Caroline Herzenberg,
why did I ever go to hear you speak?
Since then, as any story ends, I ask,
"Yes, but what about his wife?"
Or "But what became of his shy young student?"

Maria Winkelmann started well enough,
a position with the master
any male colleague would envy.
and all she had to do
was become his young wife.
But as his widow, her prestige vanished,
Her anonymous accomplishments
An incontrovertible currency.
The Berlin Academy
refused to let her
write in her own name
the almanacs she'd done in his.
Don't think ill of the Academy;
they did admit a woman,
230 years later.

Richard Rhodes deserves his Pulitzer,
despite his index. And yet--
Leona Woods had Professor Fermi's attention,
young and shy though she was.
But then? But then?
There's no Woods, Leona in the index.
Later she turns up in Los Alamos married,
but still no Marshall, Leona.
In fact the indexer
puts her Hanford stories in her husband's pen.
Not until she takes the name, Libby Leona Marshall
does she appear.

If she hadn't written her own book,
We wouldn't know of her at all.
She'd join that line of nameless adventuresome women
stretching unacknowledged back to Genesis.
Back through the middle ages,
Scientists and doctors known only as
"So-and-so's wife," "so-and-so's mother in law,"
Back to Lot's daughters and wife,
who, despite their exploits,
Have no name.

And up to the present.
When you came to the 3-M Conference
to set the record straight,
your own name was metamorphosed
to Carolyn Hertzenberg.

Larry Turner: 11/87-8/88

Notes:
Linda Schiebinger, "Maria Winkelmann at the Berlin Academy", Isis, Vol 78, pp. 174-200. (1987)
Richard Rhodes, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1986)
Abstracts, MMM Conference, Chicago, 1987. p. 6.