by David Baron
The occasion was the Woman’s Congress, an annual symposium that explored social issues from a female perspective. It attracted a large crowd, almost entirely women, consisting of artists and doctors, suffragists and teachers, journalists and poets—including Julia Ward Howe, famous for her “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” And presiding over it all, up on the platform adorned with flags and flowers, was an astronomer in a dress of black silk. She stepped to a desk, called for a moment of silent prayer, and opened the proceedings with a speech.
“When we inquire in regard to the opportunities afforded to women for the study of science, we are not surprised to find them meager and unsatisfactory,” Maria Mitchell began. “Taking our whole country into consideration, there is very little attention paid to science. The same influences which deter men in scientific research operate only more forcibly upon women,” she said. And then she made what many in American society would consider a bold, even distasteful, proposal. “I should like to urge upon young women a course of solid scientific study in some one direction for two reasons. First: the needs of science. Second: their own needs.”
AT A TIME WHEN almost all professional scientists were male, and defiantly so, Mitchell (whose first name was pronounced muh-rye-uh) served as America’s most notable exception. She had gained renown in 1847 when, while working as a librarian by day and studying the heavens by night, she discovered a comet—a feat that earned her a gold medal from the king of Denmark and, perhaps more remarkably, a paying job with a branch of the U.S. Navy.
In that era, safe navigation of the world’s oceans—and therefore the very efficiency of global trade—depended on a keen understanding of the celestial spheres. “Astronomy enters into the price of every pound of sugar, every cup of coffee, every spoonful of tea,” the U.S. Naval Observatory asserted. Mariners tracked latitude and longitude by carefully measuring the positions of the sun, moon, stars, and planets and comparing those readings to an astronomical table, called an ephemeris, which served like a railroad schedule of the skies, specifying the daily movements of the heavenly bodies months in advance. Even small inaccuracies in these tables could send ships dangerously astray, so the Navy employed expert astronomers and mathematicians to plot precise orbits well into the future. Such calculations had to be done by hand, by workmen called computers, who penned rows and columns of tiny numerals in oversized ledgers, a job that demanded rare skill, concentration, and stamina.
Lieutenant Charles Henry Davis, superintendent of the Navy’s Nautical Almanac Office, which published the American ephemeris, had hired Maria Mitchell to do the computations for Venus—an appropriate assignment, he gallantly argued, since the planet was named for the Roman goddess of beauty. (“As it is ‘Venus who brings everything that’s fair,’ ” he wrote to Mitchell in language that typified the time, “I therefore assign you the ephemeris of Venus—you being my only fair assistant.”) Mitchell did this work for nineteen years, even after she took a second job, as the first professor of astronomy at a new, all-women’s college founded by Matthew Vassar in Poughkeepsie, New York.
By the time of the Woman’s Congress in Philadelphia, Mitchell had been teaching at Vassar for a decade and was approaching sixty, but while her curls had grayed, the lessons of childhood still ran fresh in her veins. A daughter of Quakers, she had grown up on Nantucket in a community that embraced women’s education. She also claimed a hereditary love of science, as she was a distant cousin of Benjamin Franklin. “The lightning that he caught on the point of his kite seems to have affected the whole race,” she wrote. Her father, an amateur astronomer, encouraged Maria’s independent study from the family’s rooftop observatory, and he enlisted her at age twelve to help him observe a solar eclipse that passed over their island home. (That event, which occurred on February 12, 1831, was an annular eclipse, in which the moon passes directly in front of the sun but is too far from the earth in its orbit—and therefore appears too small in the sky—to cover the solar surface entirely. At the peak of such an eclipse, the land does not go dark but the sun is left a luminous ring, or annulus, in the sky.)
