It then is appropriate to discuss the nature of how the government, being one of the most prominent social institutions, affects the dynamics of the work place for men and women. According to Habashi (1997), Ida held very few actual paying jobs after she married her husband. In fact, it was common for woman chemists to be considered “wife-chemists” upon marrying a man within the same field. This often led to degrading work for little or no pay. In the case of Ida’s situation, she too was an individual that suffered from the biases of the government in which they gave priority of men over women. With the Reich government coming to power, the Nazi Administration constructed two obtuse arguments for the reason why women were not allowed to fulfill prominent positions in the professional world: 1) “…women were usurping men’s rights to high-paying jobs and thereby increasing unemployment among men… [2)] and that the birth rate was rapidly dropping, threatening the future of the German race” (Habashi, 1997, p. 221).
This then becomes a powerful structural force within Ida’s life. Being a smart well educated women with no children automatically placed barriers that would take tremendous amounts of effort along with support from her husband to overcome. And that is exactly what Ida did. After assisting her husband in the laboratory on joint projects, she would then pursue her own interests. This lead to more work within the periodic table for the search of transuranium elements, which eventually gave rise to an interest in nuclear physics (Habashi, 1997).
