[frossie]

Unless you personally know either of the people involved, I don't think you are in a position to make a judgement as to whether it was "love, sacrifice and reward" or "prevailing cultural pressures at the time that were always regretted later"

[pdeuchler]

How does that make a difference? We're supposed to discount his wife's sacrifice because of potential social pressures?

If you really wanted to be a cold hearted bastard about it you could have done a cost benefit analysis on the potential earnings of a theoretical physicist vs a secretary in the early 1950's before you discounted it from being a financial decision, but then you couldn't have made an opportunistic political statement due to a man's death.

[ciupicri]

I thought that the prevailing cultural pressures at the time were about men working and women staying at home.

[ScottBurson]

Well, the thrust of it was that the man's career is important, and the woman's isn't. So assuming they had no children at the time, it was entirely consistent with that for her to quit college and take a job with no career path in order to fund his education. (If they had children, of course, the ethic would have been that she should stay home to care for them... indeed, she would likely have had no alternative.)

I think frossie has a good point, actually. We can hope that it was as jusben1369 suggests, but we can't really know that. Maybe being married to Gene gave Marian all she wanted in life, and maybe it didn't.

[vdaniuk]

Yeah, this comment shouldn't be downvoted so much even if it is offensive to some people.

[zcdziura]

It's being downvoted not (necessarily) because people think it's offensive, but rather because it's hypocritical.