For decades, finding employment for spouses was not just a low priority—it was against the rules.

Harvard and peer institutions across the country had official policies against “nepotism”—in effect, against hiring professors’ wives—that were not torn down until the 1970s when the federal government stepped in.

These nepotism policies limited the career of Mary Fieser.

At the time of her death in 1997, after more than 40 years of work in Harvard labs and with Harvard students, Fieser was remembered as one of the “outstanding women chemists in the world” by Elias J. Corey, the Emery professor of organic chemistry and the 1990 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry.

“She was a major figure in our department,” Corey said, adding that Fieser was “like a mother for generations of graduate and undergraduate students at Harvard.”

But Fieser never was a professor at Harvard.

For her entire career, Fieser, who co-authored the seminal chemistry text of the 1950s and 1960s but never officially obtained a Ph.D., worked as a research assistant for Professor Louis Fieser, her husband and co-author.

She continued writing chemistry texts for decades after her husband died.

Near the end of the Fiesers’ careers, the world changed.

Executive orders of 1970 and 1972 meant that the University, like thousands of others schools, businesses and institutions, risked losing its federal contracts if it failed to correct discriminatory employment policies—including its “nepotism policy.”

But while tearing down the “nepotism policy” took just months of federal pressure, correcting the tenure system that grew up with the discriminatory policy and erasing its effects on academic culture was not so easy.

While the couples problem has the potential to affect everyone in the academy, it has in the past had a particularly detrimental effect on women—whose careers have traditionally taken a back seat.

Jamison says the institutional bias against academic wives remains.

“There used to be a general feeling that faculty wives are simply some kind of add-on,” Jamison says. “It took them a very long time to realize that I was independently an academic.”

PATH-BREAKERS