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A Reflection on Stephanie Kwolek*
"...I started thinking that even though she wasn't my contemporary, we had a lot of similarities in our experiences. Stephanie's mother was a very strong person who supported the family and did things back in the 30’s that women normally didn't do and I saw my own mother doing those same things in the 50’s, having a career instead of having to stay home. So we both had strong female figures that we could follow. I also saw that Stephanie had some of the same difficulties in her science career as I did.
Even as a young science student it was a little bit different for a girl even in the 50s and 60s for a girl to be interested in science. We'd collect bugs and critters and play with electricity and invent things, have a chemistry set and a telescope in the back yard and all those neat science things. Stephanie had some of those same problems. She was a little bit different as she went through her elementary years and she was very different as she went through high school and into college. In fact, when she got her degree out of MIT, she had more chemistry credits than the men who were getting degrees in Chemistry, but she opted to get a degree in a more liberal arts area and kind of hid her chemistry background.
She went on to be hired in 1946 by Dupont and found that she was given a pretty much dull and routine assignment and never got any of the exciting assignments, in fact, in 15 years she hadn't been given a single promotion and her salary hadn't kept up with her male counterparts who were doing the same work. This wasn't because she was lax and didn't work hard, in fact, she decided she wouldn't marry, she would give up having a family because of her devotion to her job which took a great deal of time. So you know that she was putting 200% into the work and deserved salary raises and promotions. In fact, she watched a female colleague of hers be fired (transferred) because she did complain about the lack of equality.
So finally in 1964, Stephanie was given a wonderful assignment, she was told that she needed to create a fabric with certain physical properties. Dupont had been doing a lot of work with Lycra and Dacron® and Orlon® and had 10 years of research to back it up. And we know that we still use those fabrics today and they are very durable and tough as fabrics go, but they wanted, at Dupont, something that was very, very strong but yet more fabric like and that was Stephanie's assignment.
Stephanie started with known polymers. She researched how each was constructed and learned the characteristics and limitations of each polymer. She then studied the effects of mixing other materials with the polymer to create a totally new material--a composite. The resultant composites offered new characteristics that somehow transcended the characteristics of each. In eight months she designed a composite that had all these wonderful qualities described on the DuPont advertisement**––Kevlar®: a fire resistant, bullet–proof, 5 times as strong as steel, composite material that could be shaped, molded, attached to fasteners and made to have utility in industry, sports, and in public safety. Bullet proof vests filled with Kevlar® have saved many a soldier’s and policeman’s life.
You can see that Stephanie really was a hero, she was a hero for women in science, she was a hero for chemists, and I think that we should be very proud to have women like this in science.
*Reflection by Miriam Munck, Assistant Professor of Science Education at Eastern Oregon University and lifelong chemist.
A wonderful summary of Stephanie Kwolek's life work can be seen in this video. This could be used at the end of the unit to re-introduce Kwolek to students and set-up their own challenge.
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