It’s not as simple as that. They tried to award it just to her husband before splitting it in half and awarding both. Marie Curie’s Wikipedia page says:
“At first the committee had intended to honour only Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel, but a committee member and advocate for women scientists, Swedish mathematician Magnus Gösta Mittag-Leffler, alerted Pierre to the situation, and after his complaint, Marie's name was added to the nomination.[45] Marie Curie was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize.[24”
Nevertheless she got awarded a second Nobel Prize after the death of Pierre Curie. One and a half Nobel price is still more recognition than almost anybody else, including Albert Einstein.
To my mind, Marie Curie wasn't exactly met with acceptance.
It was a really huge uphill battle for her from the beginning. For example, in defiance of laws against women getting an education, she attended a secret university for women.
Mileva Einstein had unprecedented support and was initially admitted to an all boys school thanks in part to family backing, but later tried repeatedly to complete her degree and was denied a degree and finally gave up.
I will suggest that Marie Curie ended up with more recognition in part because she had to go to school secretly in defiance of the law. Mileva Einstein began with a really remarkable and unusual degree of family support for her interests and aspirations and this may have left her ill-prepared for dealing effectively with an openly hostile sexist social climate.
It also possibly made her more of a target because she was performing a full frontal assault on sexism instead of quietly doing an end run around the issue. That tends to get a lot more push back.
To this day, the #MeToo movement suggests most women with serious careers pay a rather high price in terms of having to face constant sexual harassment and even sexual assault. There would have been far less support at that time than there is now and women generally tend to express the idea that there is far too little now.
In my own life, where I have persisted in the face of an uphill battle it has consistently been a situation where I felt like I had no real choice. I felt backed into a corner and like this -- whatever "this" was -- was the least-worst option available to me or the only option.
I believe that one of the things that accounts for poorer performance/outcomes (career-wise) for women is that when women have options -- like letting their husband provide for them while they raise their children and pursue their interests in a more hobby-like fashion -- they tend to take them. Taking a stand tends to come at a high price. Many people simply choose to not pay that price if they have any way out, even if it means letting their career dreams die as a consequence of trying to protect themselves.
I don't think most people breaking barriers are really people who just want to take a stand and make a statement and make a difference. I think most of them are like me: Someone who has some ability to outperform others in some metrics whose situation doesn't readily give them a way out of the confrontation with society.
I don't think anyone should be sitting in judgment of Mileva for wanting to try to support her husband's career and eschew credit for herself in some vain attempt to try to get a comfortable life that didn't really materialize.
And I think it is ugly behavior when people act like "Well, she made a choice and didn't want it badly enough" or something like that (as is all too often the way this gets framed).
It's kind of like that scene in Good Will Hunting where he talks about his abusive father laying out three things and giving him a "choice" as to which one he wants to be beaten with. In a sick system, most people are trying desperately to find some way to say "Well, I really don't want to be beaten at all." while the world looks on and says, more or less, "You chose to be beaten because you answered the abusive question as to which instrument you would like to be beaten with."
To my mind, that's the crux of a sick system and it underlies an awful lot of social ills, such as sexism, racism and homophobia.
If you are "the wrong kind of person," the world simply doesn't give you the option to have nice things. It insists that you must choose between these various ugly options and then acts like you have no right to complain about your suffering "because you made this choice."
Sometimes, people are some combination of talented and lucky and manage to quietly have a nice life anyway, in spite of being "the wrong kind of person." But that tends to not go hand-in-hand with breaking social barriers and becoming extremely prominent in your field. People who become extremely prominent in spite of being "the wrong kind of person" tend to pay a price for it beyond the usual price for success.
Wouldn’t Marie Curie’s Nobel Prize present a counterfactual to the absolutism of this claim?