Early Life
Barbara McClintock was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the third of four children of physician Thomas Henry McClintock and Sara Handy McClintock. She was independent from a very young age, a trait McClintock described as her "capacity to be alone". From about the age of three until the time she started school, McClintock lived with an aunt and uncle in Brooklyn, New York in order to reduce the financial burden on her parents while her father established his medical practice. She was described as a solitary and independent child, and a tomboy. She was close to her father, but had a difficult relationship with her mother.
McClintock completed her secondary education at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn. She discovered science at high school, and wanted to attend Cornell University to continue her studies. Her mother resisted the idea of higher education for her daughters, believing it would make them unmarriageable. The family also had financial problems. Barbara was almost prevented from starting college, but her father intervened, and she entered Cornell in 1919.
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“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
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