Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science
Excerpted from Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics. Copyright ©2008 by Renee Bergland; reprinted by permission of Beacon Press.
In 1861, astronomer Maria Mitchell was one of the most famous women in the world, but she was modest by nature and disliked publicity. Upstairs in her bedroom in her home on Nantucket, she had a medal that had been awarded to her by the King of Denmark for her discovery of the comet that had brought her international renown. The metal was a three-inch disk of solid gold with Miss Mitchell's name engraved on it; its dull gleam bespoke the solid weight of her accomplishment. By 1879, Maria Mitchell was such a celebrity that people who sat next to her at a meal or glimpsed her across a train platform often wrote to their hometown newspapers to report the sightings.
Traditionally, Venus (ultra violet photo, top right) is viewed as the female planet. Her erratic path through the skies is an apt metaphor for women's circuitous path toward political and educational rights, and it times, the story of women's rights in the United States also moved backward. In the glorious years of Mitchell's youth on Nantucket and up to the middle of the nineteenth century, women's access to education and to the political process expanded rapidly. But this quick expansion was follows by an equally swift contraction. Even women's education -- previously regarded as a clear social good -- was controversial by century's end.
Women's relationship to the sciences changed most drastically of all. When Mitchell was young, science was considered a ladylike avocation, and girls were encouraged to study it. Mitchell never intended to challenge scientific or social conventions by her work in astronomy; on the contrary, the community supported her interests. But later generations of female students would not meet with the same encouragement. While Maria Mitchell was not from Concord, her interactions with the citizens of that town were both formative and illustrative of women's roles in intellectual circles in the nineteenth century.
As host of the Nantucket Atheneum's many public lectures, she built a remarkable network of friendships with influential literary, political, and scientific figures. She taught Ralph Waldo Emerson how to use the telescope on the roof of her home above the Pacific Bank there.
Following the discovery of her "woman's comet" (as it was later viewed by some), Mitchell visited Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne in Paris and traveled with them from there to Rome in 1858. Mr. Hawthorne recorded in his journal that "...The evening was beautiful, with a bright young moonlight, yet not sufficiently powerful to overwhelm the stars; and as we walked the deck, Miss Mitchell showed the children the stars and constellations, and told their names." These travels became the basis for a solid family friendship, and she and Sophia developed a warm friendship; the children loved her.
Much earlier, in the 1820s and 1830s, the seeds of religious liberalization had been sown around Massachusetts in classrooms rather than in churches. Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and William Mitchell were in the vanguard of the new reformist pedagogy. Mitchell and her family offer a fascinating parallel to the Alcotts. Like Bronson, her father William was an accomplished educator whose teaching style was happy, peculiar, and experiential, open to the questions and insights of his students. Both men were somewhat well known in Massachusetts but both were eventually outshone by the gifted second daughters whose educations they had tended to carefully. Louisa May Alcott and Maria Mitchell, two of the most successful women of the nineteenth century, were friends and Mitchell attended the Concord School of Philosophy during the summers. They both were Unitarians who became passionately committed to women's educational and political rights. Both believed that women's right to work was paramount, that women could and would work for the good of society, and that they would change the world for the better. Their feminism was rooted in their Unitarianism.
Throughout her career, Mitchell stressed the importance of women being hired for professional jobs, paid fairly, and encouraged rather than discouraged. Regarding the proportion of women faculty at Vassar where she was a member of the founding faculty, she once asked, "Do you know of any case in which a boy's college has offered a professorship to a woman? Until you do, it is absurd to say that the highest learning is within the reach of women." As for the efforts to encourage women, the New York Times reported in 1881, "The question of equality of the sexes is one that does not naturally disturb such a woman. She merely says if women are regarded as equals, in mental capacity, they should have equal advantages, and if considered inferior, they should be given better chances."
But as times changed, commenters became more and more likely to focus on Mitchell's strangeness. Where in 1872, her declaration that "Science needs women" was applauded wildly, by 1891, it was applauded just as enthusiastically when Harriet Stanton Blatch proclaimed that "to rear an astronomer is perchance a higher labor than to discover a comet." Women astronomers, along with other women scientists, had spiraled backwards.
Eventually, the myth reshaped reality. In 1959, C.P. Snow casually remarked in his landmark history of science, "We don't in reality regard women as suitable for scientific careers." In 2005, Harvard President Lawrence Summers blundered into a minefield with a speech that attempted to explain women's exclusion from the sciences in terms of their innately unscientific qualities.
The fact that American girls and women were expressly encouraged to study science from around the time of the American Revolution until the late nineteenth century means that such an age can surely come again. Mitchell's life and career show the possibilities for women who are given opportunity as well as some of the constraints that have limited women scientists thus far. She asked her students at Vassar, "Does anyone suppose that any woman in all the ages has had a fair chance to show what she could do in science?... until able women have given their lives to investigation, it is idle to discuss the question of their capacity for original work."
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