Why did Mileva remain silent? Being reserved and self-effaced, she did not seek honors or public attention.
She was failed and denied a degree in spite of having better grades than Albert, probably solely because she was a woman. Albert was probably blocked from employment positions he wanted by the same professor that failed her, possibly because he was treating a woman like his equal.
This reads to me like they coped as best they could with a world that absolutely wouldn't accept a woman as a serious scientist and even with trying to be self effacing, etc, they both paid a high price -- such a high price, it likely destroyed their marriage.
Both of them appear to be highly rational people. And I'd wager that the scientific world was already a "winner takes all" competition back then. 1 scientist ranking in the worldwide top 10 will likely earn much more than 2 scientists ranking on the top 11-20, because at the extreme, compensation tends to go up exponentially.
My understanding of the article is that they were aware and, thus, Mileva made the rational decision to boost her husband's career at the expense of her own career.
Albert: "I need my wife. She solves for me all my mathematical problems."
Mileva: "Before our departure, we finished an important scientific work which will make my husband known around the world."
To me, that sounds like a rational plan to make him famous by letting him pretend to also possess the skills that in reality his wife provides. Plus, we now know in hindsight that it worked.
And obviously, a groundbreaking work attributed to only one person seems even more impressive than if it was attributed to a team.
EDIT: It also appears to me that Mileva was smart enough to recognize the value of her assistance: "In 1919, she agreed to divorce, with a clause stating that if Albert ever received the Nobel Prize, she would get the money. When she did, she bought two small apartment buildings [..]"
Colette (28 January 1873 – 3 August 1954) initially ghost wrote for her husband and when they split she ended up dirt poor because he owned all the copyrights in his name and she had no claim to any of it.
I agree with your first 2 examples. But in my opinion, the fact that back then sexism caused strong income differences only makes it even more likely that this was a rationally coordinated team effort by the Einstein's.
As for that destroying their marriage, it seems that she got pregnant from another man, while he had multiple affairs, so I wonder if they were ever strongly physically attracted to each other. To me, it seems more likely that they were mentally best friends, but physically craved others.
I kind of dislike your Jezebel link because in my opinion, their goal is mostly to spread hate as opposed to improving the situation. So I'd wager that their experiment was skewed to produce the intended result.
But in my opinion, the fact that back then sexism caused strong income differences only makes it even more likely that this was a rationally coordinated team effort by the Einstein's.
That doesn't contradict anything I've said. If anything, it supports my position.
As for that destroying their marriage, it seems that she got pregnant from another man,
He married her after she had that child. To my mind that seems to be fairly strong evidence that they had a powerful bond that overcame many obstacles that would have prevented most people from ever even getting married.
I don't typically read Jezebel, largely due to the criticisms you cite. But the piece I posted is backed up by data and strikes me as reasonable and even-handed.
I don't think it was engineered by the publication. It seems to have been some one off thing by some random female author who got frustrated with her efforts to get published.
I agree that they overcame many obstacles that would have prevented most people from ever even getting married. I also agree that they had a powerful bond. But I would argue that their bond was mostly mental, like friendship.
There's usually an age disparity in sexual relationships [1] and I would argue that this is because men in general prefer slightly younger women. The fact that Mileva was born 4 years before Albert already makes their relationship highly uncommon (around 1 out of 30 couples).
So maybe Albert married her because she was reliably, intelligent, and had a great character. But that doesn't mean that she had to be in line with his sexual preferences, which then would make it likely that they'll eventually get bored of each other.
I would argue that this is because men in general prefer slightly younger women.
It takes two to tango. Your assumption de facto dismisses the choice of the woman in the relationship, as if her opinion is irrelevant.
I think there are multiple factors involved in that trend, one of which is that women tend to be more socially savvy than men. I think women tend to prefer men who are a little older because, on average, a man needs to be a little older to have a similar level of social savvy and this is a critical detail for a personal relationship.
There are other things in your comment that I don't agree with. But I don't care to elaborate, so this is where we get to "agree to disagree" I guess.
Thank you for actually discussing the details of the article with me.
As someone who's interested in writing, I have noticed things changing over the last few decades so I was interested in the how the situation has evolved over time based on data. I dug this up:
There seems to have been an inflection point in the 1990s, which the author posits is due to the rise of MFA degrees (2/3rds granted to women). Commercially, the gender ratio seems to have approached parity overall, even if in specific categories the large imbalances exists (owing to various factors, some self-selection effect exists). Even though commercial success seems to be at parity, the author posits that the publishing industry lags behind in reflecting this and that there remains a funnel bias in the industry (from critics to publishers).
Note that Karen Blixen published the Danish version of the book under her own name. And apparently she used the pen name Tania Blixen in the German versions. I don't know what this says though. She kept using different pen names even after getting famous under her own name.
> Mileva made the rational decision to boost her husband's career at the expense of her own career
This is a good explanation for her actions while they were married. But it doesn’t explain why she continued to be withdrawn following their divorce. It could have simply been inertia. But there was likely an element of exhaustion from the sexism referenced elsewhere at play.
I don’t think the article’s humility argument sways me. But a combination of your hypothesis for her choice and Doreen’s sexism hypothesis for her sticking with it makes sense.
Children. She had a sick child who needed constant medical care and had expenses.
Being poor might also be a reason for said ‘inertia’. One has to run faster to stay in the same place..chasing someone to retrieve what was stolen from you is unlikely.
[..] Mileva moved back to Zurich with her two sons on 29 July 1914. In 1919, she agreed to divorce, with a clause stating that if Albert ever received the Nobel Prize, she would get the money. When she did, she bought two small apartment buildings and lived poorly from their income. Her son, Eduard stayed frequently in a sanatorium. He later developed schizophrenia and was eventually internalised. Due to these medical expenses, Mileva struggled financially all her life and eventually lost both buildings. She survived by giving private lessons and on the alimony Albert sent, albeit irregularly.[..]
