Women in American Cosmology
Jack C. Straton
University Studies
Portland State University.
Day 1 - Women and Astronomy
For images see http://www2.lucidcafe.com/lucidcafe/library/95aug/mitchell.html
Assign "Gender and Science: Women in American Astronomy, 1859-1940," (by John Lankford and Rickey L. Savings, Physics Today 43, 58 (March 1990)) to be read by today.
A discussion of Women in Science not only has to cover women’s contributions that have often been overlooked, and the ways in which gender ideology can blind scientists to the ways they think about the world, but also must examine the ways women have been treated within the sciences. Today we will talk about one specific example of a field that was unusual in opening up doors to women as participants in numbers nearly equal to the number of male astronomers, while simultaneously relegating women’s status to menial tasks at low pay with little chance for advancement.
Form discussion groups on the following topics:
Overview
Astronomy as a field for women
The outlook of male scientists
The education of women astronomers
Pay and career choices
Women and the reward system
Each of the following quotes for stimulating dicussion is from Lankford and Slavings.
Overview
Historically, the division of labor within American astronomy was gender specific. Although the field took in large numbers of women, gender dictated who collected data, who reduced it, who analyzed it and who published the results. The assignment of roles reflected the perceptions male astronomers had of females, and those perceptions in turn mirrored the values of American culture.
[C] areers developed in the context of a dual labor market that shunted most females onto a track with limited mobility, low pay and little room for intellectual independence. Only at the women’s colleges did female astronomers have freedom to choose research problems, . . .
Only in the 1950s did the first woman become a tenured professor of astronomy at Harvard, while the Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories permitted the first women astronomers to use their facilities in the mid-1960s.
Astronomy as a field for women
By the 1890s major observatories were beginning to resemble industrial factories. The latest research technologies, most of which involved photography, increased the amount of data collected exponentially, and so reduction and analysis had to be routinized. . . . [P]eople with unequal levels of skill all became part of the production of knowledge.
Men observed at the telescope and carried out the final discussion of the data. Women measured spectrograms, computed star places or reduced photometric data.
The expansion of higher education provided a second source of employment for women in astronomy. Before the Civil War only a few colleges admitted women. After mid-century, however, the movement to create colleges for women gained momentum. Mount Holyoke and Vassar were early in the field with astronomy offerings. They were soon followed by Smith. Of the "Seven Sisters"—the prominent New England women’s colleges—these three institutions developed strong astronomy departments.
In 1859 Maria Mitchell was the lone female astronomer in the United States. [B]etween 1860 and 1899, . . . the number of women rose to 56, or 18.3% of the community [and in] . . . 1900-1940, included 344 women, who made up 43% of the community. Maria Mitchell
By the 1840s middle-class urban American culture had come to believe that . . . men were competitive and successful in business, while women excelled in art. Women also were credited with more patience than men, and so were thought to deal easily with routine tasks.
Mitchell, no less than other Americans of her generation, was imbued with the culture’s values regarding gender-specific roles. "The eye that directs a needle in the delicate meshes of embroidery will equally well bisect a star with the spiderweb of a micrometer," she wrote. "Routine observations . . . dull as they are, are less dull than the endless repetition of the same pattern in crochetwork."
Science is embedded in a cultural context that prescribes many of the values and behaviors of its practitioners. Cultural values and norms also condition perceptions. The process of evaluating students and colleagues, for example, depends in part on cultural factors and not completely on purely objective standards.
The outlook of male scientists
The letters of male astronomers frequently reveal their perceptions of women. The physical and emotional strengths of women were major areas of concern. Female students were sometimes characterized as excessively emotional or nervous and given to bouts of ill health.
Frank Schlesinger, longtime director of the Yale University Observatory, was quite clear in his evaluation of women. He viewed women as superior to men at routine work that called "for patience and great care to avoid errors." But, he insisted, "according to my experience, women are not as creative as men of equal training."
