LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter Seven

       A Nobel / Noble Woman (1909)

      A battle cry of feminism—one that launched a thousand tweets, T-shirts, and tattoos—appeared in 2017, when Republican Senator Mitch McConnell shushed Elizabeth Warren. Regarding her refusal to be muzzled, he stated, “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” The hashtag #LetLizSpeak began trending, along with historical examples of powerful men silencing females: Rosa Parks, Susan B. Anthony, Malala. A century earlier, a despot tried to annihilate a lady who not only persisted, but prevailed, to become a Nobel Woman.

      Old habits, as has been observed, die hard and, even with the end of the Victorian era, sexism was still rampant. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Italian girls not only had to contend with misogyny, they also had to fight time-honored machismo. One who refused to conform to a sexist mold was born into an observant Jewish family in Turin. One of four children, Rita was the daughter of Adamo Levi, an electrical engineer, and Adele Montalcini, a painter, Italian Jews who could trace their roots to Israelites who immigrated during the days of the Roman Empire.

      The event that altered the trajectory of Levi-Montalcini’s life was the death of her governess, Giovanna, who had helped raise Rita, her twin, Paola, and her siblings, Nina and Gino. Devastated by the loss, she determined to become a doctor and find a cure for the disease that had claimed the life of her second mother. However, in the early 1900s, Italy decreed that girls’ primary goals were in the domestic sphere. Because of the current zeitgeist, her parents sent their three daughters to an all-girls’ high school whose graduates did not meet the criteria for acceptance into a university. This lack of education did not faze her sisters, as Paola became a painter and Nina married and became a mother of three. In contrast, Gino, free from gender restraint, became a prominent architect and professor at the University of Turin.

      Rita felt she lacked her mother’s and twin’s artistic talent, though she had an artistic temperament, and the thought of marriage held no appeal. Indeed, she would have taken umbrage at the term “maternal instinct,” as she had no desire to populate the planet. “Babies did not attract me, and I was altogether without the maternal sense so highly developed in small and adolescent girls.” Although her father remained steadfast in his conviction that medical school was a man’s domain, he gave his grudging approval. After intensive studying to fill the gaps in her education, Rita entered the University of Turin, one of seven women in a class of three hundred. Her professor, Giuseppe Levi (no relation), took her under his wing and helped her overcome the school’s entrenched sexism, and in 1936, she graduated summa cum laude. In recognition of her achievement, Levi-Montalcini received a trip to a scientific conference in Sweden, but returned to a brutal reception.

      The best-laid plans of mice and men—and an ambitious young woman—were waylaid when Benito Mussolini issued the Manifesto per la Difesa della Razza, signed by ten Italian scientists, that resulted in the banishment of non-Aryans from the academic and professional fields. To avoid the regime’s anti-Semitism, Rita fled to Belgium, where she worked as a guest of a neurological institute. In 1940, on the eve of the Nazi invasion, she returned to Italy.

      Showing that you can’t keep a great woman down, Rita, with the help of her brother, converted her bedroom into a makeshift lab and filled it with the chicks she needed for research. Forced to innovate, she fashioned her own scientific instruments using, among other things, reshaped sewing needles and watchmakers’ tweezers. Discovery of her clandestine activities could have resulted in imprisonment or death, but she refused to let the dictator, Il Duce, sideline her passion. After the fascists dismissed Giuseppe from his post, he ironically went to work as an assistant to his former pupil.

      With the Allied bombing raining death on Turin, the Levi-Montalcini family fled to a retreat in Piemonte, where Rita set up another lab. In order to carry on her investigation of nerve growth in chicken embryos, with eggs in short supply because of wartime shortages, she bicycled around the countryside searching for fertilized ones. To deflect suspicion, she explained to the farmers that she wanted them because she felt they were more nutritious for her “babies.” As a bonus, she could later turn her experiments into omelets. Forced to go on the run once more, the family escaped to Florence, where forged papers bore the surname Lupani and identified them as Catholic. In 1945, Mussolini, who fancied himself the contemporary Julius Caesar, and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, met their end through machine-gun fire. After the war, Dr. Levi-Montalcini joined the Allies as a volunteer physician in refugee camps, where she treated patients suffering from typhoid and other infectious diseases.