Mileva sat for the intermediate diploma examinations in 1899, one year later than the other students in her group. Her grade average of 5.05 (scale 1–6) placed her fifth out of the six students taking the examinations that year.[6] (Einstein had come top of the previous year's candidates with a grade average of 5.7)[8] Marić's grade in physics was 5.5 (the same as Einstein). In 1900, she failed the final teaching diploma examinations with a grade average of 4.00, having obtained only grade 2.5 in the mathematics component (theory of functions).[9] Einstein passed the exam in fourth place with a grade average of 4.91.[10]
Marić's academic career was disrupted in 1901 when she became pregnant by Einstein. When three months pregnant, she resat the diploma examination, but failed for the second time without improving her grade.
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.
"Pure speculation" ...by a woman who is likely the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board of HN, who is a former full-time wife and mom, who was a top student in her graduating high school class and a National Merit Scholarship winner and ended up a homemaker anyway instead of having a "real career," who has studied social things both formally (in college) and informally (out of personal interest trying to figure out why I didn't get the two-career couple lifestyle I thought I would get)...among other things.
It's a somewhat unique point of view from someone who has studied such things to try to figure out how and why they work that way in hopes of escaping such patterns.
It's frustrating but not exactly surprising that this is rapidly turning into a dismissive pile on.
FWIW, I for one enjoyed reading your perspective. This is something my wife and I discuss all the time. We're both ambitious in our respective careers, and your points have added value to my view of this discussion. Thanks for sharing.
Yeah, if a woman suggests that HN might be a bit sexist there is inevitably a horde of people rushing to prove their non-sexism by downvoting the one woman in the discussion.
>and maybe even refraining from downvoting a post b/c that user is a woman is itself sexist?
You're not supposed to say that, or treat women as equals -- in that you equally troll them / equally openly disagree / become equally aggresive / or equally "well actually" them as you'd do for any fellow nerd...
Equality somehow means "treat women equal, but different".
For example "well actually" it's something a nerd does to another nerd all the time. If you do it to woman though, it's "mansplaining" and its sexist...
Rather ironic that my above comment is being downvoted and I am being accused of having a chip on my shoulder in a discussion about how Einstein's first wife got insufficient credit for her contributions to his work.
I'm merely explaining what informs my point of view to someone whose handle was about 30 minutes old when I replied to it on the assumption that they have no idea what my background is.
There is a leader board here and people care about it?
Is there a meta hackernews where this kind of thing is discussed? I’ve been here for years and this is the strangest conversation I’ve seen, like other people are stepping out in front to let people know you’re legit because you mention your gender identity and have lots of upvotes on a leaderboard and I’m like wwwhat? Have I been using hackernews wrong?
Since you spend a lot of your time on this social media site and get listed as one of its frequent users, that means you can empathize with Einstein's wife?
It simply means that the comment is not merely "pure speculation", which as a comment is 100% worthless in the first place and should be the focus of anyone claiming intellectual integrity and interest in the discussion; instead of bickering about about things downstream of it.
No, that's just a thing I can relatively readily point to that gets respected here if you have male bits between your legs but gets roundly dismissed as worthless internet points if you have female bits between your legs.
I can empathize with her because I was one of the top three students of my graduating class and had the highest SAT scores of my class. I was STAR student and a National Merit Scholarship winner.
I was inducted into Mu Alpha Theta, a college-level math honor society, at age 16 in eleventh grade, the earliest you can be inducted. At age 15, I was state alternate for the Governor's Honors Program, a residential gifted summer enrichment program. That means only two other people outperformed me in the entire state of Georgia on a topic I sort of picked randomly out of a hat because I was a well-rounded student and didn't have any particular area of obvious strength like most candidates.
But more to the point, I have a form of cystic fibrosis and I have been getting myself well for nearly two decades while the entire world calls me crazy and a teller of tall tales and a liar and throws me off of one forum after another which is why I don't cite it more often as a reason I can empathize with someone like Mileva Einstein. I much more often compare myself to Semmelweis and talk about trying hard to not end up locked up in an insane asylum and beaten to death for the crime of thinking I know something medically useful.
What I know really ought to qualify me for something like the Nobel Prize in Medicine. But I'm not holding my breath. I'm not likely to ever get any recognition for my accomplishments. The dismissive nonsense in this thread is very much the norm, unfortunately.
"No, that's just a thing I can relatively readily point to that gets respected here if you have male bits between your legs but gets roundly dismissed as worthless internet points if you have female bits between your legs."
Sure, whenever anything you say is dismissed, it must be because you are a woman. Not because you didn't provide any evidence at all to make your case. Also, women don't have to provide evidence, I guess, they just know things and have to be believed.
Historically, it was somewhat common for men to say to each other here "You must be smart and competent because you have a lot of karma on HN." People tend to not say that about me and when I say that about myself -- "Look, this is a metric right in front you that gets used to say other people here are smart and competent" -- it generally gets ugly reactions, as occurred here.
I'm trying to walk away from this discussion at this point. I haven't had enough sleep and I've been on HN over eleven years and the degree to which I still get treated like "Shut up woman, there is no sexism here!" is a point of personal aggravation and there is no good means to combat it.
Ideally, someone else should be telling people "She's probably the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board and a respected and valued member of the community" or someone else should be telling people "She kicks ass. This is a list of her accomplishments." That's generally how respected men get treated.
But that's not happening and I end up feeling like I have no real choice but to defend myself at times, knowing that will also go badly and be used against me as evidence that I'm not actually important or respectable or smart and so on.
That's the essence of sexism. It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. There simply are no good answers for me. They don't exist and trying to find them gets a lot of abuse heaped upon me.
I was openly homeless on HN for nearly six years. I remain dirt poor. I continue to get treated like I'm a loon who has no basis to claim any kind of competence at all.
And if I say that is evidence of sexism, well, that's just more "evidence" I'm some crank.
Anyway, I haven't had enough sleep. I have had more than I care to have of this type of conversation for today. I'm trying to walk away.
May I offer some context for what appears to be general push-back to your argument.
