Ava Helen Pauling, more than any other person, was responsible for Linus Pauling’s peace work. Raised on a farm in Oregon, the tenth of twelve children born to a socialist schoolteacher father and suffragist mother, Ava Helen learned early in life that issues of social justice were paramount -- and that women could do anything. She was a bright girl who breezed through high school in three years, and met her future husband while taking a chemistry class from him at Oregon Agricultural College. The teacher fell in love with the student, the student with the teacher, and they were married in 1923, just after he entered graduate school in chemistry at the California Institute of Technology.

Pauling quickly discovered that his new wife was an extraordinarily able woman. Soon after they were married, he brought home a book on intelligence tests. They worked the problems together. "Much to my astonishment," he remembered, "I found that my newly acquired wife could work these mathematical problems faster than I could, and get the right answer more often than I could." She helped him with his early laboratory work, accompanied him while he studied physics in Europe, spurred him to achieve great things, and tried to infuse him with some of the left-leaning social idealism to which she was herself committed. Dinner-table discussions through the 1930s and 1940s often centered on political issues. Before marriage, Pauling had voted Republican. Not long after, he was voting for liberal Democrats. Ava Helen encouraged him to support world government, to vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt, and to give a young Japanese-American man a weekend job as a gardener. Under her influence, Pauling’s political views took a decidedly liberal bent.