{"id":6072,"date":"2010-05-05T14:46:32","date_gmt":"2010-05-05T18:46:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/etherwave.wordpress.com\/?p=6072"},"modified":"2010-05-05T14:46:32","modified_gmt":"2010-05-05T18:46:32","slug":"married-physicist-couples","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/2010\/05\/05\/married-physicist-couples\/","title":{"rendered":"Married Physicist Couples"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Joseph and Maria Goeppert Mayer; AIP Emilio Segr\u00e8 Visual Archives<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I’ve been away from the blog for some time now, which mainly has to do with the fact that I just got married.\u00a0 Thus activities surrounding this event went to the top of my agenda, bumping ordinary work down into the space usually occupied by supplying content to EWP.\u00a0 This post is inspired by my recent bout of marriage on the brain.<\/p>\n

A bit of background: I nabbed some funding for putting together ACAP on my first try, but barely.\u00a0 One thing that almost derailed the proposal was some anxiety that this would be yet another dead-white-male hall of fame.\u00a0 That outcome is sort of inevitable: to this day, the physics profession suffers from a pronounced gender skew, albeit not so bad as in prior decades.\u00a0 If one is to study physics history, one is going to end up studying a lot of white males, unless one specifically sets out to do a sociological or anthropological analysis of gender and minority relations in the profession.<\/p>\n

I argued at the time that ACAP’s scale and reach to the present would almost certainly allow it to include women and minorities with whom professional historians rarely bother, but who have been well-known to physicists themselves.\u00a0 This turned out to be correct.\u00a0 On account of the historical bias of the physics profession against female and minority participation, only a small percentage of people in ACAP are women and minorities, but they are nevertheless there, and this allows the beginnings <\/em>of a conversation about their history in the American physics profession—with certain important caveats, most notably that ACAP can analyze only the careers of those who have made it to the upper echelons of professional recognition.\u00a0 ACAP must not <\/em>be taken as a reliable sample from which to draw general conclusions about “women and minorities in physics”, since professional advancement has been one of the greatest challenges facing these groups in the profession.<\/p>\n

One notable trend that we can<\/em> look at is the prevalence of physicist married couples in the history of physics. The classic icon of women in the profession is Marie Curie (1867-1934), who, with her husband Pierre, won half the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 (Becquerel got the other half).\u00a0 The only other woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics was Maria Goeppert Mayer<\/a> (1906-1972), who won in 1962 for her development of the “shell” model of the nucleus (she won with Eugene Wigner and German physicist Hans Jensen).\u00a0 Mayer, though highly respected, had notorious difficulty securing her own position.\u00a0 A German by birth, she was a student of G\u00f6ttingen quantum physics luminary Max Born, and she moved to America in 1930 with her American husband Joseph Mayer<\/a> (1904-1983).\u00a0 Barred from professorships by anti-nepotism rules, Maria worked in low-level and unofficial positions until both she and Joseph became professors at the brand-new San Diego campus of the University of California in 1960.<\/p>\n

On this blog, I have already discussed<\/a> the career of Chien-Shiung Wu<\/a> (1912-1997), who immigrated to the United States from China in 1936 to study physics at Michigan.\u00a0 Learning of gender discrimination at that campus, she decided to study at Berkeley instead, where she met her husband, physicist Luke Yuan (1912-2003), another Chinese immigrant.\u00a0 Wu found a place at Columbia in New York City, while Yuan spent his career at Brookhaven National Laboratory on nearby Long Island.\u00a0 Although her career was slow in its early growth, by the 1970s she had become a distinguished figure in the American physics profession, and was the first woman to be named president of the American Physical Society.<\/p>\n

