Recently, I started reading the book The Secret of Life, by Howard Markel. It’s the story of the discovery of the structure of DNA, retold with respect for the facts. James Watson’s bestselling book, The Double Helix, in 1968, was a great read but not very accurate. The dismissive way he treated Rosalind Franklin, the scientist who did not win the Noble Prize, is well known. But I was struck by the back-to-back quotations about lipstick at the beginning of chapter 13. Watson wrote “There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair..” Franklin’s mother wrote, “…and she always wore lipstick.” I am certain her mother was correct. I remember a man who told me when I was a medical resident (in the seventies) that I never wore a skirt, that I always wore pants on the ward, “like a dyke”. In fact, I often wore the white skirt I had been issued as part of my resident uniform (no white pants for the girls) but not when I was on call for 36 hours. After that comment, I carefully alternated skirts and pants and kept track.

We were also taught “the lipstick sign” in our clinical training. When a patient in the hospital started putting on her lipstick, it meant that she was feeling better and ready to be discharged. The first time I heard this “sign”, I remember thinking that I would never be discharged because I didn’t wear lipstick. I wasn’t opposed to it, but it seemed difficult—something I would have to reapply constantly. Those were hippie years and I always felt that I had something better to do than learn about cosmetics. But as Watson’s comment indicates, some men see lipstick as a symbol of compliant femininity, so much so, that a woman who was assertive (as Franklin was) would be perceived as not wearing it, even if she was. So you can’t win. Markel writes, “Watson’s malice toward Rosalind Franklin, and his cartoonish portrayal of her as an overemotional , angry, incompetent woman was set into the literary equivalent of concrete by the time he composed his memoir’s final line.”

Toni Martin Writes