A Woman's Life Alongside Chemistry:The Memoirs of Theresa Kopp Baumann

As her second and third names suggest, Theresa Kopp Baumann (1856-1944) was the daughter and subsequently the wife of eminent German academic chemists. Her substantial unpublished autobiography, written ca. 1910 and presented here in English translation in an edited and considerably abridged form, provides unique insight from a privileged female perspective into the socio-cultural aspects of German academic science in its period of greatest international reputation and influence. In the two cases-in-point that are vividly recounted there - her life as daughter and then as wife - it also gives shape and colour to the many ways in which gendered domestic roles invisibly condition and assist scientific activity.