Albertine Necker De Saussure

Albertine Adrienne Necker de Saussure (9 April 1766, in Geneva – 13 April 1841, in Mornex, on the Salève, near Geneva) was a Genevan and then Swiss writer and educationalist, and an early advocate of education for women.

Life

Albertine Necker de Saussure was the daughter of the Genevan scientist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure (1740-1799), a noted physicist, geologist, meteorologist, and Alpine explorer, and Albertine-Amélie Boissier (1745-1817). Horace-Bénédict, believing that the schools of the day were inferior, taught his three children at home. She learned English, German, Italian, and Latin, and her father also trained her in science. Albertine "inherited a large share of her father's intellectual energy as well as of his enthusiasm for educational reform." She supported her father's schooling in her later writings. Although a Calvinist, her religious views were broadminded and tolerant.

In 1785, at age 19, Albertine married Jacques Necker (1757-1825), a captain in the French cavalry. He was the son of Louis Necker and the nephew and namesake of Louis XVI's finance minister, Jacques Necker. The French Revolution ended Necker's military career and, in 1790, he began teaching as a demonstrator in botany at the University of Geneva, a job he obtained because of his wife's surname. She initially wrote her husband's botany lectures for him, but he eventually rose to Professor of Botany at the university. She educated her own children in a wide range of subjects, including science. They lived in Cologny, Switzerland and she became a close friend of her husband's cousin, the prominent writer and intellectual Germaine de Staël.

Albertine's brother Nicolas-Théodore de Saussure became a noted chemist and a pioneering researcher in photosynthesis and plant physiology. Additionally, her great uncle Charles Bonnet, like her father, was a famous naturalist.

Albertine did not believe marriage to be the be-all end-all of women's existence, and she did not think that women should be educated solely to please men. She has been compared to Mary Wollstonecraft for believing that single women must maintain themselves through education.

Science

Encouraged by her scientist-father, Horace Bénédict de Saussure, Albertine began, at about age 10, to keep a diary in which she recorded her scientific observations. In time, she became an active experimentalist, and during an attempt to prepare oxygen she burned her face badly. As a young woman, she went on geological and botanical expeditions with her father, but her scientific activity declined after her marriage.

Necker de Saussure became acquainted with several well-known scientists of her day. The chemist Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau wrote that he had revived her interest in chemistry during a visit she paid to him. Other famous French chemists that she visited included Antoine Lavoisier