For Better or For Worse? Collaborative Couples in the Sciences, 2012 Science Networks. Historical Studies Series, Vol. 44

In this volume, a distinguished set of international scholars examine the nature of collaboration between life partners in the sciences, with particular attention to the ways in which personal and professional dynamics can foster or inhibit scientific practice. Breaking from traditional gender analyses which focus on divisions of labor and the assignment of credit, the studies scrutinize collaboration as a variable process between partners living in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who were married and divorced, heterosexual and homosexual, aristocratic and working-class and politically right and left. The contributors analyze cases shaped by their particular geographical locations, ranging from retreat settings like the English countryside and Woods Hole, Massachusetts, to university laboratories and urban centers in Berlin, Stockholm, Geneva and London. The volume demonstrates how the terms and meanings of collaboration, variably shaped by disciplinary imperatives, cultural mores, and the agency of the collaborators themselves, illuminate critical intellectual and institutional developments in the modern sciences.

Foreword, by S.G. Kohlstedt - 1. Introduction.- 2. The Making of a Bestseller: Alexander and Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Chemistry, by J.-J. Dreifuss and N.T. Sigrist. - 3. ‘Not merely wifely devotion’: Collaborating in the Construction of Science at Terling Place, by D.L. Opitz. - 4. The Mystery of the Nobel Laureate and His Vanishing Wife, by J. Harvey. - 5. Married for Science, Divorced for Love: Success and Failure in the Collaboration between Astrid Cleve and Hans von Euler-Chelpin, by K. Espmark and C. Nordlund. - 6. Ida and Walter Noddack through Better and Worse: An Arbeitsgemeinschaft in Chemistry, by B. Van Tiggelen and A. Lykknes. - 7. A Model Collaborative Couple in Genetics: Anna Rachel Whiting and Phineas Westcott Whiting’s Study of Sex Determination in Habrobracon, by M.L. Richmond. - 8. Social Reform Collaboration and Gendered Academization: Three Swedish Social Science Couples at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, by P. Wisselgren. - 9. Social Science Couples in Britain at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Gender Divisions in Work and Marriage, by E.J. Yeo. - 10. Co-operative Comradeships versus Same-Sex Partnerships: Historicizing Collaboration among Homosexual Couples in the Sciences, by D.L. Opitz - Epilogue: Collaborative Couples – Past, Present and Future, by N.G. Slack. - Select Bibliography.- Contributor Biographies.- Index.