A student in Warsaw

In Warsaw, a gold medal at school did not open every door. Maria Salomea Skłodowska graduated from secondary school in 1883, but the city’s university did not admit women. The future Marie Curie had to find another way to continue studying science. She had been born in Warsaw on 7 November 1867. The city belonged to Congress Poland, within the Russian Empire. Her parents were teachers, and her father taught mathematics and physics. Laboratory lessons had been banned from Polish schools, so he kept his teaching apparatus at home and used it with his children. Science was already part of Maria’s education before Paris entered the story. Maria and her sister Bronisława attended the clandestine Flying University, which accepted women. It moved from place to place so that the authorities could not find it. This was higher study organised outside the ordinary university system. The name describes how the classes moved, rather than a journey abroad. The sisters also made a practical agreement. Maria would help pay for Bronisława’s medical studies in Paris; Bronisława would later help Maria study there. Maria worked as a tutor and then as a governess for the Żorawski family in Szczuki. She continued studying while earning money. These jobs belong to the route towards her scientific career, even though they were not university posts. In late 1891, Maria left for France and enrolled at the University of Paris. There she used the name Marie. She earned a physics degree in 1893 and a mathematics degree in 1894. A place at university had become possible, but it followed years of study and paid work. The change of country mattered because the opportunities available to a woman were different. The American Institute of Physics accounts of her girlhood and governess years trace these educational barriers and the sisters’ arrangement. The Nobel biography confirms her move to Paris and her later doctorate in 1903. BnF catalogues a second edition of her thesis published in Paris in 1904. Those later dates do not turn her Warsaw schooling into doctoral research. They show how far the story would continue after the move. How did a student excluded from the ordinary university in Warsaw reach a university in Paris? Her route connects a secret school, a sister’s studies and paid work. A list of prizes alone would leave that beginning out.