In advance of the inevitable "Dorothy Hodgkin for the £50 note" campaign, a short thread on why the spats about it could be a lot of fun.
When Dorothy Hodgkin won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1964, the Mail's headline was "Oxford housewife wins Nobel" (the Telegraph went for "British woman wins Nobel Prize – £18,750 prize to mother of three")
She was the first woman in Oxford to get paid maternity leave.
(oxford uni that is, possibly other women in the town of oxford got it before her!)
Tho (according to P Ferry's bio) Hodgkin found the idea of maternity pay hard to accept, but the college wanted to improve policy so as not to put off "future married fellows" from having children. So we should probably credit an unamed admin for that, not Hodgkin.
Hodgkin also famously taught Thatcher at uni. There's an interesting play about this theguardian.com/science/politi…
Hodgkin and Thatcher's politics were very different. E.g. in 1987, Hodgkin accepted the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet government for her work on peace and disarmament.
Still, Thatcher apparently really admired Hodgkin - v inpsired by the way she managed to be a successful woman. Hodgkin's Nobel win was, it's been argued, a real boost for Thatcher's confidence in her career.
Hodgkin was banned from entering the US in 1953 due to communist tendancies and subsequently only allowed to visit the country with a CIA waiver. She supported the miners in the 80s and worked with the rad sci movement in the 70s.
she is not the sort of person you'd necessarily expect Thatcher to have wanted a portrait of at No.10...
Really interesting post by Katharine Hodgkin (Dorothy's granddaughter) in response to the BBC play about Thatcher and Hodgkin I linked to earlier theguardian.com/science/politi…
basically: let's have a Hodgkin for the £50 note campaign. There is something for everyone and it'll throw up loads of chat about women in sciencem scientists and politics, and war.