There are some incredible contributors to this forum who are women that I respect a lot, despite that they actually have quite low HN karma, devaboone for example. The only thing that causes respect in most eyes is the actual quality of discourse, the content itself. When I see a high karma, the only conclusion anyone draws is that this is someone who spends a lot of time on this site, which is just fine. But anyone here can have a high karma if they want to spend that time, and merely spending that time is not in and of itself a source of interest. What is definitely not interesting is talking about the karma score itself and whether or not someone is on some list of frequent users.
> I continue to get treated like I'm a loon who has no basis to claim any kind of competence at all.
> And if I say that is evidence of sexism, well, that's just more "evidence" I'm some crank.
You claimed in the thread that you were deserving of the Nobel prize in medicine. If people are treating you like a crank and you are making claims like that, that is pretty far from "no basis to claim any kind of competence at all." That one seems to be a claim of supreme competence.
I've never seen people flaubnt their karma or congratulate others on their karma here, and I have been on HN almost from day one. I've also been on the leader board at some time (when the board was introduced or was topic of discussion, may have been the only time when people where congratulated for their karma or position on the board).
These days I use throwaway accounts because of the increasing censorship and to force myself to ignore the karma system.
I think karma does affect the algorithm that decides if you get flagged or banned, or at least alerts the mods. May just be the short time votes on specific comments, though.
I'm not going to spend all day on this -- it's pointless anyway because answering you will be some new crime on my part since I said I was walking away and no one will feel like "Well, they shouldn't have doubled down and tried to lure her back into the conversation" because it's all about proving I'm evil and the way I get mistreated is justified -- but here are a few:
You rarely would say "He has accumulated lot of good karma by doing good, I better see what he has to say". On HN, its a different story.
Those are all old comments. Probably not a coincidence because as stated previously when I began pointing out the double standard -- that men would praise each other for having high karma here but nothing I do is ever good enough and I get attacked for trying to assert that I deserve to be treated better -- then people began saying that less rather than, you know, decide to treat me better.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
This pattern - posting something controversial and breaking the rules - and then blaming it on people not liking the controversial thing you said - is not uncommon. Indeed, I frequently see comments to the effect of "See Trump was right about the tech companies being monopolies but people here will downvote me because they hate Trump" sitting at the bottom of every thread when I enable "showdead".
In sum - if you want to get more votes (as you apparently care about votes) and for people to give your ideas more consideration - consider not self-sabotaging by pairing your ideas with a rule breaking comment.
Fwiw, this is the third time I've seen you bring up your rank on the HN leaderboard. It's also the third time I've heard of the HN leaderboard. I'm not sure if somebody being ranked on HN makes me more or less likely to consider their argument - probably less, because it means they spend too much time on social media - but it's not a strong effect in any case. Simply put - does literally anybody care about that leaderboard besides you?
> ...a National Merit Scholarship winner and ended a homemaker anyway instead of having a "real career,"
I would be interested to know why you feel you are entitled to a 'two-career' lifestyle. That you are not is a choice you made, unless you can give the name of the person who pointed a gun to your head to prove otherwise. If you are unhappy with your choices, take responsibility and make amends.
None of that however makes you more likely to be right about 1930 Germany social structures and behavior. It does give you some insight into stay at home situation and such.
> possibly because he was treating a woman like his equal
This for example is complete speculation. Him being Jew and him being undisciplined (his bad grades in math were totally due to that) had likely to do with it a lot more.
She is portrayed quite well in the recent National Geographic series about Einstein's life, "Genius".
Well worth watching. Mileva was a talented physicist and mathematician, contributed significantly to Einstein's early success, gave him three children and Albert dumped her for his cousin.
Like many people, they had a relationship that became bad and they divorced. He is reported to have had numerous extramarital affairs, also. This article is 24 years old https://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/06/arts/dark-side-of-einstei... - all of this is well-known.
He supported Mileva and the children from that marriage throughout his life. Everybody has flaws.
Something similar happened with Carl Sagan’s wife, Lyn Margulis, whose perseverance with endosymbiosis should see her ranked alongside Darwin as a scientist who deduced where we came from.
How did I not know Lyn Margulis was Sagan's wife? I'm quite familiar with both of their work (Margulis also did groundbreaking with on our endorphin and dopamine systems, if I recall).
By the way, I don't think that's even close to the same thing. Every biologist and biochemist knows about Margulis, because of her work.
Looks like they were only married for around 8 years (1957 to 1965), so they divorced before he was really famous. Maybe that's why it's not more widely known?
Sadly, in her later years she became a bit too persistent with it, trying to apply it in cases where it clearly wasn't happening. The notorious example is this 2009 paper, now retracted: https://www.pnas.org/content/106/47/19901
It's huge. For the first 2 billion years of the history of Earth, life was unicellular. The only type of cell in existence was prokaryote. The atmosphere contained no oxygen.
Then there was 1 billion years of history in which Earth's atmosphere changed. At the end of that billion years, two main differences were apparent. Firstly, the atmosphere was comprised of 21% oxygen. Secondly, life on Earth was comprised of two different types of cells - prokaryotes, and eukaryotes.
Eukaryotic cells are 100 times larger than prokaryotes. Unlike prokaryotes, they form multi-cellular organisms. Everything you see around you with your eyes, and every living thing you ever watched David Attenborough talk about on TV are comprised of Eukaryotic cells.
Endosymbiosis is the explanation of how Eukaryotic life came to exist.
I don't mean it is not important, but it doesn't change how society thinks about things in a significant way. Evolution theory offers an alternative to the explanation that "god created everything". That affected everybody, not just the scientists.
Yes, that's why I contrast Margulis' lack of renown in society with Carl Sagan's and Charles Darwin's respective fame.
If endosymbiosis were popularly understood, society might better understand and acknowledge the connectedness of life on Earth. Instead of humans treating the planet as their own kingdom and garbage dump, they might develop a more harmonious, respectful relationship with the natural world. That might lead to greater prospects for sustainability of the planet and of humans.