Around 1920 Robert H. Baker, director of the Laws Observatory at the University of Missouri, wrote of one graduate student. "While unfortunately she is not a man, I believe she is handicapped by her sex less than any aspirant I have known."
The education of women astronomers
We rarely find much information about the dynamics that impel individuals to select careers in science. The Vassar archives provide an exception to this rule. In the papers of Caroline Furness (Vassar class of 1891), who succeeded Mary Whitney (Mitchell’s student) as professor of astronomy and director of the Vassar Observatory, . . . Mitchell, sitting, surrounded by several unidentified women, probably at Vassar
At the outset, Furness made it clear that she did not aim "to become an astronomer, but [rather] a teacher of astronomy. The opportunities for being strictly an observer would never come to me. I aspire only to be a teacher."
I only want to prepare myself for the highest place—just as any young man might." Rather than waiting "for some young man to come along to marry me," she argued, "I want to prepare myself to live a useful and happy life without marriage, and then, if the right one comes along, well and good, I shall take him, but I shall not be obliged to take a man just for the sake of a home."
Pay and career choices
In many ways, Mitchell exemplifies women in astronomy. Her career experiences foreshadowed choices and decisions future generations of women would face in a variety of institutional settings.
In 1849 Mitchell accepted the position of computer with the newly established Nautical Almanac Office. Her acceptance letter indicated a sense of deference and self-deprecation in excess of that demanded by her Quaker upbringing.
Mitchell’s salary was only one-third that of the male professors: $800 to the men’s $2500.
Observational astronomy, in keeping with available instrumentation, defined the activities of the women astronomers. Comets were followed and positions carefully measured so that orbits could be computed with the aid of advanced students. Sunspots, variable stars and occultations formed a major portion of observing programs. Mitchell often searched for new planetary satellites, but she seldom found time to reduce her observations and compare them with the positions of known objects. She also observed planetary markings. Working in her sitting room after breakfast she would attempt to recapture with watercolors the delicate hues of Mars, Jupiter or Saturn.
Women and the reward system
Fully 50% of the women active in the American astronomical community between 1859 and 1940 had careers whose lengths did not exceed five years. . . . Only 12% had careers longer than 25 years.
Honors and awards generally do not begin to accrue until after the 14th year of a scientific career. This suggests that part of the explanation for the differential reward system is related to differences in career length.
Before 1940 four women held a total of six elected offices in astronomy related scientific societies. This stands in sharp contrast to the 403 elective offices held by male astronomers. Two women and 164 men served in various editorial positions on astronomy and astronomy-related scientific journals. Before World War II, three female and 76 male astronomers were elected to the American Philosophical Society.
[A]ttempts of the astronomy section of the National Academy of Sciences to nominate a woman for membership in the academy make a compelling story. Florence Sabin, a physiologist at of the Rockefeller Institute, became the first woman member of the academy in 1925, followed by Vassar psychologist Margaret Floy Washburn in 1931. In 1944 geneticist Barbara McClintock became the third female academician. The astronomy section, however, remained a men’s club until 1978.
Wilson supported the Wellesley-trained Cannon for National Academy membership because of her work on the Draper catalog of stellar spectra, a project that occupied Cannon for 40 years. . . . "I don’t believe [Henry Norris] Russell could have done his work [on stellar evolution] if he hadn’t had the Draper catalogue to use."
