Barbara McClintock - Women in Science

[Nancy Hopkins]

Barbara [McClintock] was one of these paradoxical people. Whatever you heard about Barbara, the opposite is also true. Barbara loved people and sought them out.
I met Barbara when I was young, and just coming into Cold Spring Harbor for the first time. I was a graduate student and she was about 70 years old. I think she was having a crisis in her life and I could see that she needed someone to talk to. She seemed quite unhappy at that time. Perhaps she saw in me a young woman scientist, and therefore someone she could talk to. In any case, she seemed to be reliving some very difficult years of having to be a woman scientist at a time when it was so extremely difficult for women in science. She wanted to tell me how painful this had been for her. For example, how she would be asked to sit outside the door while the men would discuss her results, and how at first she couldn't get a job except in a home economics department, and so forth. So she used to seek me out to talk about this, and she was terribly distressed about it, but of course, I didn't know her well at all yet and I was pretty young. I thought biology was wonderful and I was going to have a wonderful life, and I didn't want to hear about her terribly hard time, because [I thought] it wasn't going to happen to me! It was very painful for me to hear her talk about how hard a time she had had.
It would have been in the 1970s. And so she must have been about 70. I think she got through that period and then she stopped talking [about] how difficult it had been for her in those early years. When I finished my graduate school and postdoc years and was about to go off to my job at MIT, she said, "Don't go to a university, Nancy. The discrimination is so terrible you will never survive it." But I didn't want to hear this depressing news. As time went by, after many years, I better understood what she may have lived through, and what I lived through myself. I felt badly then, and my sympathy [went out] to her because I hadn't understood what she was talking about and that she had needed someone to talk to about her life. Now I feel I understand so much better. We became good friends and I went to her 90th birthday party. By then I had come to realize that she was one of the people that I had loved most in my life. I truly loved that woman. She was amazing.
She talked a lot about the politics of science and, I think she found that aspect so difficult. And again, I wish I could talk to her now. I now have an understanding of [what it means to be] a woman in science, which I didn't understand during those years. She said a funny thing to me, when I think she must have been in her late 80s. She was talking again about the treatment of women in science and the difficulties they have, and she said, "You know, I will never understand this problem. There is something in this that we don't understand, there is something biological, I think, in this relationship between men and women that these men just don't like these women." She said she would never understand it to the day she died. I wish she would come back so we could chat about it.