Some women choose a
career, while others appear born to it, and some women simply
have it thrust upon them. That, more or less, is what happened
to Cécile DeWitt-Morette, 78, who has earned a place among the
most respected and honored scientists of the 20th century.
Her native France has
bestowed awards on her, and so have international scientific organizations.
She has a remarkable number of publications to her credit---she
has written 95 articles and four books and edited 19 books --and
her enduring accomplishment was the establishment 50 years ago
of Les Houches Summer School in the French Alps, an institution
that attracts research scientists from around the globe. Hers
has been a lengthy and distinguished career, and it is not the
one she originally intended. She
is almost an accidental physicist, for as she explained to Senior
Women Web in a telephone interview, "I became a physicist because
of circumstances. I began to really like it only after I got a
Ph.D.''
When she was growing
up in middle-class comfort in Normandy, Cécile Morette pinned
her hopes on medical school. "I wanted to be a surgeon,'' she
says, envisioning herself as a humanitarian physician not disappearing
right after the operation but giving her patients attention and
care through their recovery. After
high school, however, her mother suggested she study mathematics
in college--treating it, DeWitt-Morette says, like a finishing
school, ''for cultural purposes and logical thinking.'' Once she
had a few credits, Cécile thought she might as well go ahead and
get the degree. She did so, and then decided "to go to Paris to
have adventures.''
The country was then
under Nazi occupation, and the French were not allowed to travel
without a permit. How to explain to a German officer a reason
for trips to Paris? "I could not say, 'For adventures' because
it would have the wrong connotation,'' she says, "so my excuse
was that I was taking advanced courses.'' She
was in the midst of an exam in Paris when tragedy struck. It was
D-Day, and in the bombing of Caen, the family home was destroyed
and Cécile's sister, mother and grandmother were killed. "I now
felt in charge of my family,'' she says, "so I thought I had better
get a job.'' At 21, she no longer felt young.
After advance courses
and laboratory work in France, and later in Dublin and Copenhagen,
she was invited in 1948 to the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, N.J., by J. Robert Oppenheimer. While she was there
she met the physicist Bryce DeWitt, who soon became her husband.
(Their 50th anniversary is this May.) The
young woman was torn by the idea of accepting a marriage proposal
from an American and forsaking her country, and she was also deeply
concerned about the diminished state of scientific research and
education in France following the war's devastation. Her solution
was the establishment of Les Houches, which offered her the opportunity
to make a contribution toward re-establishing France as an important
center for science. According
to her daughter Chris DeWitt, this was the most of the important
aspect of the project, although it also gave her the chance to
spend several months in France each year.
To gain support from
male colleagues for Les Houches, DeWitt-Morette made them think
the proposal was their own. She would describe the plan to them
and then phone a week later to say, "Oh, that idea you told me
about was great.'' Remembering
those days now, she says with a laugh, "I was an intellectual
geisha.''
She likes to tell one
story about how she managed to snare an appointment with a hard-to-see
government minister. She went to the building where he worked,
removed her coat and hat--this was a time when a woman would never
been seen without a hat--so she could walk around freely and everyone
would think she was just another secretary. Waiting until the
minister's own secretary had gone to lunch, she slipped into his
office and asked if she could make an appointment. She got it,
as well as enough money to fund one summer session. "I
couldn't pay my lecturers well,'' she says, 'but the school was
in the mountains and I knew that instead of money I could give
them a cottage for their whole family that would be better than
money. " With
their families happily settled, they could give lectures and have
discussions with participants to their heart's content.''
The plan worked admirably.
Les Houches, which she headed for 22 years since founding it in
1951and still serves on the board of directors, plays an important
role in theoretical physics. A Swedish student named Marcus Berg,
who is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas, attended
in 1998 and believes the school is "unique in that it has long
sessions during which participants can really learn something
new, without the stress of an all-too-short conference."
A surprising
number of physicists are into mountain hiking, and the combination
of strenuous physical activity, fresh mountain air and breathtaking
views of the Alps is useful to physicists because it is such a
contrast to sitting at a table doing calculations.'' Twenty-four
participants who went to Les Houches as students or young lecturers
afterward received Nobel Prizes.
Three recent French
Nobel laureates--Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, Georges Charpak and
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji--were students at Les Houches in the '50s
and credit the school as a factor in their successful careers.
Alain Connes, a recipient of the Fields Medal--it's the equivalent
of the Nobel Prize for mathematics--and one of the world's greatest
living mathematicians, has said that "my scientific life began
at Les Houches."
As a girl going to
an all-female school, Mlle. Morette had not experienced discrimination,
nor did she find many obstacles to her career during the first
years in America. The roadblocks appeared after she married. First,
there was the complication of her name. She tried using her husband's
surname only to discover he was given credit for her own work.
