AWM Book Review

A Woman Wanders Through Life and Science

Irena Koprowska, State University of New York Press, Albany 1997. xix+306. ISBN 0-7914-3177-0 (cloth), $27.50.

From: AWM Newsletter, November/December 1997.

Reviewed by: Marge Murray, Book Review Editor, Department of Mathematics, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061-0123; email: murray@calvin.math.vt.edu.

The book under review is the first in a projected SUNY Press series, Voices of Immigrant Women. Irena Koprowska is a Polish-born pathologist, cytologist, and cancer research pioneer. She fled Poland during the German invasion in 1939 and eventually came to New York (via France, Spain, and Brazil) in 1944. Pulled this way and that by the pressures of war, marriage, motherhood, and career, her story -- as the title suggests -- has a meandering quality to it. Given the social, political, and cultural conditions under which she has lived, her achievements are truly remarkable. While the SUNY series ostensibly concerns itself with the uniqueness of the immigrant experience, it is clear that sexism, perhaps more than nationality, has posed the greatest barrier to Koprowska's personal and professional happiness in this country. The book illustrates, in vivid and personal detail, the devastating effects of institutional and personal sexism, and Irena Koprowska's often agonizing perseverance in the face of it all.

Koprowska's autobiography is unsophisticated, touching, and often painful to read. She was just twenty-two years old, and had barely completed medical studies at Warsaw University, when she left Poland in 1939. Just a year before, she had married a medical school classmate, Hilary Koprowski, whose feelings for her both before and after the wedding can best be described as ambivalent. During the early war years, they wandered through Europe and the Americas in search of a permanent haven and were often separated. During this time, Irena gave birth to a son under difficult conditions, while Hilary -- seemingly ambivalent about his medical career as well -- pursued a budding career as a concert pianist.

It was Irena -- not Hilary -- who took the first steps toward establishing a medical career during the war years. In a decidedly unconventional 'internship', Irena worked first as a psychiatric consultant in a lunatic asylum in France; for this, her first job as a physician, she had no training and very little guidance. Later, reunited with her husband in Rio de Janeiro, she worked at a variety of unskilled jobs until she was finally hired as an assistant pathologist at Hospital Miguel Couto, where she performed hundreds of autopsies, developing expertise largely without benefit of textbooks or formal instruction.

Hilary, too, eventually began a career in medicine, but by a less deliberate route. He had been working as a piano teacher when he learned through an acquaintance of an opening at the Rockefeller Foundation Labs in Rio. There he began his career in biomedical research by working on a yellow fever vaccine. Inspired by his Rockefeller colleagues, Hilary decided to move the family to New York City with a view to advancing his research career in the States.

At the point at which Hilary made this decision, Irena writes:

I had just been offered an assistant professorship at the University of Rio de Janeiro Medical School. My acceptance of this offer would provide me with an academic position, professional status, a secure job, and significant career advancement. I feared having to begin my medical career all over again in another country. But I was not about to stand in the way of Hilary's future; there was absolutely no question about my accompanying Hilary to the United States, even though I regretted relinquishing my own opportunities in Brazil. Also, I had come to feel at home in Brazil; I spoke Portuguese, had made friends, loved the sounds of the samba, and would miss it all very much. (pp. 128-9)

This is just one of the many passages in the book where the painful ambivalence she feels about her role as a woman comes to the fore.

Having arrived in New York, Hilary had the extraordinary good fortune of landing a series of increasingly prestigious positions in research laboratories devoted to vaccine research. Irena, by contrast, obtained her first medical position as a 'voluntary assistant' in the pathology department at Cornell's medical center in New York City. She gradually progressed to paid positions and obtained credentials as a pathologist before coming at last to work for the man who she describes as her greatest mentor, George Papanicolau, developer of the Pap smear. In her years working with him at Cornell, she became a talented researcher and diagnostician specializing in the early detection of cancers of the cervix, uterus, and lung.

Meanwhile, Hilary Koprowski gained in notoriety, status, and salary, as one of the developers of the first oral polio vaccine. At the same time, Koprowska struggled under sometimes hostile working conditions, developing the wisdom and savvy to publish her research results early and often. In the early fifties, she gave birth to a second son, accepted a promising position at SUNY's Downstate Medical Center, and obtained her first research grant from the National Cancer Institute.

But after just two years in this position, Hilary decided to accept a prestigious research directorship in Philadelphia, and once again, Irena felt she had no choice but to leave a workplace she loved:

For the two years since I had left Cornell in 1954, I had been assistant professor of pathology at Downstate and director of the Cytology Laboratory at King's County Hospital....I was settled, respected, and felt comfortable in the Department of Pathology, where I also taught medical students. I had absolutely no desire to leave my job, but I would never seriously consider remaining in Englewood [New Jersey] and have Hilary commute from there to Philadelphia. (p. 214, emphasis added)

The move to Philadelphia marked the start of a period of terrific adversity for Irena Koprowska. In her first job at Hahnemann University, she attained tenure but watched as her department head tried to block her promotion to full professor, offering it instead to a colleague who had more financial obligations, more seniority, and decidedly fewer publications. In the end she became the first female full professor at Hahnemann (around 1962), but at considerable personal cost.

In 1970, she moved on to what promised to be a better position, at better pay, at Temple University; but again, conditions proved to be mixed. With the advent of Title IX in 1972, she received a substantial raise in pay, but at the same time her department chair withdrew much of his support for her laboratory technicians. When at last she took her first sabbatical in 1975, she returned to find that her laboratory facilities had been taken away from her. Her response to this outrageous turn of events was not outward protest but inward reflection:

After weeks and months of asking myself what exactly made me most unhappy when I had to relinquish my research, I found the answer. I had become deprived of the means of expressing my creativity. Perhaps I could satisfy this need in some other way and regain happiness. (p. 275)

In response to this prejudicial behavior, Koprowska rejected the idea of bringing her grievance to the courts, turning instead to expository and autobiographical writing as a means of 'rechanneling' her creativity.

As an American woman born in the late fifties, I grew up as a witness to and a beneficiary of the activism of the women's movement. I am not of Koprowska's generation; nor can I truly understand what it means to have been born in Poland, to have negotiated so many different countries and cultures, and to have arrived personally and professionally in the social and cultural turbulence of post-World War II America. Viewed in this light, the many acts of discrimination, from the minute to the egregious, which Koprowska faced during the later years of her career, are decidedly more outrageous than her seemingly too-willing acceptance of such shabby treatment.

Despite the institutional adversity she experienced in the later years of her scientific career, Irena Koprowska did win international notoriety and recognition for her many contributions to the early detection of cancer. Her successes are truly remarkable. I recommend her book as an inspiration -- but also as a cautionary reminder of our recent past -- to anyone who is concerned with the advancement of women in science.