Doris Lessing is only the 11th woman to wind the Nobel Prize for Literature – are men better writers than women? Or has the Nobel Foundation been misogynistic for most of its history?
1) “Chien-Shiung Wu (nicknamed the “First Lady of Physics”) disproved the law of the conservation of parity (1956) and was the first Wolf Prize winner in physics. She died in 1997 without receiving the Nobel . Wu assisted Tsung-Dao Lee personally in his parity laws development—with Chen Ning Yang—by providing him with a possible test method for beta decay in 1956 that worked successfully. She did not share their Nobel Prize—a fact widely blamed on sexism on the part of the selection committee. Her book Beta Decay (1965) is still a sine qua non reference for nuclear physicists.” “Lise Meitner contributed directly to the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939 but received no Nobel recognition . In fact, it was she, not Otto Hahn, who first figured out fission, after having analysed the accumulated experimental data and successfully incorporating Bohr’s liquid drop model (suggested first by George Gamow) at its theoretical base, with Otto Robert Frisch’s participation: Niels Bohr did in fac
Misogynistic might be a bit strong. Dismissive possibly. The thing is they can only choose winners from writers that they’ve actually heard of – and there have always been more published male writers than female ones. I think partly that’s the literature – reading public’s fault – whilst women tend to be very open to reading books by male authors, a lot of men seem not to want to read books by female authors. So the publishers have to reflect what the public seems to want – consequently most of the female names in Borders are on the front of pink covers and have usually written something involving shoes and biological clocks. If I was judging from that I’d probably assume that women didn’t write serious literature either.
Related Questions
- Doris Lessing is only the 11th woman to wind the Nobel Prize for Literature - are men better writers than women? Or has the Nobel Foundation been misogynistic for most of its history?
- Who is the only man without a post-bachelor degree to win a Nobel Prize in the sciences?
- Who declined the Nobel Peace Prize?
