She too

Rosa Montero, El País – 2 Jun 2019

Einstein made his first wife sign a humiliating contract. He burned her letters and barely mentioned the contribution that she made to his work.

While reading the Nativel Preciado’s recent novel, ‘El Nobel y la corista’ [‘The Nobel prize-winner and The Chorus Girl’], in which the writer paints a brilliant portrait of the womanising Einstein, I was reminded of the disturbing story of Mileva Marić, the Serbian physicist and mathematician who was the scientist’s first wife. Mileva and Einstein met in 1896 in the Polytechnic Institute of Zurich, where they were both students. She was 21, he was 17, and it was love at first sight. Mileva had shown such talent from an early age that her father decided to give her the best education possible. To get a sense of how ground-breaking this attitude was at the time, suffice to say that her father had to ask for special permission for his daughter to study physics and mathematics, two subjects that were reserved for men only. It was a world in which women were denied everything.

Mileva and Albert started living and working together, in spite of the furious opposition from his mother. The fact that Mileva’s partner defended her in the face of his own mother’s disapproval must have given the young woman an endless sense of gratitude towards him. Indeed, Professor Weber initially approved Mileva’s application to pursue a doctorate after having rejected Albert, as he didn’t think him prepared. She then accepted the offer only on the condition that Einstein be admitted as well. Mileva, a better mathematician than him, used to revise her lover’s mistakes. Einstein’s notes are covered with her corrections: “She solves my mathematical problems”, he wrote.

The young woman was obsessed with finding a mathematical foundation for the transformation of matter into energy, and she shared her fascination with Albert, details of which are contained in letters that are still preserved today.  His partner’s idea interested Einstein. In 1900, they finished their first article on capillarity. It was a joint work - “I gave a copy of our article to Professor Jung”, Einstein wrote - but only he signed it. Why? Because the name of a woman attached to the paper would have discredited the work. Because Mileva wanted Einstein to succeed so that he would marry her, as he had said that he would not do so until he could support her financially. And because of the pathological feelings of gratitude, psychological dependence and unhealthy humility that the patriarchy instils in women.

​And so, insidiously, the misfortune began. In 1901, Mileva went to Serbia to give birth to a daughter in secret, who has never been heard of since - perhaps she ended up in an orphanage. A little after this, Einstein secured a job as a specialist in the Federal Office for Intellectual Property in Bern and, now that he had a salary coming in, the two of them married. According to various testimonies, while Albert worked all day, Mileva wrote hypotheses that they would then discuss in the evenings. She also looked after the house and their first child, Hans Albert. “I will be very happy (…) when we finish our work on relative movement”, Einstein wrote in a letter to Mileva. In 1905, three crucial articles appeared in the Annals of Physics signed only by him, although there is a testimony written by the physicist Joffe, the director of the journal at the time, saying that he saw them with the signature Einstein-Marić.

Then, the misfortune worsened. They had a second child, who suffered from schizophrenia; Einstein became famous, fell in love with his cousin and wanted to leave Mileva, who clung desperately to him. From then until their separation in 1914, Einstein subjected her to atrocious psychological abuse; he forced his wife to sign a humiliating contract, stripping her of rights and freedoms. But as bad as this contract seems, what seems to me to be even worse is what the Nobel prize-winner did with Marić’s legacy: he burned her letters, never mentioned the contributions she made to their work, and only mentioned her in a single line of his autobiography. Einstein’s agents tried to delete all traces of Marić - without permission, they took family letters and disposed of them. The doctoral thesis that Mileva presented in 1901 at the Polytechnic also disappeared which, according to testimonies, consisted of the development of the theory of relativity.

I’m not saying that Einstein wasn’t a great scientist - I’m saying that she was one, too. But he insisted on erasing her from memory, and succeeded in doing so until 1986 when, following the death of their son Hans Albert, a box was found containing letters that had huge repercussions in the world of science. In spite of that, Mileva continues to be eclipsed, overshadowed by Einstein’s legendary legacy. That’s how cruel and tragic the consequences of sexism can be.

Translated by Molly Shevlin
Original article: elpais.com/elpais/2019/05/27/eps/1558955111_252877.html