Posted: 1/12/2019
Disclaimer
I am not a Richard Feynman expert nor have I studied all misogynist claims made against him.
Motivation
When I read two recent articles about allegations of misogyny and sexism against Richard Feynman, I had immediately a strong hunch that this was a willful and largely unjustified campaign to destroy this man.
As I was reading more about this man it became quite clear that we are dealing here with a very brilliant, complicated, and eccentric human being. And that there is so much more to his story than these manufactured allegations against him.
Faced With Antisemitism
So here we have one of the outstanding physicists of the 20th century, but he had to suffer antisemitism early on in his career:
- After 1932: “Feynman applied to Columbia University but was not accepted because of their quota for the number of Jews admitted” (Source 4; emphasis added)
- Ca. 1940: “The head of the physics department [of Princeton University] there, Henry D. Smyth, had another concern, writing to Philip M. Morse to ask: "Is Feynman Jewish? We have no definite rule against Jews but have to keep their proportion in our department reasonably small because of the difficulty of placing them."” (Source 4; emphasis added)
Briefly And Highly Selectively About His Personal Life
Feynman was apparently an eccentric and very complicated person:
- “Feynman tried marijuana and ketamine at John Lilly's famed sensory deprivation tanks, as a way of studying consciousness. ... He gave up alcohol when he began to show vague, early signs of alcoholism, as he did not want to do anything that could damage his brain.” (Source 4; emphasis added)
- “[Gell-Mann] noted that Feynman's eccentricities included a refusal to brush his teeth, which [Feynman] advised on national television that others not do” (Source 4; emphasis added)
Feminists probably omit that “... Jenijoy La Belle, who had been hired as Caltech's first female professor in 1969, was refused tenure in 1974. She filed suit with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which ruled against Caltech in 1977, adding that she had been paid less than male colleagues. La Belle finally received tenure in 1979. Many of Feynman's colleagues were surprised that he took her side. … ” (Source 4; emphasis added)
Briefly About His Three Wives
From Wikipedia, we learn about his first of three wives:
“One of the conditions of Feynman's scholarship to Princeton was that he could not be married; nevertheless, he continued to see his high school sweetheart, Arline Greenbaum, and was determined to marry her once he had been awarded his Ph.D. despite the knowledge that she was seriously ill with tuberculosis. This was an incurable disease at the time, and she was not expected to live more than two years. On June 29, 1942, they took the ferry to Staten Island, where they were married in the city office. The ceremony was attended by neither family nor friends and was witnessed by a pair of strangers. Feynman could only kiss Arline on the cheek. After the ceremony he took her to Deborah Hospital, where he visited her on weekends.” (Source 4; emphasis added)
So Feynman married his high school sweetheart, who was at the time of marriage terminal ill and both knew it. His first wife died in 1945. I am sure feminists have not much to say about that!
Richard Feynman apparently was known for being quarrelsome and having violent tempers. His second and third wives should probably have known about this. Divorced from his second wife in about two years, i.e. married between 1954-56. Wikipedia about this divorce: “An interlocutory decree of divorce was entered on June 19, 1956, on the grounds of "extreme cruelty".”(Source 4; emphasis added) His second wife should have known about this very well.
The Wikipedia article mentions also an FBI interview of a female close to Feynman who later sent a written statement to J. Edgar Hoover about Feynman that includes several serious accusations against Feynman such as communism, ruthlessness etc. (See Source 4).
From Wikipedia we also learn that Feynman apparently had affairs with some dubious women:
“Feynman's love life had been turbulent since his divorce; his previous girlfriend had walked off with his Albert Einstein Award medal and, on the advice of an earlier girlfriend, had feigned pregnancy and blackmailed him into paying for an abortion” (Source 4; emphasis added)
From Wikipedia, we learn about his third wife:
“On the beach at Lake Geneva, he met Gweneth Howarth ... working in Switzerland as an au pair. ... When Feynman found that Howarth was being paid only $25 a month, he offered her $20 a week to be his live-in maid. Feynman knew that this sort of behavior was illegal under the Mann Act, so he had a friend, Matthew Sands, act as her sponsor. Howarth pointed out that she already had two boyfriends, but decided to take Feynman up on his offer, … She made a point of dating other men, but Feynman proposed in early 1960. They were married on September 24, 1960, ... They had a son, Carl, in 1962, and adopted a daughter, Michelle, in 1968” (Source 4; emphasis added)
Both were married until Feynman’s death for about 28 years. Was Feynman such a terrible husband as were are led to believe?
