If you were a chick making mindblow-level science discoveries in 1911, you’d be rare.

You’d be among the elite. You’d get a nobel prize.

You’d be… rejected?

From a seat in the French Academy of Sciences?

That’s what Marie Curie endured, at least, after her groundbreaking radioactivity research landed her the aforementioned coveted award and great notoriety. To be fair, however, it wasn’t just because of ovaries. It was also because those ovaries had formerly been paired up with Pierre Curie. And even though he’d died and become one with the Higgs Field, she was expected to spend her life pining and pipetting in a lab until she shriveled up and died herself. Instead, she hooked up with a dude who had split from his own wife and caught hella shade for it from critics everywhere. It didn’t help that the multi-leveled ignorance induced rumors about her religion were going around. I call it multi-level-dumb ‘cause half of them were hating on her atheism… while the other half snubbed her for assuming she was Jewish.

Admittedly, I’m dumb at history and had to read up on the “Dreyfuss-Affair Era” in France to know why being Jewish in France back then was a faux pas, even though homegirl wasn’t. Basically, a Jewish French artillery officer back in 1894 was accused of treason. Then, they found out somebody else did the treason who then let him take the fall. Thing is, that realization didn’t happen or get acknowledged by the law till like 1906. So, in the meantime, France was all split up and anti-Semitic. Because when someone does something bad, it’s a good excuse to hate on the other things about them that are different from us. Like their gods. And then keep hating on them and their gods and anyone else who likes those gods when we find out they’re not bad after all. Don’t like someone? Say they worship that god anyway. And it’s basically tantamount to treason. #facts

Anyway, Miss Marie was super lucky she didn’t have a Twitter account back then.

‘cause people were trolling her hard even sans the interwebz.

Which is why this note from her then buddy Albert Einstein totally made my day:

Something about this really did make me smile.

Maybe it’s that – in my head – I hear Albert saying, “Don’t let the hataz keep ya from doin’ ya thang” like the mathlete from “Mean Girls”. Or maybe it’s knowing that even history’s superhuman minds weren’t total unfeeling Sheldon-esque geniuses. That even the Curies of the world needed the occasional cure of emotional comfort. They needed the reassurance of their colleagues in the face of drivel constructed by non-intellectual media for the “reptilian” reader brains, as Einstein aptly put it.

Or maybe it’s ‘cause I found this letter 100 years later.

Sandwiched between links about a socialite’s personal life… and coverage of a furry convention.