As Mitchell matured and ventured beyond Nantucket, she came to understand—and increasingly resent—the second-class status to which women were relegated in the sciences. In her late thirties, Mitchell toured Europe for almost a year, as was a custom of the educated and affluent. When not sightseeing with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s family and teaching his children the constellations (Hawthorne’s young son, Julian, learned to identify the bright stars in what he called “O’Brian’s Belt”), she visited the great Old World observatories, where she quickly found that the men in charge did not always treat a “lady” astronomer as a peer. In France, the head of the Paris Observatory invited her to tea and gave her a cursory tour, yet he declined to show her the domes. “[I]t was evident he did not expect me to understand an observatory,” Mitchell vented. In Rome, although she received admittance, after special pleading, to the Jesuit observatory atop the Church of St. Ignatius—which was generally off limits to women—the astronomer-priest in charge denied her request to remain for nighttime viewing. “[T]he Father kindly informed me that my permission did not extend beyond the daylight.”
VASSAR COLLEGE.
Later, back in America, Mitchell faced unequal treatment at Vassar. Despite teaching at a women’s college, she received less than half the salary paid to the school’s male professors—an injustice she fought, with some success—and while astronomers at other universities (for instance, James Craig Watson at Michigan) were offered generous faculty housing, Mitchell occupied the sparest of accommodations. For her first decade at Vassar, she slept on a sofa in the corner of a box-like space that alternately served as parlor and lecture room. When the college finally provided her with a separate apartment for sleeping—it had previously been the observatory’s coal storeroom—one of her students marked the occasion in tongue-in-cheek verse:
Beautiful Venus, pride of the morning,
Tell it to all little stars who have fled
That, in a sweet chamber that needs no adorning,
Miss Mitchell sleeps in a bed.
Despite her clashes with the college administration, Mitchell loved her “girls,” as she called her students, and in turn they adored her. It was for them that she took up arms in the fight for women’s higher education, a campaign she waged even as a storm of opposition billowed.
IN 1873, A YEAR WHEN the nation was grappling with financial panic, a prominent Boston physician introduced a new cause for public alarm. In an incendiary book called Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for the Girls, Dr. Edward H. Clarke warned that the push for female colleges and coeducation could seriously undermine the health of American women. He contended that by taxing the brain, higher education caused a girl’s body—especially her reproductive organs—to atrophy. “When arrested development of the reproductive system is nearly or quite complete, it produces a change in [a woman’s] character,” he wrote, and this included “a dropping out of maternal instincts, and an appearance of Amazonian coarseness and force. Such persons are analogous to the sexless class of termites.” Clarke recounted case studies of previously healthy girls who, after studying at Vassar and other schools, became pale, sterile invalids. In one instance he diagnosed “death from over-work,” and a new term, “Vassar victims,” entered the late nineteenth-century lexicon.
Thrown on the defensive, proponents of women’s education published a barrage of rebuttals, offering evidence of the health of college girls and stressing the benefits of higher learning. “If we know the number of young girls who have died from over study, let us find the number who have died from aimless lives, and the number who have lived on and ceased to be young,” said the redoubtable Maria Mitchell. Clarke’s critics called out his book for what it was: a thin, hysterical polemic, based on conjecture and scanty evidence.
No matter. Sex in Education found a receptive audience in an America unsettled by shifting gender roles. The Civil War,
having tragically killed well over half a million men, left many women unmarried, forcing them to enter the workforce. Meanwhile, the successful effort to abolish slavery had inspired women to seek their own full citizenship, including the right to vote, which was no longer denied—at least in theory—to freed black men. American society was changing so irrevocably that it seemed women were in danger of no longer being women, and men would soon be emasculated and cease to be men. Clarke’s book foretold this horrid future.
