PHYSICIST ITALY[Laura] was afraid of no one. [She] fought with clear-sighted determination to win acceptance in the patriarchal world of eighteenth-century science.
—MARTA CAVAZZA, BIOGRAPHER
Mama, Mama, may I please go now?” The embroidery on young Laura’s lap was rumpled and frayed. Her mother sighed at Laura’s lack of interest. For the hundredth time, she thought that this child should have been born a boy. Reluctantly, she nodded her head; Laura tossed the hated embroidery aside and was off, running to welcome her teacher, who had just arrived for her daily lessons.
Young Laura Maria Caterina Bassi had a thirst to learn. Born in 1711 in Bologna, Italy, at the start of the Age of Enlightenment, she lived in an exciting time, a time of booming curiosity. After centuries fearing the unknown and being terrorized by the mysteries of life, people were beginning to calm down. For the first time, they began to understand that through observing and questioning the world around them, some of the unknowable could indeed become known. Life was becoming less a terrifying mystery and more an intriguing puzzle to be sorted out.
Laura was considered to be an expert in Latin, logic, metaphysics, natural philosophy, algebra, geometry, Greek, and French.
Unfortunately for Laura, women were not invited to the Age of Enlightenment. Upper-class girls like her were supposed to learn to sew, to manage a home and servants, and to prepare themselves for motherhood. They weren’t expected to be interested in or even to have the brains to be curious about the natural world. But Laura didn’t let this prejudice stop her. Throughout her life, Laura never settled for what other people wanted of her.
Laura’s teacher, a professor at the University of Bologna, was a good one. He was also the Bassi family physician and had agreed, at Laura’s father’s request, to teach her. He came to the Bassi villa each day. There, in her sunny garden, Laura studied mathematics, philosophy, anatomy, natural history, and languages.
When she was only twenty, her teacher declared she had learned everything he had to teach. It was time for her public examination. He took her to the university to be grilled by the best minds in Bologna. For hours, learned and unbelieving professors, all men, queried Laura about her lessons and challenged her answers.
If you were an enlightened thinker back then, you questioned authority, examined your own motives for prejudice, and relied on your own experiences as the best teacher.
Laura not only gave the right answers, she also defended them with spirit. Despite her sex, they could not dispute her knowledge. So in a solemn ceremony in the Palazzo Pubblico (public palace), she was named a professor of anatomy at the university and a member of the Academy of the Institute for Sciences. In the University of Bologna’s six-hundred-year history, no woman had ever been named a professor. Laura was the first.
Laura was admired for her good character and charity to the poor, and was sought out by famous thinkers, like Voltaire, when they visited Bologna.
But, as time went on, it became clear to Laura that, despite her achievements, she was considered special. Not special in a good way—special in that she didn’t get to participate in the life of the university like the male professors did. She was a gracious young woman, good at meeting the right people and charming them with her wit and knowledge. University leaders thought she would make a great figurehead, like a beauty queen of science. They tried to limit her role to hosting parties and welcoming honored guests. She was called the Bologna Minerva, after the ancient Roman goddess of wisdom, invention, and the arts. A lovely title, but Laura didn’t want titles. She wanted to teach.
She played along with the game, earning some powerful friends as she performed her hostess duties. Then she went home and quietly did exactly what she wanted. With the support of her husband, physicist Giuseppe Veratti, Laura set up a private teaching laboratory in her home. There, surrounded by her growing family (she eventually had twelve children!), she continued teaching and researching in experimental physics, ignoring the taunts of male scholars who claimed she was neglecting her work to care for her children.
If it bothered Laura, she didn’t complain. She kept her head in her studies and in her teaching, and unlike most of her male colleagues, didn’t worry about trying to publish her findings or becoming famous. For her, knowledge was the goal.
In 1745, when she was thirty-four, her years of research and her skills at gracefully handling disbelieving colleagues began to pay off. Laura started to get the recognition she deserved. Finally! She was allowed to teach what were known as the male sciences—mechanics, hydrometry, and elasticity. The pope himself, Benedict XIV, nominated her for a post in his Benedictine Academy. But even with the pope’s backing, her colleagues still thwarted her and would not allow her to vote, even though she was a member of the academy.
Despite the continuing discrimination, from that time on, Laura’s authority was questioned less frequently. She had proved herself and shown that women could do more than manage households. Her fame as a teacher spread, and at sixty-five, two years before her death, Laura was appointed to the prestigious chair of Experimental Physics at the Institute for Sciences in Bologna.
Laura Bassi was an early hero in the fight for women’s equality. Her struggle and triumph over male chauvinism are an inspiration to every girl who has been labeled different. As Laura showed, being different can be a wonderful thing.
HOW WILL YOU ROCK THE WORLD?
My dream is to be an author as famous as J. K. Rowling and as funny as Rick Riordan, with more published works than Shakespeare and Ken Follett combined. I could write books with veiled messages, books with relevant themes. I could write stories with strong female characters in a male-dominated historical period. Subtly I could teach people facts through fictional stories. I may be only one girl, but someday I’ll be the girl who inspired millions to rock the world.
KATE SAMUELS 
AGE 13