Epilogue: Collaborative Couples – Past, Present and Future
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Epilogue: Collaborative Couples – Past, Present and Future Nancy G. Slack This new book explores many themes in the lives of collaborative couples in the sciences from the early 1800s through most of the twentieth century. A great deal has been written about women in science since Margaret Rossiter’s seminal book about American women scientists before 1940.1 Other more recent books explore the relationships between couples in literature and art, but For Better or For Worse? Collaborative Couples in the Sciences is the first comprehensive collection to take up the themes explored in Creative Couples in the Sciences (1996) and to elucidate more fully the nature of collaboration.2 The authors who wrote about the couples in both books considered the man’s scientific work and his part in the collaboration as well as the woman’s. Homosexual scientific couples, about which there is little previous study, are considered in the present book as well. Whether these collaborations were for “better or worse” – and for whom – has been pondered by many of the authors. In my view this question deserves special consideration in relation to changes both in societal attitudes and in the way science is done. A number of themes emerged from Creative Couples and from other accounts of scientific couples. In the present book, we can see how the more detailed and perhaps deeper look at collaboration accords with these themes. Several of the authors make excellent use of primary sources to elucidate the nature of collabora- tion between the husband and wife. In the case of Ida and Walter Noddack for example, laboratory notebooks and publications have been carefully analyzed (see Chapter 6, this volume). Both Creative Couples and the present book are limited to couples who are no longer alive; we need to look as well at more contemporary couples. Both society and the ways of doing science have changed greatly over time, changes worth exploring in the lives of collaborative couples. In this epilogue, I will review what I consider to be some of the major themes from previous research on collaborating scientific couples of the past and show how the present book expands the study of collaboration and elucidates these themes. I will then discuss living collaborative couples in science and how they have been affected by the problems of the past and by societal changes during the last 50 years. Finally, I will consider what the future may hold. Here I consider A. Lykknes et al. (eds.), For Better or For Worse? Collaborative 271 Couples in the Sciences, Science Networks. Historical Studies 44, DOI 10.1007/978-3-0348-0286-4, # Springer Basel AG 2012 272 Epilogue – and reconsider – a range of social factors and changes in respect to societal attitudes, anti-nepotism rules, affirmative action, spousal intimacy, divorce, commut- ing and telecommuting, as well as housekeeping and childcare assistance. In addi- tion I will consider new and future research on collaboration among same-sex couples, class dynamics, and the way science is now done and how this may affect future collaborating couples. The Past One might hope to find collaborative couples in which both partners, in most cases male and female, had equal opportunities, positions, scientific success and recogni- tion. This has rarely been the case. It is usually the male partner who has had, in the past, more of each of these, although this was not true for three of the couples discussed in Creative Couples (the Berkeleys, Lonsdales and Brandegees). In these it was the wife who had the better position and the greater recognition. Three of the collaborative Nobelist couples – the Curies, Joliot-Curies, and Coris – can be considered as nearly egalitarian as possible for their periods. But for almost all of the other couples who appear in that book, it was the husband who had the greater share of scientific success.3 As the editors of the current volume record in the Introduction, “collaboration” was consciously broadly defined in Creative Couples. The editors of that book, including myself, looked for collaboration in the sense of each scientist-spouse creating a nurturing environment for the other’s scientific work, even if the scien- tific work itself did not involve joint research and publications. I wish to highlight some of the themes that emerged in the earlier book as a means for considering what we can learn from these new and varied cases of collaborative couples presented in the current book. Patterns of Collaboration Among the couples studied, historians have found a number of different patterns. We can build on these here to advance the field. Many of the present volume’s contributors have delved into primary sources such as laboratory notebooks and correspondence to discover the true aspects of scientific collaboration among the couples they