Early teaching career (1938–1943) After completing her studies, Wagner was hired as a biology and chemistry instructor at
Atlantic Christian College in
Wilson, North Carolina. In 1938, she was promoted to head the school's biology department and worked there until her marriage in 1940. Wagner married James O. Beasley, a pioneering plant geneticist, on September 17, 1940. After their marriage, the couple moved to
College Station, Texas, where both were employed at the
Texas Agricultural Experiment Station. Beasley was drafted to fight in
World War II in 1942 shortly after Wagner published her second paper and just prior to the birth of their son John in April. Soon after, Beasley went missing in action and Wagner contacted his friend,
Sheldon C. Reed, to see if he had any information. She returned to Ohio with their son and lived with her parents during this time, while working on
penicillin studies at the Ohio State Research Foundation. Wagner was notified in November 1943, that Beasley had been in killed in action, in September 1943 in Italy. He was subsequently awarded a
Purple Heart.
Genetics work (1944–1966) '' In 1944, Wagner took a post at
Vassar College in
Poughkeepsie, New York, as an assistant professor in plant sciences. In 1945, she relocated to
Delaware, Ohio, and taught botany at
Ohio Wesleyan University. On August 20, 1946, she and Sheldon Reed, who had remained in touch, married. He was at the time an assistant professor at
Harvard University, teaching biology. After their marriage, the couple lived in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and both worked at Harvard. They began collaborating on research at that time and thereafter jointly published works. Their first project concerned the
speciation of flies, which was published as
Morphological Differences and Problems of Speciation in in March 1948. Reed gave birth to their daughter, Catherine, that same month. By the time the paper was published, the family had moved to
Minneapolis, Minnesota, where Sheldon had become the director of the
Dight Institute for Human Genetics at the
University of Minnesota in 1947. Although Reed had a desk at the Dight Institute from 1947 to 1966, she never held an academic position with the institute because of nepotism rules. Her nominal tie was to the University of Minnesota. She nevertheless continued to work with Sheldon and publish works on genetics. Their next two papers,
Natural Selection in Laboratory Populations of (1948) and
Natural Selection in Laboratory Populations of II: Competition between a White Eye Gene and Its Wild Type Allele (1950), focused on
Drosophila melanogaster and
natural selection. These studies were important in the development of new theoretical and methodological approaches, using statistical analysis and comparison of minute differences, to studying the process of speciation. As a pioneer in the work on
Drosophila genetics, Reed was one of the women who contributed to establishing and standardizing processes to study species evolution. From 1950, the Reeds changed from studying flies to human genetics and published works together on
intellectual disability. In June 1951, their son William was born. Many of their works, like a 1958 follow-up study of former residents from the turn-of-the-century at the
Minnesota Experimental School for the Feeble Minded in
Faribault, and a 1962 study on intelligence, focused on families and attempted to determine whether certain traits were genetic. They became proponents of
genetic counseling, studying parental genes to determine the probable source of children's
congenital disorders or diseases, in an effort to mitigate and understand how they occurred. Their best known joint book, which gave Reed lead author position, was
Mental Retardation: A Family Study, published in 1965.
Women's studies (1950–1992) From 1950, Reed was interested in writing about women and studying
sexism in science. Having been a member of
Sigma Delta Epsilon, an organization dedicated to fostering women in their scientific endeavors, she recognized that issues of self-esteem, family obligations, and sexual discrimination they faced were largely responsible for women leaving the profession. That year, she published
Productivity and Attitudes of Seventy Scientific Women, which analyzed the impact of marriage and childbirth on scientific careers. She noted that of the women in her sample four-fifths regardless of marital status indicated working was a necessity for financial reasons. She concluded that in her study group marriage and children were the primary reason women abandoned scientific careers. Aware of the difficulties, Reed tried to encourage members of Sigma Delta Epsilon to continue working and to know their rights. She was a committed women's rights activist, supporter of the
National Abortion Rights Action League, and served on the board of
Planned Parenthood. The push of activists in the
Women's Liberation Movement in the 1970s brought about the advent of
women's studies courses. A central role of the new field was to recover the histories of women's participation and contributions to society. In 1992, Reed published
American Women in Science before the Civil War, which recovered the histories of twenty-two American women scientists who had published prior to the
American Civil War. The book, along with
Ladies in the Laboratory by Mary R. S. Creese, was acknowledged by Tina Gianquitto, a professor at the
Colorado School of Mines, whose work focuses in on nineteenth-century women scientists, as being one of two sources that gave extensive historical and biographical information on women scientists of that era. Historian William P. Palmer noted in 2011 that Reed had been "the most thorough biographer of
Mary Amelia Swift". In a different chapter of the book, about
Eunice Newton Foote, Reed wrote that Foote's experiments confirmed that when subjected to sunlight, carbon dioxide became warmer than air "thereby demonstrating what we call the greenhouse effect today".
Later career (1966–1980) In 1966, Reed was officially hired by the University of Minnesota to develop the
Minnesota
Mathematics and
Science
Teaching project, known as Minnemast. The program was funded by the
National Science Foundation and aimed to focus on better science and math education for kindergarten and primary school children. Reed worked on the project through 1970. The project developed twenty-nine teaching plans, six of which were created by Reed. She was still working at the Dight Institute and was part of the staff in the 1970s, as well as serving as co-director of research for the Minnesota Genetics League. She taught courses at the University of Minnesota and gave courses on women's contributions throughout history at the university's Continuing Education and Extension Department. ==Death and legacy==