After a successful year in Göttingen, Lucy Mensing went back home to Hamburg, where she planned to take the state exam needed to get a teaching license. As a woman she had little to no chance of ever landing a professorship. Becoming a high-school teacher may have been her best bet to stay involved with physics.

Yet she dropped this plan when Alfred Landé offered her a one-year assistantship at the University of Tübingen. Unfortunately, her winning streak in Göttingen did not continue in Tübingen. Not only was her research (on the Ramsauer effect) not going well, she was also put off by the competitive mentality she encountered in the physics community. In 1928, realizing that this would mean the end of her career in physics, she married Wilhelm Schütz, who had come to the physics institute in Tübingen as the assistant of Walther Gerlach, the successor of Friedrich Paschen as director of the institute.

Cite this resource

Michel Janssen and Gernot Münster, “Lucy Mensing,” American Institute of Physics, 2025. http://www.aip.org/history/lucy-mensing.