Sounds like she had more technical knowledge so she could verify his equations and ensure his papers had good structure and were legible by the academic community.
But she says herself that their work will make him famous. So clearly she believed his ideas were the foundation.
Or she believed that she wasn’t due any credit because of the sexist society they lived in.. It’s probably impossible to tell exactly how much she contributed now.
Yeah the thought did enter my mind but the magnitude of the discoveries made me dismiss it. She would have understood the magnitude of his ideas, which is made clear by her believing Albert will become world famous.
So given the magnitude of his ideas, if she really had helped develop them she would have also become famous. I mean, she is famous now.
And these are personal letters but apparently no mention of "our" ideas or credit due to her even in their personal correspondence. He did definitely need her to make a reputation, but the ideas were his.
> Mileva and Albert had similar grades (4.7 and 4.6, respectively) except in applied physics where she got the top mark of 5 but he, only 1. She excelled at experimental work while he did not. But at the oral exam, Professor Minkowski gave 11 out of 12 to the four male students but only 5 to Mileva. Only Albert got his degree.
She was never allowed to actually work in physics.
She did work in physics, though - she worked with Einstein on his papers, as we learned for example from the article here.
You don't actually need permission to work in physics. Didn't Einstein also write his seminal papers while he was working at the patent office?
Also from that example, it seems that three times more male students than female students failed their exam. Doesn't really prove sexist discrimination, especially with the first example where she got the good grade and Einstein the bad one.
> three times more male students than female students failed their exam.
That is fascinatingly manipulative way to frame situation in which all female are kicked, at least one having great results and being failed only in the most subjective part of it.
She got better results then him in most objective parts and got kicked in most subjective part. Him failing to solve exercises does not prove she was not discriminated.
But we do know that Einstein was actually good in physics, so the argument that "she was better in objective parts" seems rather questionable.
People fail exams all the time, for a variety of reasons. Every now and then here on HN there is a big discussion on how job interviews shouldn't have whiteboard coding sessions.
Maybe she was such a person who can't do live whiteboard coding. Oral exams are something like that. Then the system is perhaps bad, but it doesn't sexism was the cause.
Also usually oral exams involve more than one interviewer.
And I think it is fascinatingly manipulative to frame it as "all female are kicked", if there was only one female to begin with.
(Note: it is of course possible that sexism was the cause, but it can't be inferred from the information given. BBC sure wants to suggest it, though)
Einstein was not actually performing at college and during studies. He was not interested in what they wanted him to learn and had "attitude". He went off doing what he wanted which led to poor college results. He had trouble to find academic job after for precisely that reason. He was perceived to be lazy. Later, he had good ideas, partly thanks to his extra studies (while at patent office where he was supposed to be doing something else by employer, it was boring job).
It is preposterous to claim that the way these tests went is not an instance of sexism. His college teachers did not seen prodigy in him at all.
> (Note: it is of course possible that sexism was the cause, but it can't be inferred from the information given. BBC sure wants to suggest it, though)
It absolutely can be inferred. Moreover, it can be safely guessed that if she was rebelling the way he did, she would get even less of benefit of doubt.
Einstein had good ideas later and success. But at the college, most of his peers had better results then him.
All of the Einsteins, male and female, lived in a sexist society, as did the majority of major scientists across human history, because the majority of societies have been varying degrees of patriarchal and have had limited roles for women. So, no, this doesn’t seem particularly strange to me.
And recently Maryam Mirzakhani. Usual explanation is that they can't ride equity agenda there and have to earn money with hard skills. So they become compulsory geniuses just like men.
Definitely dims my view of Einstein the way he treated her. Doesn’t dim it completely though nor anywhere near. I know the times were very different and nothing’s perfect but it’s just a gut reaction that I’m feeling on hearing about this.
His father was denying him permission to marry her. It is likely someone else was blocking him from getting employment of the sort he wanted, possibly because of his relationship to Mileva. She had a baby out of wedlock by another man at a time when that would have been far more scandalous and shocking than it would be today and Albert married her anyway.
Let me suggest you not judge him too harshly. There is only so much one man can do to stand down the sexist, misogynistic crap of the entire world.
Oh please, it would've been extremely easy to title it "The Life of Einstein's First Wife, Mileva Marić," and thereby make it clearer she was a notable person in her own right, not for merely being Einstein's wife, to even a casual reader who didn't click through.
Well if you leave out her name, then readers will never see her as an individual and will only think of her as a wife of an important man. People on HN and even the author too will go into denial about this and give you some bullshit about "recognizability" or "editorialization" but that is the real reason because they both hate women and are also too cowardly to admit it.
Besides being a really good insight into women in science in early 1900s I wonder whether inadvertently her upbringing and the society around her stole a female icon in science for the generations that followed.
This is the 'racism' that women have faced from the dawn of civilization. It seems to have been born from the early formation of tribal conflict. We have seen that hunter-gatherers functioned more equitably, even though women bore the children and had a higher burden. It seems that as agrarianism grew and allowed a higher population density, some degree of group impingement competition arose - which led to resource scarcity - and then to conflict. Men with their greater strength became more combative and role specialists emerged. I suspect this was the start.
With a warrior class emerged the pushed around class.....the middle ages were bad, no vote at all for women in many societies, and not vote even for men with no land. By the 1600's this was solidified in many places. Gradually universal suffrage emerged after years of conflict. In Einstein's day women were severly abused in the way that Mileva was. This endures to this day, try as we do to eliminate it, these abuses persist all throughout society in many places.
I agree, Mileva deserved far more credit than she got. That evil professor was one of many that infested the ranks of Academe. The ranks of higher education are still riddled with these abuses - every day we see more of them outed.
Downgrading women is a HUGE burden to society and I do whatever I can to eliminate this is an my interactions.
1. that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order;
2. that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room;
3. that my bedroom and study are kept neat, and especially that my desk is left for my use only.
B. You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons. Specifically, You will forego:
1. my sitting at home with you;
2. my going out or travelling with you.