Gatherings such as the Woman’s Congress stoked these public fears. During the three-day proceedings in Philadelphia, one ardent speaker would boldly assert the “full and positive equality, physical and mental,” between men and women. Another would rebuke the mores of extramarital sex that “crush and dishonor the offending woman” yet “mildly admonish the offending man.” A third would call for the reform of women’s dress and its “tatterdom of flimsy, frayable, soilable outrigging that makes us unfit for efficient work or comfortable play.” The general public’s response to such remarks was often hostile. Newspapers lampooned feminists as jilted man-haters, a caricature that The Chicago Times had applied to the Woman’s Congress in 1875. “Here were assembled all those blighted hearts whom vile men refuse to take as partners of their joy and sorrow. All who have, for cause or without, quit the bed and board of abandoned tyrants unfit for association with the gentler sex.” Another newspaper ridiculed the gathering in Victorian idiom as a “petticoat parliament.”
It was against this backdrop that Maria Mitchell—herself an unmarried professional—presided at the Woman’s Congress in 1876. But Mitchell was no strident agitator. Shy by nature, she took to public speaking reluctantly, and as she declaimed from the podium and encouraged young women to follow her into a life of science, she carefully staked out a middle ground, assuaging the public fear and prejudice that served as obstacles. She chose not to argue that men and women were the same. In fact, she took the contrary position.
“Women are needed in scientific work for the very reason that a woman’s method is different from that of a man,” Mitchell said. “All her nice perceptions of minute details, all her delicate observation of color, of form, of shape, of change, and her capability of patient routine, would be of immense value in the collection of scientific facts. When I see a woman put an exquisitely fine needle at exactly the same distance from the last stitch at which that last stitch was from its predecessor, I think what a capacity she has for astronomical observations. Unknowingly, she is using a micrometer [to measure the angles between stars]; unconsciously, she is graduating circles. And the eye which has been trained in the matching of worsteds is specially fitted for the use of prism and spectroscope.”
Having come of age in a brash, misogynistic world, Mitchell must have understood the futility of challenging men too directly. She was arguing merely for equality of opportunity. “Does anyone suppose that any woman in all the ages has had a fair chance to show what she could do in science?” she asked with a ring of protest in her voice.
Within the confines of St. George’s Hall, Mitchell was speaking to an audience of believers. It was America at large that needed to hear her message, to be convinced that science and higher learning were not anathema to femininity, and that women deserved a fair chance.
Although the hall suffered from poor acoustics and the audience had difficulty hearing the speech, Mitchell’s words resonated well beyond Philadelphia. A few weeks later, a prominent newspaper far to the west printed the lecture under the title: “The Need of Women in Science.” The publication was the Rocky Mountain News, in the Centennial State of Colorado, out on America’s frontier, where the nation was in so many ways reinventing itself.
PART TWO
1878
CHAPTER 5
POLITICS AND MOONSHINE
WINTER 1878—
Washington, D.C.
THAT A TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE WOULD CROSS THE WESTERN regions of North America on July 29, 1878, was inevitable, the natural result of heavenly cycles set in motion eons ago. Eclipses do not occur randomly; they follow patterns known since ancient times. Lunar eclipses can happen only at full moon, solar eclipses at new moon, and both types can take place only within defined “eclipse seasons” that recur every six months or so, shifting slowly backward year by year. A rhythm reigns in the long run as well. Eclipses of a similar character—lunar versus solar, partial versus total—repeat themselves after the passage of precisely 6,585 and one-third days. (This protracted cycle, lasting a shade more than eighteen years, is called the saros.) The Babylonians, Greeks, Mayans, and Chinese, among other early civilizations, identified these patterns and used them to predict eclipses, a critical task for a court astronomer for whom the unexpected dimming of the sun or moon might mean the expected loss of his head.
Knowing when an eclipse might occur, however, did not imply the ability to forecast where it could be seen. A lunar eclipse presents little difficulty in this regard—it will always be visible from at least half the earth’s surface—and a partial solar eclipse might be seen from a fifth of the planet, but a total solar eclipse is a rare bird indeed. It is visible only within a narrow corridor, called the path of totality, which is often little more than a hundred miles wide. Stand within the zone and you will see the moon entirely cover the surface of the sun, converting day to transitory night. Stand outside the zone and you will see a partial solar eclipse—an interesting event, but a fundamentally different experience.