His Autobiography
Sexist claims derived from his autobiography titled “Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!” (published in 1985), which became a bestseller, are nothing new:
“The publication of the book brought a new wave of protest about Feynman's attitude toward women. There had been protests over his alleged sexism in 1968, and again in 1972.” (Source 4; emphasis added)
The Alleged Scandal
First, the accused died in 1988 or 30 years ago and therefore is unable to defend himself anymore.
My first impression is that these accusations against Richard Feynman are rather out of thin air and more sensationalist than real. They were probably fabricated or blown out of proportion by some feminists!
The article (Source 1) reads like a piece of trash! Please feel free to read it for yourself where guilt by association is constantly evoked. Flimsy analogies to recent scandals are presented and linked to Feynman. The 100th birthday of Feynman is abused by this feminist author!
“... a quote from Feynman’s widely beloved memoir, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” in which he calls women in bars “bitches” for not sleeping with him ...” (Source 1)
So what? Perhaps this was more fiction than anything else.
“My initial intention was to critique Nature magazine’s celebratory profile of Feynman’s oeuvre, which made only glancing mention of “disturbingly sexist” sections of his book that revealed “predatory behaviour towards women,” without further explanation of Feynman’s well-documented history of sexual predation. ” (Source 1; emphasis added)
The feminist author provides no evidence whatsoever in her article to support her allegation that Feynman had a “history of sexual predation”!
“... In “Surely You’re Joking”, Feynman details how he adopted the mindset of a pick-up artist (an outlook he also claims to have eventually abandoned) by treating women as if they were worthless and cruelly lashing out at them when they rejected his advances. He worked and held meetings in strip clubs, and while a professor at CalTech, he drew naked portraits of his female students. Even worse, perhaps, he pretended to be an undergraduate student to deceive younger women into sleeping with him. His second wife accused him of abuse, citing multiple occasions when he’d fly into a blind rage if she interrupted him while he was working or playing his bongos.” (Source 1; emphasis added)
So what? None of these allegations are not supported by anything. Have younger women never pretended to be older and to seduce older men? The dubious second wife of three wives was already covered above. Feynman was only married with her for 2-3 years.
Source No. 2 only briefly mentions some of the accusations by the second wife.
Source No. 6 at least contains a more extended quote from Feynman’s autobiography:
“All during the next day I built up my psychology differently: I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren’t worth anything, and all they’re in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they’re not going to give you a goddamn thing; I’m not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic.” (Source 6; emphasis added)
So feminists what is wrong with this given that it was written decades ago? By the way, the above quote is the only accusation you find in Source No. 6.
Source No 7 is trashy too! Appears to be nothing else but regurgitated accusations and innuendo without any substantiation like the other articles. On the contrary, the author writes:
“As far as we know, there is no evidence that Feynman discriminated against women in his career; the letters he writes to women in the collection of letters edited by his daughter indicate no bias. Both male and female students admired him. His sister Joan documents how he was always supportive of her own career in physics. At one point he came to the aid of a female professor filing a discrimination suit at Caltech.” (Source 7; emphasis added)
This author is caught up in petty things almost not worth mentioning!
I might be wrong, but it seems that none of the Feynman accusers have interviewed the still living third wife of Feynman, who was married with him for 28 years!
Sources:
- Surely You’re a Creep, Mr. Feynman On toxic moral license and the mythos of male scientific genius (publication date N/A; presumably January 2019)
- Richard Feynman's FBI Files Make Fascinating Reading (published 6/7/2012)
- The problem of Richard Feynman (published 7/13/2014)
- Richard Feynman, sexism and changing perceptions of a scientific icon (This appears to be a repost of the blog post by Scientific American)
- Richard Feynman, sexism and changing perceptions of a scientific icon (published 7/11/2014. This was probably the blog post that triggered this scandal. Originally posted by Scientific American, but Scientific American has removed this post saying: “The text of this post has been removed because it did not meet Scientific American‘s quality standards”)
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