C. You will obey the following points in your relations with me:
1. you will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way;
2. you will stop talking to me if I request it;
3. you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it.
D. You will undertake not to belittle me in front of our children, either through words or behavior.
I think women from cultures where the fairer sex are considered historically ‘submissive’ would have dealt with this entirely differently. In other words..they wouldn’t have gotten mad, they’d have gotten even.
I suspect Mileva was probably on the spectrum and/or didn’t have had a high social IQ. One needs high survival skills to be female. She wasn’t designed fo it.
Women who are not surrounded/supported by their ‘sisterhood’ or female ‘tribe’ often get exploited by men. Female input and advice will save a lot of loss and damage. Because. Experience. Other women know. They share. They talk. They gossip. Guidance. There is an evolutionary advantage to gossip and chat. That’s how female wisdom goes viral. It worked in the pre social media era. I am always suspicious of men who try to isolate their girl from female company. That’s a warning sign. I have never been wrong w/this assessment.
Children are a burden. Women should be taught not to have children without a supportive man who cannot be a father for life. Because it’s a responsibility for life.
Single parenthood is not a badge of honor. We should not celebrate it as a society. Or rather, we should not glorify single parenthood. I suppose there is obviously something to celebrate about children. But the experience of creating something is different from the value of the creation. Would be parents should understand the gravity of the task and responsibility in front of them.
Raising children is the most difficult thing to do .. even in partnerships never mind as a single parent. I honestly don’t understand why people are eager to have children. Sometimes more than they can afford wrt time and money and effort. It’s not for everyone. There is no shame or guilt in living and enjoying life as an individual.
Had Mileva Einstein not had the parenting responsibility and burden, she would have blossomed as the scientist she was obviously meant to be...the female uterus is severely undervalued. As is the value of progeny.. by men.. it is the vessel for half their genetic material and their only way to leave a meaningful biological legacy. So until we can grow little humans in pods, women must make men pay their due for carrying their genetic material and delivering it as viable life forms or deny them the opportunity to leave behind a genetic legacy.
> I think women from cultures where the fairer sex are considered historically ‘submissive’ would have dealt with this entirely differently.
It's pretty much all human culture. It's probably a trait inherited from our pre-human ancestors. After all, our closest primate, the chimps, also have male dominant social order.
> Women who are not surrounded/supported by their ‘sisterhood’ or female ‘tribe’ often get exploited by men.
Oh boy here we go again. Sure there are exploitation by men, but the vast majority of exploitation of women are by other women. There is no magical "sisterhood".
> Experience. Other women know. They share. They talk. They gossip. Guidance.
Or gossip, exclusion, rumors, destroying reputations, bullying, etc. Eating disorder, self-image issues, cutting, self-harm, etc are mostly female on female violence.
> I am always suspicious of men who try to isolate their girl from female company.
Female company? No. You should be suspicious of men or women who try to isolate a girl or a boy from their parents/siblings/friends. Most women recruited for prostitution, cults, MLMs, etc are by "female company".
> Children are a burden.
They are a responsibility.
> the female uterus is severely undervalued.
As opposed to the male uterus?
> As is the value of progeny.. by men.. it is the vessel for half their genetic material and their only way to leave a meaningful biological legacy.
Seems more like you are devaluing the value of men?
> So until we can grow little humans in pods, women must make men pay their due for carrying their genetic material and delivering it as viable life forms or deny them the opportunity to leave behind a genetic legacy.
You are essentially saying women's only value is procreation. So if we can grow little humans in a pod, wouldn't women have no value then?
Also, men protect the women, provide shelter, food, etc. You make it seem like women do all the work. Stop basing your reality off of silly netflix series.
Honestly, what's the difference between people like you and white supremacists. Just change race with gender and I don't see a difference. Of course this kind of flamewar and disinformation nonsense is welcomed all over social media.
I'm sad it didn't have to end that way.. melavia sacrificed everything for him. She also knew that the fame Einstein had achieved would get into his head and destroy things. In the end Einstein enjoyed huge career success but she didn't. She lost her family and career.
Her sacrifices and contributions should have been recognised.
The currently accepted view is that she was a sounding board, or had a similar role as Grossmann who also got little recognition (as detailed in the brilliant biography by Isaacson).
There are a quite a few odd facts that became quite difficult to ignore though (the article has the original quotes / sources on some of them):
* There are plenty of letters from Einstein to Minerva discussing love and physics in historical record, but all but 10 letters from Minerva to Einstein are lost. It is unknown why they are lost. Without these personal writings it is difficult to assess whether her depth of knowledge and love for physics was on a similar level.
* Their relatives and children claim they always sat at the table together in the evening, discussing physics and working.
* She gave up her authorship contribution for an engineering project before for Albert, claiming "we are one, Einstein".
* Several references to 'our work' in various letters.
* Three of the 1905 papers originally had the author Einstein-Marity, a typical double name women adopt after marriage. It is unknown why. (Maybe Einstein wanted her to get recognition though?)
* There are some differences in how mathematical notation is used in the 1905 papers, and how much detail is given for the steps.
* Her divorce agreement stated that she would get the Nobel prize money. The amount was pretty much making her rich back then, which is an excellent situation to be in for a struggling single mother who might want to stay in Switzerland and not go back to Serbia. Some more details here: https://www.einstein-website.de/z_information/nobelprizemone...
* Minerva did not work in physics after she got pregnant. (The article states how she couldn't get through the academic system.) Though, Einstein, while still a productive physicist, never had an as successful year as 1905 again.
* She had better grades, Einstein copied her maths lecture notes, and you’ve got to say that you have to have quite a bit of endurance, intelligence and a thick skin to go from Serbia to ETH to study physics as a girl at that time. Not trying to devalue Einstein here, but it definitely took quite a bit more from her than for a boy at that time.
