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Maria Mitchell At COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS ASTRONOMY Maria Mitchell at 200 Richard Holmes celebrates the pedagogic fire and salty opinions of the pioneering astronomer and advocate of women’s rights on the bicentenary of her birth. he was the first woman in the United States to become a professional astron- omer, and a dauntless champion of sci- Sence education for women. Maria Mitchell, whose bicentenary is celebrated this August, was a scientific revolutionary. That is encap- sulated in her prophetic speech, ‘The Need for Women in Science’, delivered in 1876 to the Fourth Congress of the Association for the Advancement of Women, in Phila- delphia, Pennsylvania. It posed a historic challenge. Mitchell declared that the laws of nature are discovered not through “the hurry and worry of daily toil; they are diligently sought ... And until able women have given LIB. COLLEGE COLL., VASSAR & SPECIAL ID 08.07.07, ARCHIVES their lives to investigation, it is idle to discuss the question of their capacity for original work.” Or, as she put it in her journals: “bet- ter to be peering in the spectrograph than on the pattern of a dress”. Mitchell’s agile mind, pedagogic fire and salty opinions bring extraordinary anima- tion to her varied collection of scientific papers, articles, notebooks and journals. Some were first published by her sister Phebe Mitchell Kendall, in the 1896 Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals, just seven years after her death. More recent volumes include Henry Albers’s edited Maria Mitchell: A Life in Journals and Letters (2001) and Renée Bergland’s Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science (2008). Independent, combative and original, Mitchell became a major pub- lic figure by the end of her life. She “stands out clear and conspicuous”, noted her Sci- entific American obituary in July 1889, “like an evening star in the heavens she loved so well to study”. She was born in 1818, into a large Quaker family on the island whaling station of Nan- tucket, off the Massachusetts coast. It was a place of horizon-gazers, seafarers and light- house keepers, where men were often away and Quakerism honoured gender equality. Maria Mitchell (left) and Mary Whitney in the observatory at Vassar College. From early childhood she was encouraged to pursue science by her beloved father, a direc- later, she was appointed supervisor of the 1 October 1847, on the roof of the Pacific tor of the local bank and an amateur astron- local library, the Nantucket Atheneum. Her Bank, she spied a new “telescopic comet” five omer with contacts at Harvard University’s constant companion was a notebook, carried degrees above the pole star. She published a observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. in a capacious pocket. Her speech was direct, preliminary notice of her finding in the jour- Together they scanned the skies using a her ideas increasingly radical. “We cannot nal of Britain’s Royal Astronomical Society Dollond telescope from the rooftop ‘walk’ accept anything as granted,” she wrote in her on 12 November, giving her a claim to the of their house. Early on, Mitchell revealed journal, “beyond the first mathematical for- gold medal established by the Danish King extraordinary observational powers, natural mulae. Question everything else.” Frederick VI for the first sighting of any new mathematical gifts and unusual sensitivity to Like the German astronomer Caroline comet, detectable only by telescope, any- stellar movements and colours. Herschel (1750–1848), Mitchell made her where in the world. At 17, she opened her own school; a year name through discovering a comet. On Mitchell’s claim to priority was authentic, 370 | NATURE | VOL 558 | 21 JUNE© 20182018 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. All ri ghts reserved. ©2018 Mac millan Publishers Li mited, part of Spri nger Nature. All ri ghts reserved. BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT but closely matched by astronomers in Italy, logic, but is somewhat beauty and poetry”. Germany and Britain. She found an enthu- As a lecturer, Mitchell became known for siastic champion in Edward Everett, presi- pithy sayings. One was: “Study as if you were dent of Harvard University, who argued going to live forever; live as if you were going BETTMAN/GETTY her case in various scientific journals, and to die tomorrow.” On Isaac Newton’s genius: even wrote personally to the Danish consul “Newton rolled up the cover of a book; he put in Washington DC. He also wrote drily to a a small glass at one end, and a large brain at friend in late 1847: “It would be pleasant to the other — it was enough.” She explained the have the Nantucket girl carry off the prize use of spectroscopy: “The Astronomer breaks from all the greybeards and observatories up the starlight