(Eventually she settled on DeWitt-Morette.) Far
worse was institutional discrimination, something many women before
and since have faced. "In an important period professionally,
I had no position because I was married,'' she says. In 1956 she
and her husband became visiting research professors at the University
of North Carolina; he was later made a full tenured professor.
According to Bryce DeWitt, the school, citing "legally non-existent''
regulations against nepotism, demoted her in 1967 to the post
of lecturer despite her contributions in attracting funds, organizing
conferences and serving as director of the school's Institute
of Natural Sciences.
Once again, fate intervened.
The chairman of the physics department at the University of Texas
had been a student at Les Houches, and he asked both husband and
wife to join the faculty. DeWitt-Morette began lecturing in the
astronomy department in 1972. Its chairman was delighted to have
a physicist, she recalls, and "I moved into physics little by
little and now my work is completely in physics.'' After more
than 25 years in academe, she became professor of physics in 1983.
To students, her immense
knowledge and extensive writings can be inspiring and somewhat
intimidating. Marcus Berg remembers when he first took the class
based on selected topics from the two-volume "Analysis, Manifolds,
and Physics'' that she co-authored with French mathematician Yvonne
Choquet-Bruhart. It contains more than 1,000 pages of concise
mathematical physics, and Berg says, "Over time, I overcame the
naïve impression that Cécile holds every one of the thousands
of formulas in her head. Still, I am convinced that she understands
every formula in that book--in itself an almost superhuman feat.''
He thinks of
her as " the grandmother of my generation of physicists and, as
a Ph.D. supervisor, the academic mother of more than 20. As
a researcher, she does as much ground work as any of us graduate
students, so in this respect, she is a sister physicist.''
She passes along to
her students something she learned early on: the value of diplomacy.
It isn't part of the scientific curriculum, of course, and says
Berg, "it may be unrelated to physics as a subject, but it is
certainly not unrelated to physics as a career. Cécile knows exactly
when to complain, when to demand, when to agree, and how to express
any of these actions, in speech or in writing.'' Unlike many other
professors supervising Ph.D. candidates, she likes for her students
to spend a year outside the U.S. At
her encouragement, Berg studied for a year in Paris and was there
when she became a member of the French Legion of Honor. "I chatted
with Cécile before,'' he recalls, "and she seemed happy and relaxed,
but then suddenly furrowed her brow. For a second, I thought maybe
she was a little nervous about the formality of the ceremony,
but then she said, 'If I were your mother--which I am not--I would
do this.' " The diminutive professor reached up with both arms
and resolutely straightened his collar.
She does have the maternal
touch, but to her four daughters, DeWitt-Morette has never been
a typical Mom. When three of them turned eleven, their mother
arranged for them to spend a year living with a family in another
country (Japan, Peru, Chile). Two of the sisters are now lawyers,
and one is the writer Abigail DeWitt, who used some of the circumstances
of her mother's life in France in her novel "Lili"(reviewed
in SeniorWomen's Aug., 11, 2000 Culture Watch) DeWitt-Morette
says of her daughters, "I gave them a lot of respect and dignity.
I am proud of them, but I don't take credit.''
Every summer when the
children were young, the whole family went off to France, and
she and her husband still go, staying in the house in the Pyrenees
they remodeled. Chris DeWitt describes her mother--who dresses
simply and never wears makeup--as "completely unpretentious, treating
secretaries and custodians with the same respect she would a Nobel
laureate colleague.''
She never liked to
shop or to cook ("You work for hours, and it is all over in half-an
hour!''), but sewing, and especially darning, are favorite occupations.
She offers a deal to friends when she visits, she jokes, presenting
herself as a kind of traveling seamstress. "Make a pile of things
that needs mending or sewing," she instructs, "and I will work
on that and you don't have to entertain me.''
At present, she is
president of Planned Living
Assistance Network, an organization that helps families who
find themselves no longer able to care for their children afflicted
with mental illness. One of her daughters has obsessive-compulsive
disorder, and says her mother simply, "It is easier for me to
help her by helping a lot of people.''
Over the years she
has taken up judo (she holds a brown belt) windsurfing, skiing
and hiking, and since her school days, when she would complete
the weekly assignment on the day it was given, the energetic scholar
has made it a habit to finish a task long before its deadline.
"I schedule my life,'' she says firmly. "Some friends say I have
a little clock, inside me and am too dictated by it.'' That
may be, but it is her finely tuned inner timepiece that has made
it possible to balance family life with a career as writer, researcher
and teacher and to inspire generations of scientists. A surgeon
could not have done more.