On the other hand, Einstein seemed to respect female scientists as evident in the letter to Curie, and might not have agreed to let her trade recognition for money if her contribution was real. In their honeymoon phase he also clearly saw Minerva as an equal (not so much later on, there is an awful letter by him setting rules for her as a housewife, but their marriage clearly was in pieces at that time.)
I’ve been following this case for a while and wish we could collect all neutral evidence (letters etc.) in original (german) form, similar to what the article already did.
There is a chance that the true story is that a couple that loved physics collaborated in 1905 and revolutionized the subject. I would love this conclusion.
I recently was interviewed by a national/international news organization, I have concerns "Fame will get to me".
Although, the big lesson I learned from this is Einstein cheated, and that caused the collapse. Solutions could be resisting urges or open relationships (although I have doubts).
Anyway, my wife has contributed or provoked ideas, editing, and real life implementation of the ideas. She didn't get interviewed.
I'm not famous (yet), I was a B+ student, I feel normal. But over the years strangers greeting me. IRL, or strangers being dissapointed in a personal political opinion, or the interviews make me realize it might happen.
Pregnancy and post partum, women’s IQ falls. There is some neural plasticity tho’ and it’s easy to retrain mental skills to reawaken full span of intellectual capability. It’s not politically correct to say this but biologically, we have evolved to pay more attention to dangers to the baby than traits like memory retention/pattern matching/comprehension etc. The mother’s brain is primed to be on mama bear mode all the time.
Maybe it would be easy to work in an office environment but sitting exams is a whole diff ball game post partum.
It's politically incorrect to say AND it's incorrect.
The reduction in memory after birth you refer to could easily be caused by the sleep deprivation that comes with a newborn child. Take a look at the studies that claim otherwise and you'll see that they did not compare the women against themselves before birth, but instead compared their IQ to the general population. They also did not have a control group of women who put the baby up for adoption after giving birth.
[1] showed that baby brain is a myth, except for very late pregnancies. Even then, there was only a reduction in one out of the four cognitive capabilities they tested.
The study which found changes in women's brains after giving birth also did not find a reduction in IQ. [2]
[..] A study published Monday in Nature Neuroscience reveals that during pregnancy women undergo significant brain remodeling that persists for at least two years after birth. The study also offers preliminary evidence that this remodeling may play a role in helping women transition into motherhood.[..]
[..] The researchers found that the new mothers experienced gray matter reductions that lasted for at least two years after birth. This loss, however, is not necessarily a bad thing (according to Hoekzema, “the localization was quite remarkable”); it occurred in brain regions involved in social cognition, particularly in the network dedicated to theory of mind, which helps us think about what is going on in someone else’s mind—regions that had the strongest response when mothers looked at photos of their infants. These brain changes could also be used to predict how mothers scored on the attachment scale. In fact, researchers were able to use a computer algorithm to identify which women were new mothers based solely on their patterns of gray matter loss. Gray matter loss was not seen in new fathers or nonparents.
It is not entirely clear why women lose gray matter during pregnancy, but Hoekzema thinks it may be because their brains are becoming more specialized in ways that will help them adapt to motherhood and respond to the needs of their babies. The study offers some preliminary evidence to support this idea. Whereas the present study focuses primarily on documenting brain changes during pregnancy, she expects follow-up work to tackle more applied questions such as how brain changes relate to postpartum depression or attachment difficulties between mother and child.[..]
Trying to prove that post partum neurological changes don’t occur in women is NOT helpful to mothers and women in general. Or to our species. The insane pressures of ‘being all that’ is so damaging to women that I fear that the social damage we have caused will take decades to fix without creating further damage.(yes, I mentioned it thrice)
Women are not inferior to men. Just so, women are not equal to men in every way either. It’s just daft to imagine that motherhood doesn’t change women physically, emotionally, instinctively and intellectually.
Without doubt, you are looking at a superbly evolved creature and it doesn’t take much to be ‘equal to men’. Such a low standard, if you ask me. The greatest lie perpetuated by feminists is that women can and should be equal to men.
From puberty to motherhood to post menopausal stage in life, women keep evolving. Why? Because hormones. All life starts as female. Female is default. One of the mutations ended up as the male of the species.
At no time was ‘work’ or brawn or muscles or physical strength or ability to code or amass is wealth considered the pinnacle of human achievement. In fact, men have all this sharpened SO they can facilitate the well being of the female of the species in order to perpetuate the species.
Virus and bacteria are better than us when it comes to survival rate. One meteor can wipe us out. True evolution is our adaptation to survival. To deny the gifts women possess purely by virtue of their hormones is the tragedy of it all. The species survival doesn’t not depend on one gender or one group of people or any one skill set but the evolution of the species to naturally select survival and to thrive.
ETA: 100 years ago, the way to make a living was..say..coal mining. As opposed to coding now. Would women still claim equal opportunity to work if the way to make a living was ‘Menhir Tossing’(I made that up) in the future?
Every time the world shifts, women find themselves ‘being left behind’. But evolution doesn’t happen at the same periodicity as technological changes or climate change or whatever pressure pushes human beings to alter their ways of life and resource collecting.
The way we live is all about resource and resource collection and scarcity. When the definition of ‘work’ changes and gender equality is tied to ‘work’, then gender equality will always be a moving target. That ..’that’ being economic equality or work place equality’ , even though those are temporal irritants too...is a highly irrational way to deal with the real problem of sexism.
ETA: I looked it up and the blog has moved here : https://www.discovermagazine.com/author/neuroskeptic ...if there is a search function it would be easier but I am likely not going to spend hours to try and discredit myself.
Thanks. I am unsure now as to whether you agree with me or not if we are referring from the same 2016 study.
Having said that, I used the term IQ rather loosely. And colloquially. Probably not the best choice of term. The import of what I meant was that pregnancy brain/mommy brain changes from the pre pregnancy female brain. The brain elasticity gives it the ability to redirect its connections elsewhere.
Brain plasticity also has been known to reshape itself past a few years post child birth. Whether it will go back to the old normal, we don’t know. But clearly it can be trained.
