by Ramona Koval
My perspective shifted. I thought of myself as damaged goods. Whatever my education had done to limit my attractiveness to nice Jewish boys, I had now written myself off completely. I was no longer a virgin and had had an abortion too. The campus was in the throes of the women’s movement, and I read Sisterhood Is Powerful, a collection of writings edited in 1970 by the American poet and activist Robin Morgan. It contained essays by Kate Millett and Mary Daly, and poems and articles about lesbians and prostitutes, and the SCUM manifesto railing against men. I saw leaflets in the cafeteria asking for volunteers for a group called the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA), and joined up.
Every couple of weeks I went to a first-floor address on Fitzroy Street in St Kilda, which in the daytime was an ordinary office and at night became the centre for telephone-counselling services. We waited for calls from women who were pregnant. We’d ask them which suburb they lived in and then give them the phone number and address of the nearest sympathetic GP, who would declare that the woman’s psychological or physical health was in danger if the pregnancy continued, qualifying her for an abortion. The idea was to spare women the humiliation of being refused the help of one doctor after another. I’m not sure if what we were doing was legal or not, but it sure felt undercover. St Kilda was full of prostitutes and drug dealers, not that I saw many of them. There was a leaflet by the phone telling us what to do if the police raided the office, but I never had to use it.
I can’t remember what I told my mama but I’m sure she thought I was still studying in the library. I’m now imagining what she might have done had I rung her from the police watchhouse after I had been arrested, the daughter who just a year or two before was dutifully putting on the clothes she had bought for me. But I think by then she was probably trying to work out how to tell us she was fatally ill.
During the next term my friend from ALRA, who was also my laboratory partner in second-year biochemistry, suggested I come to a consciousness-raising group at her share house. I attended a few meetings. Most of the women were older than we were. Some were married, or about to be not married any more. They seemed to be a very unhappy group. They were just beginning to share their stories with each other, mostly of failed hopes and dreams. I did think of The Feminine Mystique and The Group. My reading had prepared me for these women, as had my observations of the life my mama led. But they had not been prepared for me.
They were moving into large women-only share houses, wearing overalls and beginning to shear off their hair. I lived with my parents, was fond of floor-length gingham or flower-print dresses and I wore my hair long to my waist. I told the women about my abortion, which they were sympathetic about, and of my kind boyfriend who bought me flowers, which they were not sympathetic about. I did not seem to understand that I was being oppressed. Each meeting left me more and more out in the cold. I felt their disapproval. I dropped out of the group.
Years later several of the women had succeeded in finding their true selves. They were lesbians by then and had made the difficult move to come out. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time: an incurable heterosexual, living in the past. I wasn’t really paying attention to women such as Simone de Beauvoir any more. She had said, ‘Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen.’
That was precisely the direction I took. In 1973 I took a copy of Down among the Women by Fay Weldon with me when my medical-student boyfriend and I went north by train to a town on the Burdekin River in North Queensland where he had a summer posting in a hospital. When I wasn’t studying for my supplementary exam in biochemistry, I read Weldon’s comic novel. Beginning in 1950 (I was now clearly moving through history at a pace), it is about a group of women in London who have variously been left alone and pregnant, or married to much older men, or waiting for marriage or giving up work for marriage, or having an affair with a married man. But the women turn against and betray each other because they want to please the men in their lives.
The town we were living in was stuck in the early 1950s when it came to relations between the sexes, and in the 1920s when it came to relations between Aborigines and the townsfolk. It didn’t take long for us to understand that there was a bar where the upper-class whites drank, and another one for white scum. The blacks were served at the back of the second pub, where white men of all classes met black women who’d go with them into the bushes. That is how it was explained to me.
My boyfriend and I were pretending to be married so that we could share a visiting doctor’s house in the hospital grounds. The resident doctor saw that his southern student was competent, and withdrew to his own house to go on a bender lasting several weeks. The Aboriginal population heard that there was a new doctor in town who was open and kind and they began to line up in long queues to see him.
I was trying to study, but it was hard to concentrate. North Queensland was terribly hot and strange. And the wives of the dentist, accountant, lawyer and newsagent began to invite me to morning teas and generally give me the impression that I was a junior member of the upper white team.
The night of the hospital Christmas dinner-dance came. It was to be held in the top pub. My mother had finally stopped trying to dress me. She had made no suggestions about the clothing I might need in a tropical climate and I had nothing suitable to wear—certainly not the lime-green long-sleeved shirt and black jeans that were my only option. The ladies were all spruced up and the men were in pressed white shirts. The band played covers of fifties rock-and-roll hits and occasional Beatles songs.
After the speeches from the hospital administrator the music started and in the corner of my eye I saw an Aboriginal man in a light suit—could it have been violet?—making his way across the dance floor. I saw all the eyes in the room swing towards him. He was heading my way. He stopped at my seat and asked if I wanted to dance. His front two teeth had been knocked out. Now I think it the possible result of a ritual ceremony, but then it looked like he’d been brawling.
