at Fermilab. He wasn't the director then; it was Bob Wilson. Perhaps it helped that Jean- Marc and I had both been session organizers at the ICHEP conference that was held at Fermilab the previous summer. So, after my coaxing Jean- Marc somewhat, we took off for a year in the States, which turned out to be a pivotal point in my life. Fermilab was a very new, and still unfinished, laboratory when we arrived. Our offices were in barracks, and I remember trudging through the snow to lunch with my friend Shirley Ann Jackson, who was a postdoc there (and is now president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), but that's another story, remarkable in its own right). At some point during that year the “high-rise” was completed, and we moved in. At first Bob Wilson had insisted that there would be no closed offices, only cubicles, but the theorists revolted, insisting that they needed quiet private offices. So these were finally provided, except for students and postdocs. Even these were somewhat less than private. Through the wall, I reluctantly heard many phone conversations my neighbor had with his new wife — I particularly remember one about her choice of a hairdryer. There was a fledgling theory group, with Ben Lee as director, some postdocs and mostly visitors like myself. By then I had garnered some reputation for my work on kaon physics, and I was frequently invited to give talks around the country. So frequently that my son Alain, in seventh grade at the time, remarked: “You seem to be more famous here than in France,” an observation that occasioned some reflection on my part…

Our family returned to CERN in the fall of 1974. I was suddenly very much in demand. I was appointed to a committee to discuss how CERN could step up its own search for charm. What I mostly remember about that committee is that Sergio Fubini, a former theory group leader and CERN elder statesman, was reading either Time or Newsweek throughout most of the discussion, and that the meetings were in a director's conference room on the top floor of a small tower, with no women's restroom…

Although our work was widely cited, and I was invited to give many talks, I began to feel increasingly uncomfortable with my status as a sort of “permanent visitor” at CERN. John and I were mentoring a number of CERN Fellows; I even became the “official” mentor to one Fellow, Jan Finjord, when a mentoring policy was established in the theory group. So to get a different perspective on life I started spending summers, or parts of summers, at Fermilab, where I felt much more comfortably accepted as “a physicist.” During most of these visits I had some or all of my children with me, and sometimes Jean-Marc joined us for part of the time. Once or twice my daughter Dominique had a summer job there as a gardener. Leon Lederman, by then the Director of Fermilab, loved to tell the story of how Dominique casually walked into his office during a meeting he was having with Erwin Schopper, the CERN Director-General, and asked (or rather demanded) to borrow 10 dollars. I also remember jogging around the main accelerator ring, sometimes with Dominique, sometimes with Leon, and once with my old Columbia classmate, Lillian Hartmann (now Lillian Hoddeson), who had become a respected historian of physics. Since we had about 15 years of our interim lives to recount, it was a very news-filled jog…