The point I was trying to make was that Mileva Maric Einstein couldn’t have babies and keep getting pregnant..and not expect her academic performance to suffer. Sitting for exams is not like some office jobs of today where a lot of it is cut and paste/stamp and pass/management kind of jobs. So the pregnancy and children certainly did create a set back for her academic ambitions.
I was probably not clear about underlining the bit about brain plasticity. It takes a while for the ‘mommy brain’ to re-adjust. After the nursing phase, hormonal storms calm down. But she didn’t catch a break or have a supportive husband in Einstein.
The entire reproductive biological engine of a woman is a highly efficient finely tuned machine. One of the key functions is to bond with the baby. This involves changes in serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline and endorphins. That’s a heavy dose of hormonal changes. It is irrational to expect the same level of performance as was pre pregnancy. The only jobs she can excel involves babies. To expect anything more from women by painting them in super-woman colours is cruel and uneducated. But that’s what we ask of our ‘working moms’. It doesn’t have to be so if we accept our species strengths and non-strengths. That is much more respectful and would serve women and our species and society better. It is a disservice to women when we equate ‘Male ability’ equals ‘Female ability’. Women can do a lot more for which there is no common measure.
Take for example: performance reviews. There are metrics for that at work. You can compare grades. You can compare experience. You can compare efficiency at work. But how do you compare a woman’s pregnant hormones to a man who can never be pregnant. There are no metrics they share. It’s a whole different ball game.
When we reset the counter during maternity leave, it’s a new brain that comes back after hormones have subsided. How could anyone expect Mileva Einstein jump right back on the horse and perform as she did pre pregnancies? She had gained a whole higher score if Mommy IQ and probably a hit on the Math IQ points. I can’t go on Facebook when my cats are hungry. Imagine when you are hormonal and nursing and pregnant and have to study for higher math exams in an environment where women were not even admitted in the first place at that time. Her academic career was done. Finished. That was my point.
[..]
The brain’s gray matter, located mostly in the outer layers, plays a large role in muscle control and in the execution of high-level tasks like seeing, hearing, processing memories and emotions and decision making. The brain also contains white matter, which insulates the axons, helping brain signals travel further, faster and encouraging motor and sensory function. In Dr. Hoekzema’s study, the white matter of pregnant women’s brains did not appear to be changed at all by pregnancy and new motherhood, while gray matter volume was reduced.
Dr. Hoekzema said that these changes might partially occur because of a process known as “synaptic pruning,” a brain phenomenon that eliminates certain connections between brain cells to encourage the facilitation of new connections. Researchers believe that this process could help people focus on specific behaviors or activities — in this case, taking care of an infant. In other words, a “loss” of brain material might seem like a bad thing, but the changes could actually, in part, be beneficial to people faced with new conditions like parenthood, according to Dr. Hoekzema.
In Dr. Hoekzema’s study, the images showed reductions in gray matter in the hippocampus, which is largely responsible for regulating memory. Instead of focusing on relatively inconsequential tidbits of information, like a movie title, your pregnant or new-mom brain may reallocate resources to the parts of the brain that control “theory of mind,” which allows you to figure out what someone else wants and needs. Dr. Hoekzema says these same areas of the brain also lit up when mothers looked at their infants, suggesting that synaptic pruning might even promote mother-baby bonding.
[..]
*
This is a link from 2019: (nat.neuroscience the original is from 2016/2017)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30008085/
[..] Pregnancy and the postpartum period involve numerous physiological adaptations that enable the development and survival of the offspring. A distinct neural plasticity characterizes the female brain during this period, and dynamic structural and functional changes take place that accompany fundamental behavioral adaptations, stimulating the female to progress from an individual with self-directed needs to being responsible for the care of another life. While many animal studies detail these modifications, an emerging body of research reveals the existence of reproduction-related brain plasticity in human mothers too. Additionally, associations with aspects of maternal caregiving point to adaptive changes that benefit a woman's transition to motherhood. However, the dynamic changes that affect a woman's brain are not merely adaptive, and they likely confer a vulnerability for the development of mental disorders. Here, we review the changes in brain structure and function that a woman undergoes during the peripartum period, outlining associations between these neural alterations and different aspects of maternal care. We additionally discuss peripartum mood disorders and postpartum psychosis, and review the neuroimaging studies that investigate the neural bases of these conditions.[..]
[..] Emerging research points to a valuable role of the monoamine neurotransmitter, serotonin, in the display of maternal behaviors and reproduction-associated plasticity in the maternal brain. Serotonin is also implicated in the pathophysiology of numerous affective disorders and likely plays an important role in the pathophysiology of maternal mental illness. Therefore, the main goals of this review are to detail: (1) how the serotonin system of the female brain changes across pregnancy and postpartum; (2) the role of the central serotonergic system in maternal caregiving and maternal aggression; and (3) how the serotonin system and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor medications (SSRIs) are involved in the treatment of maternal mental illness. Although there is much work to be done, studying the central serotonin system's multifaceted role in the maternal brain is vital to our understanding of the processes governing matrescence and the maintenance of motherhood.[..]
> I am unsure now as to whether you agree with me or not if we are referring from the same 2016 study.
I disagree with you, specifically about mental performance. Women's mental performance does not drop significantly before, during, or after pregnancy, at least not because of the pregnancy itself.
You keep linking me to pop-sci summaries of Hoekzema's study to try to support your claim. Please go read Hoekzema's paper instead and read it beyond the abstract.
Your assumptions about the academic potential of mothers are not only NOT supported by the data, they are also exactly the kind of attitudes that for centuries have forced women to attribute their accomplishments to men in order to be taken seriously.
My point is, there's a reason that what you are claiming is unpopular, and it's not because of some liberal agenda to silence you. It's because the facts do not support your claims.
I also linked to two 2019 papers after the 2016 paper. Nature Neuroscience is not ‘pop-sci’. What data do you have to make your claim? Have you conducted any independent studies? Published any? Got any ‘pop-sci’ reference? What is your reasoning? I don’t see anything other than an unsupported opinion in your argument against me.