just as the geologist breaks up in Europe.” the rock with his hammer, and with similar She did, and it became known as Miss results, he finds copper, sodium and other Mitchell’s Comet. Recognition swiftly fol- elements in sun and stars.” lowed. By the age of 32, she had become She felt that women had a gift for obser- both the first woman elected to the American vational astronomy: “The eye that directs a Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the first needle in the delicate meshes of embroidery to enter the American Association for the will equally well bisect a star with the spider Advancement of Science. In 1849, she moved web of the micrometer.” She railed against with her father to Boston, Massachusetts, and the era’s domestic drudgery, urging her stu- was appointed an official ‘computer’ calculat- dents to pursue full-time careers in science. ing tables for the US Nautical Almanac (see Above all, she argued that higher education S. Nelson Nature 539, 491–492; 2016). She Maria Mitchell argued for women’s education. alone would give women independence of was assigned the orbit of Venus. mind and drive: “Until women throw off this That orbit was much too restricting. permission to visit, but only during the day. reverence for [male] authority they will not In 1857, she set out alone to visit the great Mitchell later wrote a study of the friend- develop. When they do this, when they come European observatories, from Greenwich, ship struck between astronomer Galileo to truth through their investigations ... their UK, to Berlin. She took with her one of the Galilei and the English poet John Milton minds will work on and on, unfettered.” earliest star photographs from Harvard, and in the 1630s. She loved Milton’s evocation Mitchell’s fieldwork was intrepid. In 1873 a volume of Lord Byron’s poetry. Her journals in Paradise Lost of Galileo near Florence, she travelled to an observatory in Russia, record encounters with George Airy, Britain’s entranced by the Moon, “whose orb/ just outside St Petersburg. In 1878, she led astronomer royal (“the Bear of Blackheath”); Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views/ an all-female expedition of her best stu- William Whewell, master of Trinity College, At evening, from the top of Fesole”. dents to observe a solar eclipse from Den- Cambridge, and coiner of the term ‘scien- In 1865, she was appointed professor of ver, Colorado (see J. Pasachoff Nature 545, tist’; astronomer John Herschel (Caroline’s astronomy at the newly founded Vassar Col- 409–410; 2017). They travelled 3,000 kilo- nephew, and “a better listener than any man I lege in Poughkeepsie, New York — one of the metres on the newly completed transconti- have met in England”); and the great explorer earliest woman-only US institutes of higher nental Pacific Railroad, camping and setting Alexander von Humboldt. learning. Her up their telescopes on an open plain with a Not all these meetings went smoothly. “She railed yearly salary was view of the Rocky Mountains. During her She was “riled” by Whewell’s chauvinist against the US$800, a figure final months at Vassar, Mitchell wrote a teasing while dining at Trinity. He mocked era’s domestic that Mitchell vigor- moving journal entry, comparing the quiet the “disgusting” poems of Elizabeth Barrett drudgery, urging ously disputed after continuity of her meticulous observations of Browning, and scorned ideas of extraterres- her students discovering it was a annular eclipses across a gap of more than trial intelligence, as contrary to the design of to pursue full- fraction of that paid 50 years. In 1831, she and her father gazed a benevolent creator. In her travel journal, time careers in to male professors. from their Nantucket rooftop; in 1885, she Mitchell noted that Whewell’s 1853 book The science.” The Vassar obser- was surrounded by students in a beautifully Plurality of Worlds “reasons to this end: “The vatory, designed appointed observatory. “Both days were per- planets were created for this world; this world by mathematician Charles Farrar, had an fectly cold and clear.” Retirement in 1888 did for man; man for England; England for Cam- 8.4-metre dome revolved by 16 cast-iron not suit Mitchell. She died within a year, with bridge; and Cambridge for Dr Whewell!” pulleys, along with transit and chronograph a telescope still at her window. But her encounter in Florence with British rooms; it was regarded as the best equipped This is a legacy to reckon with. Her mathematician and writer Mary Somerville in the United States, after Harvard’s. Mitchell archives are treasured at Vassar, and a was a true meeting of minds. Then 77, Somer- lived at the observatory for the next 23 years, museum and an association in her name ville “came tripping into the room, speaking and was supplied with a superb 30-centi- flourish in Nantucket.
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