"We thought that, by pooling our resources, we'd have more power," she says. "But by the time it got organized, I was out having children."

In 1953, when she was pregnant with her first son, Beutler was "invited to leave" her job.

He was born in 1954 and soon followed by a sister the next year.

"Initially, I just had kids," Beutler says. "But then my husband got an appointment at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor."

The family moved there not long after her daughter's birth. At this point, she had begun to lean toward accepting life as a traditional wife and mother.

"But then I started getting stuff from Radcliffe in the mail that encouraged women to work," Beutler says. "So when the kids were in nursery school, I went to the University of Michigan and took classes."

She received a masters degree in physics in 1960, in the same year her second son was born.

Soon after, she accepted a job at the university's radio-astronomy observatory.

She stayed there until 1964 and made a number of key discoveries relating to space physics.

She then went to Stanford University from 1964 to 1965 to secure her third masters degree--this time in electrical engineering.

She came back to Michigan after that to complete some of her previous work.

"We made the first measurements at the topside of the ionosphere using rockets," Beutler says.

She called it her most exciting moment in physics when her results were subsequently confirmed by Canadian scientists.

Missiles to Turbo Trans-Ams

Both her personal and professional lives underwent significant changes in 1967 upon her divorce from her husband.

She no longer had enough income to support her family and moved back to the Boston area, accepting a job studying the re-entry physics of missiles at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory.