Margrete Heiberg Bose, a Woman in Early Physical Chemistry

The life and career of the little-known Margrete Bose, née Heiberg (1865–1952), provides more than just another case of a forgotten woman pioneer in science. The first Danish woman graduating with an academic degree in chemistry, a PhD, she spent the major part of her life in Germany and faraway Argentina. Although trained in physical chemistry in Göttingen, at the University of La Plata, Argentina, she worked for thirty years in professorial positions as a teacher of physics. Her career was to some extent eased by her marriage to a prominent German chemist, Emil Bose (who however died at age 36, leaving her a single mother). Nonetheless, she managed to continue her work as a scientist and teacher in La Plata until her retirement in 1941. This biographical portrait of Margrete Bose not only tells the story of an early and in some respects extraordinary woman scientist on two continents. It also adds to the historiography of early physical chemistry, of science in Denmark, Germany, and Argentina, and of the conditions of women scientists generally in the period ca. 1895–1935. Moreover, it highlights a valuable but almost entirely ignored booklet on the difficult political and economic situation in Germany, which Margrete Bose published in 1919.