Clara Immerwahr - Infinite Women

Born: 21 June 1870, Poland
Died: 2 May 1915
Country most active: Poland
Also known as: Clara Haber

The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.

German chemist Clara Immerwahr married Fritz Haber in 1901 precisely because she wanted to continue working. As a woman in turn-of-the-century Germany, even the first one in the country to earn a PhD in chemistry, her employment options were limited and Haber enticed her with visions of the two of them working side-by-side. Once she was trapped in the marriage, however, she found herself relegated to an uncredited assistant, rather than a partner. “It has always been my attitude that a life has only been worth living if one has made full use of all one’s abilities and tried to live out every kind of experience human life has to offer. It was under that impulse, among other things, that I decided to get married at that time,” she wrote. “The life I got from it was very brief…and the main reasons for that was Fritz’s oppressive way of putting himself first in our home and marriage, so that a less ruthlessly self-assertive personality was simply destroyed.” Haber also became a zealot about developing chemical weapons, which the pacifist Immerwahr was appalled by. She committed suicide in 1915 following an argument with her husband.