I could see the panic in my boyfriend’s eyes. I was his woman, his pretend wife for the duration of the summer, and all the good burghers of the town were looking at us. But I was so impressed with the courage of the young man, with his audacity, that I jumped up from my seat and took his hand.
We danced and he told me he was up from Sydney, from Kings Cross, to see his family for Christmas. He was a little drunk, it was true, but he was a great dancer, and I remember thinking he must be gay. And slowly the dance floor emptied until we were the only ones there, and then the band stopped playing halfway through a song. He bowed low and I said thanks for the dance. He left the room as I took my place back at the table at the side of my beau, who was livid.
No one spoke to us and, soon after, we went back to our little house and had a huge argument. I explained that I was acting in support of the man fighting against the racism of the town and he explained that I was racist because I would never have danced with a strange man who was drunk and had no front teeth if he had been white. He said I had shamed him. Now everyone would think he could not control his woman.
And even with all the books I had read and the lessons I had tried to learn and the voices of the women in the consciousness-raising group and the words of Simone de Beauvoir and Mary McCarthy ringing in my ears, reader, I married him.
CHAPTER 8
Beauty is truth, truth beauty
I was nine years old. I was reading a children’s compendium of famous women that I had taken out of the bus library—Cleopatra, Florence Nightingale, Joan of Arc—when I came upon a potted biography of Polish-born physicist and chemist Marie Curie. It was winter, I was wearing a cosy nightie done up to the neck as the thought dawned on me that this woman, with fair curly hair like mine and a blouse buttoned up to a high-necked collar, was, like my parents, Polish by birth, but that being Polish didn’t mean that you inevitably worked, liked my parents, from dawn to dusk in clo
thing factories or at the treadle machine late at night in our kitchen. My fate was decided.
None of the immigrants in my parents’ circle had professional jobs. One or two, it was rumoured, had gone to university for a few years before history sent them to concentration camps or to refuges of various kinds, and then to their lives in Melbourne at the end of the world. Tailors, furriers, milk-bar owners, greengrocers and truck-drivers, they all had ambitions for their Australian-born children. The boys would be doctors, lawyers, accountants or perhaps architects, and girls like me might be teachers before we got married, had children and helped our husbands in their careers. Not that it was spelled out to me like this, but a child sees what the world is like from the confines of the family, and we didn’t exactly have wide horizons to survey. Except, of course, for those found in books.
Maria Sklodowska, as she was then, was born in 1867 into a Warsaw family. Her father, who was a high school teacher of physics and mathematics and a lover of poetry, and her mother, who was the headmistress at a school for girls, must have encouraged her interests. It was a completely different life from that led by women in my ancestral Polish family—they were orthodox Jewish mothers and wives, living in tiny shtetls, the mostly Jewish villages in the Polish countryside, running farms and shops and having many children while their husbands studied the Torah. The arc of their lives had probably not changed much since the seventeenth century.
During the day Maria Skłodowska worked as a governess and a teacher and, in the evenings, at the laboratory of the Warsaw Museum of Industry and Agriculture, learning chemical analysis and laboratory procedures. She became active in Polish nationalistic politics, and left for Paris in 1891 to study physics and mathematics at the Sorbonne. There she met the man who was to become her husband and collaborator, Pierre Curie. Together they worked in difficult conditions stirring great vats of pitchblende to isolate the new radioactive elements of radium and polonium.
In 1903, with Pierre and Henri Becquerel, Marie was awarded a Nobel Prize for physics for their work in radioactivity, and in 1911 she was given another, this one in chemistry. Even though I had not much understanding of the sociological differences between Marie Curie’s family and mine, I remember thinking that I had so much in common with her that I might win a Nobel Prize too.
I set up an experimental laboratory in my mother’s laundry. Someone gave me a small blue toy microscope for my tenth birthday. Where did I read that you could grow germs in some special gel? I assembled a variety of jars with pineapple jelly at the bottom, and I used the cat as the source of my test samples—I dipped her paws into the gel, took swabs from her ears and I even attempted to culture her milk, as she had given birth to a litter of kittens. I tried to work out the problem of milking a cat by lying alongside her kittens and watching how they pumped either side of her teats with their paws. I did the same and tried to taste her milk. Alarmed at the prospect of suckling a human child, she hid her kittens under the house for several weeks.
My mother was alarmed too when she saw what had grown in my jars over the weeks between me setting up the experiments and then forgetting about them. She ordered them out of her laundry. My other experiment involved getting the starch out of potatoes but she wasn’t keen to use it in her washing. My father suggested it would be more useful if I made potato latkes instead.
I was intrigued by the world beyond what we could see with our naked eye. I took up science at high school and became good at mathematics and physics and chemistry. I loved imagining what the electrons and neutrons were doing in the atoms that made up everything around me. I loved the certainty that the ‘universal laws of physics’ implied, and thrilled to the idea that everything had an explanation, if only we could work out what it was. Elegant simplicities were the beautiful results of sheer brainpower and experimental design. Or so I thought.
