Mary Fieser

In recent times textbooks have been central to learning chemistry. Starting in the 1940s and continuing through the 1960s, Mary Fieser wrote a series of successful chemistry textbooks with her husband, Louis. These textbooks were particularly popular because the Fiesers described real applications of chemistry for medicine and industry.

About Her Life

Mary Peters Fieser (1909–1997) was born in Atchison, Kansas, but her family moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, when she was still a child. Fieser learned her habit of hard work from her grandmother. At a young age, she also got into the unusual habit of getting up every morning at 2:00 a.m. She went on to attend Bryn Mawr College, a school for women located just outside Philadelphia. She had planned to become a doctor but changed her major to chemistry, partly due to the influence of her chemistry professor (and future husband), Louis Fieser. When she graduated in 1930, she went to Radcliffe College in Massachusetts to earn her masters degree. She actually took most of her courses at Harvard University and did her research there, but she had to enroll in Radcliffe to do so because Harvard did not admit women students or award them degrees at that time. Louis Fieser had also taken a faculty position at Harvard, and Mary did her graduate research in his research group. While Professor Fieser was open to having women work in his lab, other Harvard faculty were not so progressive. Mary took a lab course under one professor who refused to let her carry out the class lab assignments in his laboratory, making her work unsupervised in the basement of a neighboring building instead. She received her master's degree in 1932, and she and Louis Fieser were married that same year.

Photo courtesy Bryn Mawr College Library.

One of the many whimsical illustrations of the Fieser’s cats that were included in their textbooks. From Louis F. Fieser and Mary Fieser, Organic Chemistry, 1st ed. (Boston: D.C. Heath and Co., 1944).

Mary decided not to try for a doctorate, reasoning that she would always be able to work in her husband's lab whether or not she earned a doctorate. She had already encountered discrimination at Harvard, and in those days many universities and chemical companies wouldn't even consider hiring a female chemist. "I could see I was not going to get along well on my own, [but as Mrs. Fieser] I could do as much chemistry as I wanted."¹

The Fiesers worked in organic chemistry. They studied synthesis, that is, building molecules with specific structures. The Fiesers synthesized compounds that already existed in nature in order to study the natural materials. Their approach worked like this: if they thought they knew the molecular structure of a natural compound, they would synthesize a molecule with that molecular structure. If their synthetic compound had the same properties as the natural compound, then they knew that they were probably right about the molecular structure of the natural compound.

The Fiesers synthesized cortisone and other steroid hormones. They also synthesized vitamin K. In addition, the two synthesized derivatives of quinine, a compound that is used to treat malaria. They were hoping to make a good synthetic drug that could be used to replace quinine, since supplies of the drug were short during World War II, and many soldiers fighting in the tropics were becoming ill with malaria. But unfortunately, none of their compounds turned out to be useful malaria drugs.

While the Fiesers did a lot of research, their real fame came from the books they wrote. The first book was a college textbook titled Organic Chemistry, published in 1944. At first, Louis had planned to write the textbook himself. He had asked Mary to help him with the research, but they both soon realized that the job was so big that the two would have to write the book together. The textbook was innovative, because it had chapters on real-world applied organic chemistry and its uses, chapters which were mostly written by Mary. Subsequent editions also included brief biographical information for 454 different chemists. And it was the first of their texts to carry a charming illustration of their many cats in its preface. Their household harbored as many as seven cats at a time!

The Fiesers later began two book series, Organic Reactions and Fieser and Fieser's Reagents for Organic Synthesis. These were written as series because new chemical reactions are always being discovered, and new chemical reagents are always being discovered as well, so new volumes had to be written to keep up with the latest discoveries. The two published their series until Louis's death in 1977; after which Mary continued the work on her own until 1994. These series required the assistance of generations of graduate students, who warmly regarded Fieser as their quick-witted mother, aunt, or sister.

Mary Fieser spent her career working in her husband's lab, although she wasn't officially an employee of Harvard, and she worked without pay. In the 1960s, Harvard officially gave her the title of research associate, but she still didn't get paid anything for her work. She died in 1997 at the age of 87.

¹ Mary Fieser, interviews by Stacey Pramer, October 1981 and January 1982, quoted in Stacy Pramer, “Mary Fieser: A Transitional Figure in the History of Women,” Journal of Chemical Education 62: 3 (March 1985), 188.

For Further Reading on the Web

Mary Fieser— a biographical snapshot from Journal of Chemical Education (JCE) Online, published by the Division of Chemical Education of the American Chemical Society.