It was not until the eighteenth century that astronomers were able to forecast the path of a total solar eclipse with a modicum of accuracy. The best known of these early eclipse mappers was Edmond Halley, the Englishman who famously predicted the return of a comet that now bears his name. Halley calculated the path of a total eclipse that was about to pass over the British Isles, and he published his map on a broadside titled A Description of the Passage of the Shadow of the Moon, over England, in the Total Eclipse of the Sun, on the 22 Day of April 1715 in the Morning. (A rival publisher, apparently more adept at marketing, issued a pamphlet with a catchier title: The Black-Day, or, A Prospect of Doomsday. Exemplified in the Great and Terrible Eclipse. . . .) Challenging the rampant superstition of the era, Halley approached the eclipse with scientific intent. He aimed to learn how his prediction compared with reality, so he asked members of the public to report if they experienced darkness at their location and, if so, its duration—“for therby the Situation and dimensions of the Shadow will be nicely determind; and by means therof, we may be enabled to Predict the like Appearances for ye future, to a greater degree of certainty than can be pretended to at present, for want of such Observations.” The actual path of the moon’s shadow turned out to be slightly off from Halley’s prediction—it was wider, angled less northward, and shifted a bit to the southeast—but his map was broadly correct. As predicted, a darkened London fell within the zone.
By the 1800s, eclipse prediction had continued to improve. Astronomers could plot the path of the moon’s shadow decades, even centuries, in advance—hence the report in Nature, in 1876, alerting the public that an eclipse would visit the western United States on July 29, 1878. Astronomers could calculate an even more exact path as the event drew closer by updating their equations with the latest observations of the position of the moon, whose orbit tended, in the long run, to veer slightly from scientists’ expectations. Although to the casual observer the moon’s journey around the earth appears as uniform as the movement of a precision timepiece, it is, when examined closely, the walk of a drunkard. The moon weaves and wobbles, jumps ahead and lags behind. Isaac Newton found the moon’s motion so puzzling that, as he told his friend Halley, it gave him a headache.
IF ANYONE COULD BE deemed responsible for the total solar eclipse of 1878—tasked with charting its course, calculating its duration, alerting the public—it was Simon Newcomb, the astronomer who had lamented the tenuous state of American science at the time of the nation’s centennial. Newcomb had been born in
1835 (a year that, portentously, saw the return of Halley’s Comet) not in the United States but in Canada, yet this bookish child from rural Nova Scotia grew up to become an eminent American, one of the most influential scientists of his era. Newcomb was an astronomer, mathematician, physicist, economist, philosopher, professor, government administrator, and popularizer of science all in one, a polymath who exuded power, authority, and a fierce intelligence. A student recalled Newcomb as “a big, lusty, joyous man.” A friend remembered Newcomb’s “piercing eyes, a look full of strength—steady, direct, penetrating.” To his sister, Newcomb seemed a force of nature, a man who worked constantly—“like a glacier, slowly, steadily, irresistibly.”
PROFESSOR SIMON NEWCOMB
Newcomb’s primary occupation was as a mathematical astronomer, one who calculated the orbits of the heavenly bodies rather than observed them. Like Isaac Newton, he was obsessed with the motion of the moon, and like Maria Mitchell, he had landed his first paying job in astronomy at the Navy’s Nautical Almanac Office, which published the American ephemeris. Whereas Mitchell worked remotely—computing the orbit of Venus from her home in Nantucket and, later, from Vassar—Newcomb worked in the office, then located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was less a place of employment than a boys’ club. The mathematically inclined young men often set aside their duties to play chess and debate the finer points of religion and philosophy. It seems they also belittled women’s intellectual abilities. After Newcomb read a newspaper item about Maria Mitchell—his older and, at the time, more famous colleague—he wrote disparagingly to a friend, “Miss M. is only a female astronomer after all.”