Maurice Goldhaber<\/a> (b. 1911) and Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber<\/a> (1911-1998) met after both escaped Nazi Germany for England.\u00a0 After Maurice secured a job at the University of Illinois in 1938, they both moved to Urbana where Gertrude had a similar experience with anti-nepotism rules as Maria Goeppert Mayer.\u00a0 While Gertrude finally managed to secure a paying job at the university in 1948, in 1950 they decamped to Brookhaven, where both were employed until their retirement (Maurice would direct the laboratory between 1961 and 1973).<\/p>\n

C\u00e9cile Dewitt-Morette (b. 1922) didn’t get picked up in our ACAP selection criteria, but when one finds discussion of the intellectual ferment among postdocs at the Institute for Advanced Study in the late 1940s (as in Dave Kaiser’s Drawing Theories Apart <\/em>on Feynman diagrams), her name inevitably comes up as one of the key players.\u00a0 She met her husband, general relativity physicist Bryce Dewitt<\/a> (1923-2004) there and remained in America, but went on to found the physics summer school at Les Houches in her native France.\u00a0 She and Bryce were at the University of North Carolina (1956-1972), but she was never given a promotion.\u00a0 They moved to the University of Texas at Austin, where she is currently professor emerita.<\/p>\n

Although husbands and wives have collaborated, wives generally developed their own research programs.\u00a0 We can always find exceptions: moving to the present day, Margaret Murnane<\/a> (b. 1959 in Limerick, Ireland), and her husband Henry Kapteyn jointly run a laser research lab<\/a> at JILA at the University of Colorado.\u00a0 Murnane and Kapteyn met in graduate school (Murnane received her PhD from Berkeley in 1989), and, unlike predecessor couples discussed here, were both able to find positions at Washington State, Michigan, and, finally, JILA.<\/p>\n

Being part of a married couple seems to have been a mixed blessing for women in mid-20th-century physics.\u00a0 On the one hand, initial evidence seems to indicate that it was practically a prerequisite for reaching the highest echelons of the profession in mid-twentieth-century America.\u00a0 The strength taken from the marriage seems to have been mainly in the moral support wives were given in their pursuit of a long-term physics career, rather than any influence male physicists were able to exercise over their wives’ careers, which was generally very little.\u00a0 Indeed, the marriage was often used by universities to avoid hiring wives on as professors: “anti-nepotism” was habitually invoked as a barrier.\u00a0 Sketchy evidence suggests the rise of national laboratories and new departments helped allay this difficulty.<\/p>\n

Another interesting point is that both women in general, and women married to physicists in particular, who were pioneers in building highly successful careers in physics seem to have often been foreign-born.\u00a0 (For another exception, one might look to Mildred<\/a> and Gene Dresselhaus; Mildred, born in 1930, was the second female APS president in 1984, and is often cited as a crucial influence on women students at MIT).\u00a0 In other words, while the process has traditionally been difficult for all women, the terrain seems to have been particularly forbidding for girls growing up in more typical American families.\u00a0 Actually, Illinois professor Laura Greene<\/a> (b. 1952) is the subject of a short video about her own experiences that addresses her own experiences going into physics after growing up in a non-scientific family in Cleveland:<\/p>\n

[youtube=http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ptswilP4yi0&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0]<\/p>\n

For further information on women in physics, one should look to the unfortunately neglected Contribution of Women to Twentieth-Century Physics website<\/a>, and the related book, Out of the Shadows<\/em>, edited by Nina Byers and Gary Williams, which also focus on individual, high-level women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been away from the blog for some time now, which mainly has to do with the fact that I just got married.\u00a0 Thus activities surrounding this event went to the top of my agenda, bumping ordinary work down into the space usually occupied by supplying content to EWP.\u00a0 This post is inspired by my<\/p>\n

Continue Reading… Married Physicist Couples<\/span>Continue Reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[218,241,533,1009,1013,1014,1091],"class_list":["post-6072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-cecile-dewitt-morette","tag-chien-shiung-wu","tag-gertrude-scharff-goldhaber","tag-margaret-murnane","tag-maria-goeppert-mayer","tag-marie-curie","tag-mildred-dresselhaus"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6072\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}