wrote about, from the Marcets in the eighteenth century to the Lwoffs in more modern times. Eighteenth century wives with an interest in science either before, or in some cases after, marriage to a scientist became members of the “family firm” as so ably told by Ann Shteir for English botanical couples.4 Another early example is that of the Sullivants, in which the established scientist, William Starling Sullivant (1803–1873) trained his wife to be an excellent scientific assistant, and to illustrate Epilogue 273 his publications.5 She earned praise but not scientific recognition. Thus, marriage could begin a life in science for a woman like Eliza Wheeler Sullivant (1817–1850), or could end it abruptly, as in the case of the eighteenth century Jane Colden (1724–1766), a botanist who was taught by and collaborated with her father.6 In these early eras, professional positions for women as scientists were essentially lacking on both sides of the Atlantic. What of the husband-creator/wife-assistant pattern? This was the well- documented relationship of Edith Schwartz Clements (1874–1971) and her cele- brated American ecologist husband Frederic Clements (1874–1945).7 They married in 1899; he had already published a book on ecology. Edith Clements was Frederic’s Ph.D. student; this relationship rarely led to egalitarian collaborations. Edith became his assistant in everything from photography to car repair during their many botanical travels in the western U.S., but the theoretical ideas, publications, and renown were all his. Other wives who were taught by their husbands, in addition to Edith Clements and Eliza Sullivant, were Elizabeth Coxen Gould (1803–1840) and Margaret Lindsay Huggins (1848–1915). All did good scientific work – with varying degrees of recognition. Eliza Sullivant received high praise from her husband for her (published) scientific drawings of mosses – but only after she died of cholera in 1850.8 Elizabeth Gould’s bird paintings often appeared under John Gould’s (1804–1881) name, but eventually she was “discovered” and her paintings exhibited in London museums – but long after she died of puerperal fever after childbirth in 1841.9 Margaret Huggins’s story is somewhat different. Born in 1848, she married a well-known scientist, William Huggins (1824–1910), one of the founding fathers of stellar spectroscopy. Margaret was 24 years younger than her husband, and knew nothing of astronomy; he taught her. They did collaborative research for 35 years in their garden observatory at Tulse Hill, London. Their letters and notebooks, exam- ined by Barbara Becker, make clear her own important contributions to science. But the Huggins’ presented themselves as the ideal Victorian couple: he the creator, she the able assistant. She herself wrote, “None of you know how hard we worked here, just our two unaided selves.” However, her scientific work was recognized with a government pension “for services to Science.”10 For better or worse? In that era, I would suggest “for better” both for the husband and the wife. This pattern has received further needed scrutiny in the present book in a study of the Rayleighs’ collaboration. As Donald Opitz relates (Chapter 3, this volume), Lord Rayleigh (1842–1919), winner of a Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of argon, and Lady Rayleigh (1846–1934) were part of an older tradition of science carried out in a country house, in this case with a very well equipped laboratory. Lady Rayleigh’s scientific role however was more of the husband-creator/wife- assistant pattern – at least according to her husband. But Opitz has found, using primary sources, that she had a wider role than the more usual wife/household manager. She did both computations and experiments, and she even looked for mistakes in his work. Her help was acknowledged in a few of Lord Rayleigh’s 446 papers. 274 Epilogue Rossiter pointed out that male zoologists married to women zoologists benefited because these women were probably not able to find paid positions and were thus free (and often trained) to assist in their husbands’ research.11 In some cases their names appeared on their husbands’ papers; in most cases they did not. This pattern, however, continued throughout the twentieth century. Some wives I interviewed on this point were content with their role, especially if they had children. In addition, those whose husbands traveled for their research, whether in zoology or astronomy or other sciences, were able to travel with them and assist in the field, unencum- bered by academic positions they did not themselves possess. Anti-nepotism Rules Several of the authors of this book showed how the scientific careers of both American and European wives were circumscribed by the policies of universities or other institutions that hired their husbands. This was true for Ida Noddack (1896–1978), as noted by Brigitte van Tiggelen and Annette Lykknes (chapter 6, this volume).