This book by Ruth Lewin Sime is a wonderful introduction to a fascinating person and a powerful example of the inequalities created by rigorous suppression of women in (hopefully) years past. The author says at six years old she must have seen a picture of Lise (pronounced Lee-seh) “in Life or The New York Times, or perhaps Aufbau, The German refugee’s newspaper…Lise Meitner was a celebrity:  the tiny woman who barely escaped the Nazis, the physicist responsible for nuclear fission, ‘the Jewish mother of the atomic bomb’—although she was a Jew by birth, not affiliation, and she had refused to work on the bomb…To me she was a hero…” Einstein referred to her as “our Marie Curie” for her physics research in Berlin.

The author was a chemistry teacher at a community college and was known as “…the woman the all-male chemistry department did not want to hire.” The author describes herself as a feminist; although it is doubtful she faced anything similar to the discrimination Lise experienced as a youngster wanting to gain an education and as a scientist. One of my favorite descriptions is about a research director (male, of course) who didn’t allow women in the laboratories because he was afraid they would set their hair on fire.

Lise was born in Vienna in 1868 and lived there until she became a researcher in Berlin at the age of twenty-nine. Her birth was listed in Vienna’s Jewish community as Elise. Her family’s original last name was shortened first from Meietheiner to Meithheiner, to Meithner, and finally Meitner. The only profession that welcomed young women was teaching, and that did not require a university education. A few exceptional women were eventually allowed to audit university classes. The government finally admitted women to the “letters and sciences” of Austrian universities in 1897. A few years later a few women were admitted into medical schools. Lise was one of a very small number of women to pass the requirements to attend university to study mathematics and physics at the age of 23. One of her professors was Ludwig Boltzmann, a theoretical physicist who introduced her to “the atomic world,” which was just beginning to emerge to scientists. Radioactivity was discovered in 1896 and the electron in 1897.

Lise arrived in Berlin in 1907 and would stay for thirty years. She worked quietly at her studies and research. She had to obtain permission from Max Planck to attend his lectures. She met Otto Hahn and worked as his research partner for the decades until she had to escape Berlin from the Nazis. An interesting aspect of the book is the descriptions of the close professional and personal friendship between Meitner and Hahn until he consciously rejected her as “non-Aryan” to protect himself when the Nazis began their quest to eliminate Jews, or anyone with a Jewish heritage. This violation of trust came despite the fact it was Meitner who explained to Hahn that the results he had observed in an experiment proved that he had “achieved a splitting.” Meitner was even involved in the naming of the “splitting” as “fission.” Hahn was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize for the work in which he and Meitner collaborated, but he worked diligently (and unethically) in later years to downplay or even dismiss her contributions.

Lise was not paid a living wage for the first many years of her research. She was supported in large part by an allowance from her parents into her early forties when her father died and the allowance ended. She always lived frugally by renting single rooms without a private bath. Apparently her one “extravagance” was cigarettes. She obtained her first paying position when Max Planck appointed her as the first woman assistant in Prussia after her father died and her allowance ended. She graded papers. A competing offer threatened to lure her from Berlin in 1914 and her salary was doubled to encourage her to stay.

The beginning of World War I brought changes to the entire world and put a halt on Meitner and Hahn’s physics research. Hahn was recruited for secret chemical warfare research and originally protested. Lise reassured him that he had been ordered to do the work. His resistance evidently evaporated as the war wore on and men were dying terrible deaths in the trenches from the various chemical concoctions he and the others developed. He later “…spoke and wrote about his military experiences with considerable pride.” Lise volunteered as an x-ray nurse-technician with the Austrian army. She was assigned to a military hospital not far from the Russian front. The numbers for wounded and suffering of the wounded she helped treat came as a shock. She wrote of “…6,000 to 7,000 wounded who had to be transferred elsewhere as quickly as possible…” She added that many “…at best will be cripples, (and) have the most horrible pains.”

Germany is described after its defeat as being “…exceptionally bleak:  divided, poor.” There were several winters to follow that left people freezing and hungry. There was general chaos with strikes by the unions and armed violence between opposing military factions. Also, the anti-Semitic campaigns began. The campaign against Einstein was particularly vitriolic. Lise had the good fortune to be invited to Sweden for a short visit where she marveled at the wealth of food. She returned to rampant inflation and food riots.

Lise and her fellow physicists participated in research that led 1932 to be called the “miracle year.” That was overshadowed in the non-technical world by the swearing in of Adolph Hitler as the chancellor of the Third Reich. Lise was concerned about the events that followed, but she and many other Germans remained hopeful “…it will take a calmer, more sensible turn.” The Jewish population of Germany was about 600,000, or one percent. Jews represented about 20 percent of the academic community and 25 percent of the physicists. All were being systematically deprived of their rights, including their right to remain employed in any sort of job that had government funding. Some Jews, including Jewish scientists, understood things were not going to be calmer or sensible. Einstein was in California and wisely announced he would never return to Germany. All Jews were faced with the decision whether to stay and resist or to resign and try to escape. Most who survived chose the latter. Lise stayed and continued her work in her laboratory, believing things were bound to improve. It made no difference to the Nazis that she had formally withdrawn from the Jewish community in 1908 and had been baptized a Protestant. She was dismissed from the university in the summer of 1933 although she did not lose her non-government salary, but it was an undeniable warning that things weren’t going to improve.

Neils Bohr and others began trying to find a way for Lise and others to escape. Hahn, in the last good thing he did for her, gave her a diamond ring he had inherited as she began her train trip to the Dutch border. Contrary to what I’ve read in other accounts, the trip was uneventful and she crossed the border without incident. Lise continued her work with limited resources and few friends, but she maintained contact with Hahn via letters. It was in 1938 that she evaluated an experiment that had given results that confused Hahn and informed him he had succeeded at splitting atoms of uranium. She was saddened when she heard of Hiroshima and Hiroshima. She was given numerous scientific awards, but Hahn accepted the Nobel Prize for fission without giving her credit.

There is much more to the book and anyone interested in the history of nuclear physics, the development of nuclear weapons, the evolution of women’s rights, or all of the above, should put it on their reading list.