Love is in the Air, in the Field, and in the Lab

In the past, we’ve talked about how families of Smithsonian researchers helped out with research, and some have even lived in the Smithsonian itself. In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, it seems like  love, too,  has brought many couples together both at the Smithsonian and out in the  field. Love, as you’ll see in the photos below, enabled some women to travel the world and get involved (if not always recognized) in science during a time when this was still an improbable career path for most women. Take, for example, Gustav Arthur Cooper (1902-2000) and his wife Josephine Cooper, who worked diligently alongside one another in the Division of Invertebrate Paleontology, United States National Museum (now the National Museum of Natural History). Though Josephine was not on the Smithsonian payroll (she definitely should’ve been!), she assisted her husband with collecting and ID’ing specimens. Biologist A. Stanley Rand and his wife Patricia Rand met one summer in Chicago, where they both had summer jobs cataloguing salamanders at the Field Museum. Soon after, they married and moved to the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute on Barro Colorado Island, Panama where they raised  their family and continued to collaborate in life and research, even writing papers together. And William M. Mann, Director of the National Zoo, and his wife, Lucile, looked happy together on a 1931 expedition in British Guiana collecting animals for the Zoo. As the zookeeper’s wife, Lucile traveled around the world with her husband  on live-animal expeditions and acted as a foster parent (in their apartment!) to many of the orphaned infant zoo animals. She later was employed by the zoo, editing publications and working as an administrator. Enjoy our Valentine’s Day “Love at the Smithsonian” slideshow below, compiled by SIA’s Courtney Esposito, and featuring couples across the Smithsonian Institution who accompanied one another in the name of science and in the name of love.

William M. Mann, director of the National Zoological Park, and his wife, Lucile Quarry Mann in 1931

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