We rented a car near the San Francisco airport and drove to a beach-side motel in Santa Cruz. We woke up to a gray, overcast day. Looking out at the fog hanging over Monterey Bay, Bruno said: “This is sunny California?” It was the first of many negative reactions my son had to his new environment. He experienced some culture shock at the El Cerrito High School he attended, and went back to France (accompanied by Couscous) after one year, but eventually returned to earn degrees in math and economics at UC Berkeley. After visiting the beautiful Santa Cruz campus and seeing Dominique settled in her residential college (although she moved out fairly soon and took a shared apartment downtown), Bruno and I drove to the house in Kensington, near Berkeley, that we were renting from a professor who was on sabbatical leave. He had canceled all his utilities and telephone accounts, and by the time we arrived there was no electricity. So Bruno and I went to a movie and came home to a dark house. It was no easy feat for me to open my own accounts, since I had no credit record. Getting a credit card was even harder. (I don't remember how I was able to rent the car without one, but we kept it for a very long time. We finally got around to buying our own car when we were going out of town and needed Dominique to chauffeur young Bruno; she was under 19 and could not drive a rental car.) Credit cards were not commonly used when I left the States in 1961, and did not become common in Europe until after I went back to the US, so I had never possessed one. During my time at Fermilab I had used a lab card for business travel. Dave Jackson lent me some dollars so I could open a bank account, in which my salary was deposited monthly, but when I applied for a credit card at the same bank, I was told they had “no way to verify” my salary. I wrote back that they were idiots, and they finally issued me a card with a credit limit of a few hundred dollars, which I quickly exceeded on travel to meetings, resulting in an immediate increase in the credit limit. By that time Bruno Zumino had sponsored me for an American Express card and a Macy's card, so I gradually started building up a credit record. Fortunately my offer from Berkeley included a university guaranteed mortgage at a 12% interest rate (as opposed to the then prevailing rate of about 18%), provided I buy a house by the end of 1982, which coincided with the date our landlord would reclaim his house. Maya Trilling, a realtor whose husband, George, was our colleague in the physics department, must have shown us about 100 houses. After getting over the price shock, we finally found a house we both liked — a private garden for me, and a view of the Golden Gate bridge for Bruno — just before the guaranteed mortgage was about to expire. There were two bids, which turned out to be identical, but the guaranteed loan won us the house…

I am still smoking. I should not admit to it. I know it's bad for my health and no one should ever start. I've voted more than once for raising taxes on cigarettes in California. I no longer smoke in my own house. Of course I learned long ago to forgo smoking in classes, lectures and interviews, in airplanes, meetings and so on. In those circumstances I don't miss it, but I still become desperate for a cigarette when it's allowed. In my later life, I had gum surgery with the after-effect that I can become very uncomfortable if I don't clean my teeth immediately after a meal; this becomes an urgent need when I know it's possible, but I seem to be able to forget about it when I'm out to dinner somewhere, with maybe a whole opera afterward. Perhaps these reflexes account for my early ability to accept life as it was, including a second-class status, but somehow not forever. Maybe this adaptability was part of my survival mechanism…

Once I returned to the US I was immediately drafted onto numerous committees. I had barely arrived when I got a call from a representative of the CSWP (Committee on the Status of Women in Physics) of the American Physical Society (APS). They instructed me to join the APS and nominated me for a Fellowship before my department at Berkeley had time to get around to doing so. Then in 1983 I found myself serving on the CSWP, and two years later as its chair. The APS also set up a “blue ribbon” panel on Academic Positions for Women in Physics and Astronomy, which was supposed to enable the transfer of women physicists from industry and government laboratories to academia, where they would have a greater impact as role models. The only problem was that, except for the first meeting, the male members of the panel — who had the most clout — never showed up. I put one woman physicist in contact with a university that had a position open, but that's as far as it got. In the end the panel accomplished nothing and was disbanded…

I became a feminist by necessity. My passion was physics. My feminism was a byproduct of the obstacles that I faced in that pursuit. I remember that a remark I made to my friend Grace Spruch after reading the autobiography of Fay Ajzenberg-Selove (A Matter of Choices: Memoirs of a Female Physicist, Rutgers University Press, 1994) elicited the response from Grace: “I guess you're more of a physicist than a feminist.” This has probably been reflected in my attitudes towards physics throughout my career, and particularly in my positions on committees such as the very difficult 1983 HEPAP Subpanel, or the nearly as difficult 1992 Subpanel. I had no appetite for political jockeying; I was interested only in the best physics results. In 1983 there had been perhaps some part of me that wanted the US to “beat” CERN, because of my poor treatment there. I lost, and the country lost, on that account. Preeminence in high energy physics, which was once the providence of the United States, has been essentially given up to Europe and Japan. So we had to learn to adapt. But as my National Science Board colleague, the mathematician Richard Tapia, liked to tell me, I “think like a physicist,” meaning, I guess, that I instinctively use logical reasoning, as opposed to emotional responses or politically motivated rationales in decision making…

The following sections are included:

• Acronyms
• Glossary