I don’t think there is anything more to say if you believe that pregnancy hormones does not affect the female brain.
‘Performance’ is relative. A ticket puncher can probably still perform at the same level on pregnancy brain. A student attempting competitive exams may be flailing. Maybe you have a specific job in mind when you say ‘mental performance’ doesn’t change with pregnancy. But I don’t think we should be taking the specificities into account to be objective.
ETA: it’s terrible when random claims are made that women’s performance and mental acuity doesn’t alter due to pregnancy. Other than that it flies in the face of reality for millions of women who have had the experience of birthing and pregnancy, it sets an impossible standard for other women. Mental health that has nothing to do with pregnancy occurs now and only harms women.
Such claims are a stunning display of ignorance about the toll pregnancy and child birth takes on a woman. It’s many times more drastic for multiple back to back pregnancies.
Women should be mad about such ignorant expectations rather than accept unreasonable expectations after pregnancy. Insane and mind boggling. It beggars belief that it’s more important to gain some kind of politically correct position of equity than acknowledge some of the serious issues that women face here. It’s a mass burial of facts. And denial of biology. This harms women in worse ways than ‘gender inequality’.
Some would call this gaslighting of an entire gender of a certain age. It’s worse than ‘mental performance’ in a job. Post partum depression and other mental health issues are caused by an entire mismatch of pregnancy hormone cocktails.(/end addition to comment)
On the same note, in this case..Mileva Einstein who was a mathematics student sitting for exams failed likely because of pregnancy brain because she became pregnancy thrice back to back, robbing her of her previous brilliance in her field. It was due to pregnancy hormones. That’s my stance.
Unfortunately the Discover archives don't seem to be working but you should educate yourself on the limits of brain science and show more intellectual humility.
The author, a neuroscientst writes "More generally, the controversy over human sex differences is a vast one, with a huge amount of evidence to consider, and it isn't going to be settled by one neuroimaging study, or even a hundred."
You seem like the type of person who makes up their mind after one study, as long as it fits your biases regarding gender. You would be well service by talking less and realizing much of the world is beyond your understanding as a human with limited information and (likely) a limited understanding of brain science.
you have to cite other studies if you want to discredit the ones linked.
otherwise, you are asking me to just take your word for it. i have the word of hundreds of women in my family and friends circle..not to mention my own personal lived experience as a woman..to attest that female hormones act differently and that brain plasticity both ways occurs with trauma and subsequently retraining. i am not bringing up testimonials second hand or my lived experience nor political correctness. i am bringing up scientific studies. what are you bringing to the table?
you havent offered anything substantial or credible other than call Nature* Neuroscience 'junk science' and look up a skeptic blogger who isnt even saying anything about the subject at hand. and in the link he provided, he is washing his hands off a Daily Mail article about women and food.
[..]This appeared in the Daily Mail a while back. This headline was based on a neuroimaging experiment, which, predictably, didn't prove anything of the kind. Yawn. I've written about this kind of thing before, and no doubt I will do again. But why do I do it? What's the harm in this kind of thing?
A cynic might say that this kind of thing is harmless fun - or at any rate, harmless. No-one really cares about articles like this, and no-one takes them seriously. No-one's going to read this article and start to think that all women are impulsive and gluttonous - at least not unless they were a sexist pig to begin with.[..]
if 'neuroskeptic' is going to disown Nature Neuroscience like he is doing with a Daily Mail article, then we certainly dont have anything to discuss here anymore.
I'm not convinced you understand the studies you are citing but let's posit you do understand them. If a study came out tomorrow that you felt contradicted what you just cited, you would retract it? And therefore it would be obvious what you wrote here today was false?
Maybe, again, you should show a little humility instead of spreading stereotypes as if they are objective facts.
Old joke: A reporter once asked the aging Einstein if he though inventing the Cosmological Constant [1] was his biggest mistake. "No" he replied, "that was my second biggest mistake. The first biggest mistake was marrying my first wife."
This article hasn't been grammer checked, uses a lot of recent, sensationalist words, doesn't ask questions directly except at the end, provides no new or interesting information on Mileva, her accomplishments or her day to day, her kids and family, background, or their accomplishments. I conclude with no picture of what her life was like.
It's substance consists fully of vague diatribes about why Mileva didn't get credit for general relativity, asking vague, emotional questions that can easily be construed as accusations without providing new information or answers.
It is, by definition, trite and spin and poisons the news feed of HN. If it's a slow news day, it's a slow news day.
This reminds me of slashdot back in the early 2010's after Cowboy McNeal sold it off to I think it was Dice. Every day there was minimum 1-2 SJW Agenda pieces; initially they were recieved warmly but as the material got more and more radical over time, the community realized what was going on and turned extremely vitriolic. Then they drew an unbelievable amount of automated bot spam and even people with old accounts became hostile and left. Towards the end, they got sneakier and sneakier about the agenda pieces; you'd see one about an obvious feminist topic draw ire and a tremendous amount of vitriol, then another about "How do I help my daughter learn STEM\Electronics". Articles like the ladder became more common and people began ignoring them. Eventually the community left and all you had were a bunch of hateful people left. BizX stopped posting those pieces after buying the site a few years backl; They have a different agenda mostly inline with their financial portfolio.
I remember when the site had minimum 300-400 responses per article, many of which were tremendously useful, with some articles hitting 1000-2000 and it did that on every article. Today they're lucky to hit 100 and most of that, these days, looks like astroturf.
Why did Mileva remain silent? Being reserved and self-effaced, she did not seek honors or public attention.
She was failed and denied a degree in spite of having better grades than Albert, probably solely because she was a woman. Albert was probably blocked from employment positions he wanted by the same professor that failed her, possibly because he was treating a woman like his equal.
This reads to me like they coped as best they could with a world that absolutely wouldn't accept a woman as a serious scientist and even with trying to be self effacing, etc, they both paid a high price -- such a high price, it likely destroyed their marriage.