The Nobel Prize has been awarded to 34 women since 1901. One woman, Marie Curie, has been awarded the Nobel Prize two times, in 1903 (the Nobel Prize in Physics) and in 1911 (the Nobel Prize in Chemistry).
Marie Curie 1867-1934
Marie Curie was born in 1867 in Warsaw to two Polish schoolteachers. She was the youngest of five. She loved traveling with her family to the country to visit their relatives often during her childhood. Having schoolteachers as parents, Curie got an early start to education at age six. She learned physics and math easily and received much help from her father in the sciences, which he loved. Her oldest sister's death when Curie was nine began the hardships in her childhood Her mother, stricken with guilt over her sister's death, died two years later. Her mother had always been the one keeping the family together, and her father took her death very hard. He focused on work and his children's studies, so school became an important part of her life. Curie finished school at fifteen and took time of to become a governess. She moved back in with her father and began working in a laboratory. She also studied science, literature, and sociology on her own. With the help of her father, she moved to Paris to live with her sister. She moved from her sister's house to the heart of Paris to go to school and be less distracted by social scenes in her sister's part of town.
Doris Lessing, winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for literature
Doris Lessing was born on 22 October 1919 to British parents in Kermanshah in what was then known as Persia (now Iran) as Doris May Taylor. Her father, Alfred Cook Taylor, formerly a captain in the British army during the First World War, was a bank official. Her mother, Emily Maude Taylor, had been a nurse. In 1925 the family moved to a farm in what was then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) hoping to improve their income. Lessing described her childhood on the farm in the first part of her autobiography, Under My Skin (1994).
Her best-known works include The Golden Notebook, Memoirs of a Survivor and The Summer, Before the Dark. Lessing is only the 11th woman to win the prize, considered by many to be the world's highest accolade for writers, since it started in 1901. The content of her other novels ranges from semi-autobiographical African experiences to social and political struggle, psychological thrillers and science fiction.
Physics
1903 - Marie Curie , 1963 - Maria Goeppert-Mayer
Chemistry
1911 - Marie Curie, 1935 - Irène Joliot-Curie, 1964 - Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
Physiology or Medicine
1947 - Gerty Cori , 1977 - Rosalyn Yalow,1983 - Barbara McClintock , 1986 - Rita Levi-Montalcini
1988 - Gertrude B. Elion , 1995 - Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, 2004 - Linda B. Buck.
Literature
1909 - Selma Lagerlöf, 1926 - Grazia Deledda, 1928 - Sigrid Undset, 1938 - Pearl Buck, 1945 - Gabriela Mistral, 1966 - Nelly Sachs, 1991 - Nadine Gordimer, 1993 - Toni Morrison, 1996 - Wislawa Szymborska
2004 - Elfriede Jelinek, 2007 - Doris Lessing
Peace
1905 - Bertha von Suttner , 1931 - Jane Addams, 1946 - Emily Greene Balch, 1976 - Betty Williams
1976 - Mairead Corrigan , 1979 - Mother Teresa, 1982 - Alva Myrdal, 1991 - Aung San Suu Kyi
1992 - Rigoberta Menchú Tum, 1997 - Jody Williams, 2003 - Shirin Ebadi, 2004 - Wangari Maathai
