Harriet Brooks

Born on 2 July 1876 in Exeter, Canada, Harriet Brooks was a pioneering nuclear physicist who made important discoveries about radioactivity. Brooks earned a BA in mathematics and science from McGill University in Montreal. She remained at McGill to become Ernest Rutherford’s first graduate student, earning a master’s degree in 1901. After working with J J Thomson at Cambridge University, she returned to McGill to become Rutherford’s research assistant. Brooks’s research focused on elucidating the nature of radioactivity and radioactive materials. She discovered the quantum phenomenon of atomic recoil and was among the first to recognize that one of the particles emitted by thorium was not alpha, beta, or gamma radiation, but the radioactive element radon. At first Brooks followed the standard career path of an academic physicist: She did the equivalent of a postdoc (with Marie Curie in Paris) and, in 1904, she joined the faculty of a university (Barnard College in New York City). But when she became engaged to be married, Barnard’s dean insisted that she resign for “the good of the College and the dignity of the woman’s place in the home.” In her resignation letter, she wrote: “I think it is a duty I owe to my profession and to my sex to show that a woman has a right to the practice of her profession and cannot be condemned to abandon it merely because she marries. I cannot conceive how women’s colleges, inviting and encouraging women to enter professions can be justly founded or maintained denying such a principle.” Brooks broke off the engagement and moved to Paris in 1906 to work for a year at the Curie Institute. She returned to Canada a year later, married, and left physics.

Date in History: 2 July 1876