Einstein's machismo wasn't relative.
Zurich, 1913. Max Planck and Walther Nernst asked Einstein to accept the direction of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics and therefore move to Berlin. Einstein nodded, but his wife, Mileva Maric, didn't deserve to take the news. By then, the relationship was already approaching dismantling, and a year ago Einstein had established a close correspondence with his cousin Elsa Lowenthal, who was going to be his second wife.
Einstein and Maric met in the fall of 1896, when they both signed up for the Diploma in Physics and Mathematics at the Zurich Polytechnic School. In the mid-level exams of the diploma, the only woman in the course obtained excellent results: in mathematics Einstein got a better grade (5.7 on a scale from 1 to 6) than Maric (5.05). But in physics they got the same result (5.5).
Mileva Maric’s promising academic career was interrupted in 1901, when Einstein became pregnant. Lieserl's daughter was born in 1902, but Einstein's roles do not explain what happened to the child: He probably died at the end of the summer of 1903, but the unmarried couple may give the child for adoption. Einstein and Maric got married that year and had two other children.
Ten years after the wedding, when they moved to Berlin, the couple was broken, but, as on many other occasions, they decided to continue together for the sake of the children. For this, Einstein imposed a prodigious set of conditions on his wife:
“1. You shall ensure:
“You’ll have my clothes and the house in good condition.
“You’ll serve me three meals a day in my room.
“You’ll wash my room and my office and you’ll have to be clear that I’m going to use the work desk myself.
2. You will have no personal relationship with me until for social reasons it is indispensable. In particular:
“You won’t sit at home next to me.
“We won’t go or travel together.
3. Consider the following:
“We’re not going to have intimate relationships and you won’t blame me for anything.
“You will stop talking if I ask you.
“You will immediately leave my room or office, without protest, if I ask you.
“You will not despise me before the children, neither with words nor with actions.”
Although the conditions were initially accepted, they were definitively separated in the summer of 1914, and Maric returned with his two sons to Zurich. He and Albert Einstein divorced themselves from Valentine's Day in 1919.
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