There are lots of places to get sneak peaks of "The Madame Curie Complex" online. The week of February 22, you will be able to read selections from the book on Thus Spake Zuska. Right now, the Introduction to "The Madame Curie Complex" is available for free on the Feminist Press website (where you can also purchase the book). In it, Des Jardins explains the title:

"No doubt, [Curie's] work helps to make the case that science is made to be manly rather than being inherently so. But Curie’s myth haunts these pages and the psyches of succeeding generations of women more completely than her real-life example, for it has both empowered and stigmatized women, liberated and constrained them, often at the same time. The historian Margaret Rossiter noted an inferiority complex in women after Curie’s tours of the United States in the 1920s, and for generations the Curie complex has continued to allow men to disqualify women -- and women to disqualify themselves -- from science. Women scientists have felt as though they cannot measure up to Curie, and of course how could they, when this mythical measure of female competence has morphed in the American mind over and over again? It’s like trying to hit a moving target." 

You can read Suzanne Reisman's take on "The Madame Curie Complex" on BlogHer.

Des Jardins will be talking about the book at several upcoming events (keep an eye on our facebook events page for more information and updates):

03/02 “Women in Science” panel at Labyrinth Books in Princeton, NJ
03/11  Talk the CUNY Grad Center Science & the Arts program, NY
03/15 Discussion with Claudia Dreifus at Barnes and Noble, Upper West Side, NYC 

Here's a video of Des Jardins discussing "The Madame Curie Complex":

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