During WWII, only prestigious and well funded universities such as Yale or Harvard were able to finance research. The women scientists who were hired to teach in smaller colleges often had to give up their ambitious careers.
It's what happened to scientist Hilda Geiringer. Born in Vienna in 1893, Geringer got her doctorate in mathematics. According to Northeastern, she emigrated to Germany where she became the first woman to receive tenure in the faculty of mathematics at the University of Berlin. In 1933 when Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor, Geiringer lost her job like many of her Jewish colleagues.
She fled first to Brussel and then to Turkey, where she worked as a professor at the University of Istanbul. In 1938 the government changed, and Geiringer lost her job again. She made her way to London, where she was sheltered at her brother's home, before embarking on a freighter to Lisbon, along with her daughter Magda. When the war broke out, they got stuck in Portugal for over a month waiting for their visas and almost risked being deported to a concentration camp.
In 1939, with the help of fellow scholar Richard Von Mises, she finally got offered a position at Bryn Mawr and was able to travel to the U.S. But there, she had to significantly lower her expectations, settling for a job she was overqualified for. "Despite her illustrious background in applied mathematics Geiringer was expected to teach basic courses in mathematics," Northeastern reports.