[O]ne European astronomer of recognized standing told me this summer that as seen from Europe, Miss Cannon would rank above half a dozen of the present astronomical members of the Academy." . . . Perhaps Cannon looked upon her 1925 honorary degree from Oxford as a consolation prize. It was a mark of major international recognition, reserved for only a few American scientists in any generation. Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta Swan Leavitt
British-born Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, the first person to receive a PhD from the Harvard astronomy department. . . . [I]n 1931 she received two votes[,] . . . still only two votes in the informal balloting of 1935[, and] . . .. four in 1936. In 1939 Payne-Gaposchkin was the section’s nominee, with a total of 17 votes. . . . [I]n both 1940 and 1941, the balloting was closed before her name could be presented. In 1942 she was again nominated, receiving 14 votes to Donald Menzel’s 13, but in 1943 the academy rejected her for membership. Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin 1948
[It] is impossible to tell just why Payne-Gaposchkin was rejected. A clue, however, exists in the Shapley manuscripts at Harvard. In the fall of 1940, Frederick Wright, the academy’s home secretary, wrote Shapley concerning materials supplied in support of the nomination. These materials, traditionally a select bibliography and brief biography prepared by a member of the section making the nomination, were criticized by Wright as "laudatory." . . . The offending sentence in the material supplied by Shapley read as follows: "Her programs in stellar photometry are probably more extensive than those of any other astrophotometrist."
Primary sources
Archives and manuscript collections provide an intellectual time machine that can take one back to earlier epochs in the history of science. Many of the letters, diaries, memoranda and observing books on which this article is based come from such collections.
On the West Coast, the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, houses the papers of that campus’s astronomy department, the largest producer of astronomy PhDs before World War II. The Mary Shane Archives of the Lick Observatory are on the University of California, Santa Cruz campus and contain a wealth of historical treasures.
In the Midwest, the archives of the Yerkes Observatory at Williams Bay, Wisconsin, and the papers of the directors of the Washburn Observatory, in the archives of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, were indispensable. There are a few choice items on Maria Mitchell in the C. H. Davis papers at the Ford Museum and Library, in Dearborn, Michigan.
Moving further east, the archives at Vassar and Wellesley were of great value; the former contains the papers of Mitchell and Caroline Furness, and the latter the Sarah Frances Whiting manuscripts. The Harvard archives hold the Harlow Shapley papers. The Yale University archives contain the records of the astronomy department there and the papers of Yale astronomers. The archives of the National Academy of Sciences, in Washington, DC, also contain important resources.
From archival and printed sources such as biographies and obituaries, we collected data on the backgrounds, education, careers and research activities of 1205 individuals who worked full time in the American astronomical community between 1859 and 1940. These data were converted to a computer database to provide a resource for studying the astronomical community over that time period. Quantitative material discussed in this article is drawn from this database.
Further reading
Margaret W. Rossiter’s Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Johns Hopkins U. P., Baltimore, 1982) is the place to begin. It should be supplemented by Pnina G. Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram, eds., Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science, 1789-1979 (Rutgers U. P., New Brunswick, N. J., 1987).
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: An Autobiography and Other Recollections (Cambridge U. P., Cambridge, England, 1984) was edited by her daughter, Katherine Haramundanis.
Sex Segregation in the Workplace: Trends. Explanations, Remedies (Nat. Acad. of Sci., Washington, 1984) was edited by sociologist Barbara F. Reskin and provides a good introduction.
Robert L. Heilbroner and Aaron Singer deal with The Economic Transformation of America (Harcourt Brace, New York, 1984), stressing the importance of the factory in America at the end of the 19th century. Lankford’s own work in progress, Change and Continuity in a Modern Scientific Community: American Astronomy, 1859-1940 contains an extended discussion of the ways in which practices in the business sector affected astronomy.
Historian Barbara Welter introduced the concept of separate spheres in a path-breaking paper, "The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860," American Quarterly 8, 151(1966). It should be supplemented by Rosalind Rosenberg’s Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (Yale U. P., New Haven, Conn., 1982). Helen Wright’s Sweeper in the Sky: The Life of Maria Mitchell, First Woman Astronomer In America (Macmillan, New York, 1950) is useful, but for biographical material on other women scientists readers must turn to Edward T. James, ed., Notable American Women, 1607-1950 (three volumes, Harvard U. P., Cambridge, Mass., 1971) or to obituaries.
