Stars and Satellites Mary Brück

Mary Brück Women in Early British and Irish Astronomy Stars and Satellites 123 Women in Early British and Irish Astronomy Mary Brück Women in Early British and Irish Astronomy Stars and Satellites Mary Brück ISBN 978-90-481-2472-5 e-ISBN 978-90-481-2473-2 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-2473-2 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2009931554 c Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) For my sisters (nees´ Conway) Eithne, Meadhbh and Aoife Foreword The role of women in the growth of science has become an important area of modern historical scholarly research. And as far as the study of the role of women in astronomy is concerned, Dr. Mary Brück is an established and illustrious pioneer, with an international reputation and acclaimed books and articles already to her credit. Her present book, Stars and Satellites, brings together many figures who worked over a 300-year time scale, and whose relationship with astronomy ranged from informed assistants to independent researchers to major writers and interpreters of contem- porary astronomy to, eventually, paid professionals. But what is more, Mary Brück is the undoubted pioneer in the study of Irish women scientists, several of whom appear in the present volume, for Ireland was one of the most astronomically-active regions of the British Isles in the nineteenth century. And as she is a professional astronomer herself, with a University College Dublin training, combined with a love of history and an Irishwoman’s genius for narrative and the gift of making people come to life, her latest book is both a mine of information and a joy to read. In the present-day world, where it is accepted that capable girls will have full access to secondary and then higher education, and will proceed to the professions with a first-rate training behind them, we tend to have a distorted view of earlier scientific women. It is true that most girls and women in the past were not expected to become involved in science and scholarship, and as the elderly Mary Somerville recorded in her Personal Recollections (as mentioned in Chapter 6), access to learn- ing in the days of her youth, around 1800, was not easy. But I would argue that the opportunity for women to make significant contributions to science in general, and to astronomy in particular, was perhaps greater in the British Isles (and perhaps the USA) than it would have been in continental Europe. And this derived from the social organisation of British science, especially after the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars which began in the 1790s. During and after these devastating wars, several European countries remod- elled their ancient universities, while the French Revolutionary Ecole´ Polytechnique (1794) and the new universities of Berlin (1809), Bonn (1818), and the re-founding of Munich brought fresh powerful research institutions into being. Indeed, many of the countries of post-Napoleonic continental Europe came to re-invent key parts of vii viii Foreword their national identities by means of high culture: music, literature, critical scholarship, scientific research, and higher education. These universities, conservatoires, instituts, academies´ , and similar bodies generally received state funds, usually from taxation, to be spent in the cause of advancing national cultural prestige. They were hierarchic institutions, often under the patronage of ministers of state and operated via officially-appointed career directors and professors who were there to draw up and supervise research plans. And yes, they paid intellectual dividends in terms of student numbers and discoveries, with major research schools in chemistry, physiol- ogy, pure mathematics, and other sciences by 1840. Their most successful graduates emerged with the new, prestigious Ph.D. degree, and then hoped in their turn to ascend their respective academic ladders to senior chairs and directorships. In many ways, the internal organisation of these academic institutions had been influenced by the lurch towards political absolutism, starting with Bonaparte and continuing with Europe’s Kings, Emperors, and Czars who, regaining their old authority after 1815, were determined to prevent popular libertarian ideas from breaking out again. Yet the education system that arose from Europe’s revolutionary and Napoleonic maelstrom was very much of a man’s world, to which women had no access. In Great Britain, however, things were very different. Emerging as the victor from the Napoleonic wars, it managed to channel its home-grown popular unrest peacefully through a stream of reform legislation, and there was no need for a powerful Parliament and a now largely constitutional monarchy to re-establish national identity through centralised institutions of high culture. Britain had an already firmly-rooted and vigorous intellectual and cultural life, but it was expressed through private, self-governing institutions. Seven ancient independent universities existed across England, Scotland, and Ireland before 1828, together with great national learned societies, such as The Royal Society (1660), The Society of Anti- quaries (1717), The Royal Academy (1768), The Royal Astronomical Society (1820), and The British Association for the Advancement of Science (1831). And then by 1830 there were scores of literary and philosophical societies across the kingdom, as well as a burgeoning number of mechanics’ institutions. Yet not a sin- gle penny of government money went to any of them, nor could any minister of state exert any control, for the universities and even those societies with royal titles were still constitutionally independent, paid their own way, and elected their own members without any official interference. Consequently, Britain’s cultural and scientific organisation worked on a self- electing rather than on a hierarchical basis, and while the above-mentioned institutions were undoubtedly male-dominated, the system itself contained an inherent flexibility. I have styled this system ‘Grand Amateur’, for the scientists and other cultured people operating within it were self-confessed ‘Amateurs’ in so far as they pursued their subjects for love and not for gain, and ‘Grand’ because they supplied from their own means the financial and technical resources with which to address great projects, be they the advancement of British art or the discovery of nebulae in deep space. And curiously enough, this was a world into which intelligent, original women astronomers could enter, and where they could make a serious contribution, for the Foreword ix holding of an M.A. or Ph.D. degree or of an academic post was not necessary. In the early days this entry would usually be effected by means of a husband, brother, or father, who was already active in astronomy. But then, because of the flexibility of the British social system, more women started to come through in their own right, such as the mathematician, astronomer, and writer Mary Somerville. Some of these women had particularly enlightened parents who gave them a first-class private education, for example the Irish ‘Scholarly Sisters’ Agnes and Mary Ellen Clerke, and Lady Margaret Huggins (née Lindsay), whom we will meet in Chap- ters 11 and 12. Others picked up their astronomy from working with male relatives, such as Caroline Herschel, Elizabeth Brown, and Caroline Lassell. By the 1880s, moreover, women were beginning to enter astronomy on the strength of a university training in science, such as Annie Maunder and Alice Everett, though their subsequent scientific careers were still very often in the private research tradition. But by the early twentieth century, as Mary Brück makes clear, both astronomy and astronomers were changing. The escalating cost and technological complexity of the ‘new astronomy’ were moving the science, especially in the USA, towards an academic professionalism, leading to the British-born Cecilia Payne-Goposhkin becoming the first woman Harvard Ph.D. astronomer and full Harvard professor in astronomy. With the exception of special membership granted to both Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville in 1835, the Royal Astronomical Society was to elect no woman to its Fellowship until a change was made to its statutes in 1916. Long before that, however – since the early 1880s, in fact – the new, large ‘metropolitan’ amateur astronomical societies of Liverpool, then Leeds, Manchester, Belfast, and Cardiff, had been electing women on equal terms to men, and even on to their governing councils, as also had the professional Royal Meteorological Society. Indeed, these high-level amateur societies were the first scientific bodies to give a voice to women who enjoyed serious astronomy but were not perhaps in the full ‘Grand Amateur’ league, but worked as teachers or were independent ladies of means. And it was Elizabeth Brown of Cirencester – who with her sister Jemima was co-heiress to a family vintner’s business – who was the driving force behind the founding of The British Astronomical Association in 1891. It is clear that Mary Brück’s chief interest lies in the incidents and circum- stances that form individual human lives. For she comes from a narrative tradition of historical scholarship, and is not concerned with issues in feminist theory. Her interest is individual people and, in this particular study, how a couple of dozen women, born across three centuries, all come to engage with astronomy on a serious, ground-breaking level.

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