But there were very few women scientists among those we studied.
One of my favourite stories about science and research was The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA by James D. Watson, published in 1968. It told the heroic story of how Watson, together with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, discovered the structure of the essential key to life. DNA was a beautiful, simple double helix, and it was made of four nucleotides—thymine, cytosine, adenine and guanine—which together coded everything that made a human being, or a spider, or a banana or a flower or anything alive you care to think of. I adored the idea of DNA and relished the inside story of how these scientists came to light upon this elegant shape. Watson’s book was a bestseller, and I bought my copy at our newsagent.
The story begins in 1951 when Watson, a 23-year-old American, arrives with his newly minted doctorate at the famous Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. The laboratory is headed by Australian-born Nobel Prize–winning physicist and professor of experimental physics, Sir Lawrence Bragg, who even has a law named after him—Bragg’s Law of X-Ray diffraction. It’s a thrill for Watson to be there to study bacterial viruses and walk the same laboratory floors as the greats before him. It was a thrill for me to read about the places in which these great ideas were hatched.
Francis Crick is introduced, a 35-year-old English doctoral student of proteins, also at the Cavendish, and Maurice Wilkins, who is thirty-five too, and is looking at the structure of DNA using biochemical and biophysical methods at another laboratory at King’s College, London. With these chaps is Rosalind Franklin, a 31-year-old English physicist who, with Wilkins, is making photos of DNA using X-Ray diffraction. In this era, women and men didn’t even share a lunch room. I was intrigued to find a woman in the story, but as the book unfolded I was a bit dismayed at how she was depicted. I didn’t know any better than to believe Watson’s view of Franklin.
By choice she did not emphasise her feminine qualities. Though her features were strong, she was not unattractive and might have been stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not. There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents.
Rosalind Franklin, or ‘Rosy’ as Watson called her—she was not amused—was typecast as a cold, sexless, grumpy, challenging female scientist. Watson’s view of her reminded me of that classic scene in old movies that were shown on daytime television when I was sick at home from school, in which a librarian or a bossy nurse wore glasses, but when the hero disarmed her with flirting and took her glasses away there stood a beauty in all her glory. Her demeanour changed immediately. He fell for her and she started swooning and forgot whatever fierce interests she had held. Presumably the world beyond the end of her nose became a blur, but he would do the seeing for both of them from then on.
Watson wrote about the bad blood between Franklin and Wilkins in their London laboratory, describing her as Wilkins’ troublesome assistant. In truth she was getting on with her own part of the research. Wilkins passed on Franklin’s work to Watson and Crick in Cambridge without her knowledge. This led to their confirmation of DNA as a double-helix structure and a Nobel Prize for the three men in 1962. By then Rosalind Franklin had died of ovarian cancer at the age of thirty-seven in 1958.
Rosalind Franklin and DNA was written by Anne Sayre in 1975 as a corrective to the portrait painted by Watson. At the time I was trying to juggle a new baby with an honours year in a microbiology laboratory, so I missed the book, but Sayre, who knew Franklin, could not reconcile the woman she knew with the caricature she had read, ‘the female grotesque we have all been taught either to fear or to despise’.
She too noticed the way Watson muses on how Rosy might look if he removed her glasses. But, she informs us, Franklin not only always wore lipstick, she never wore glasses at all as she had brilliant eyesight and only used a magnifying glass for the finest of work.
Despite the danger that my interest in science would turn me into an unattractive old maid, the pull of the ideas was too strong for me.
I read Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape, Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. I bought a book called Check Your Own I.Q. by Hans Eysenck, published in 1966, well before the controversies that would dog him over his views about race and intelligence, and tobacco-industry support of his research. I spent many an afternoon on my bed, testing, testing, testing. I announced to Mama that I had an IQ of 165, but I may have cheated.
I was immensely attracted to the order of things in physics and chemistry, like the periodic table of elements and the laws of physics. How marvellous to think that the world could be made of predictable actions and reactions, that this chemical mixed with that one always produced this reaction; that this particle aimed at speed at this surface would always be reflected and refracted in calculable ways. Of course this wasn’t necessarily the case in every situation, but I was to learn that later. I was disturbed about the theory of light, refusing to accept that it sometimes behaves like a particle and other times as a wave. I was an all-or-nothing girl. I applied my mind to learning how the rules worked to predict the behaviour of the universe the same way I’d explored how the world worked through reading.
I failed my first-year university biology exam. I had been spending a lot of time in the gardens behind the Botany school with my boyfriend and a bottle of cheap port. When it came to the exam, the question was about the excretory system of the spider. All I could remember was that the spider had a bottom made of chitin—a plastic-like substance produced by mother nature to be so strong that the spider could excrete straight ammonia without it being transformed into urea, unlike us, who need the urea cycle to protect our own bottoms made of mere human flesh, or that’s how I had understood it.
So, instead of writing a short biochemical analysis, I waxed lyrical on the beauty and profundity of this. Later I was hauled before the university Failures Committee.
