Maria Mitchell at 200: a pioneering astronomer who fought for women in science

Abstract

She was the first woman in the United States to become a professional astronomer, and a dauntless champion of science education for women. Maria Mitchell, whose bicentenary is celebrated this August, was a scientific revolutionary. That is encapsulated 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 Philadelphia, 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 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: “better to be peering in the spectrograph than on the pattern of a dress”. Mitchell’s agile mind, pedagogic fire and salty opinions bring extraordinary animation 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 public figure by the end of her life. She “stands out clear and conspicuous”, noted her Scientific 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 Nantucket, off the Massachusetts coast. It was a place of horizon-gazers, seafarers and lighthouse keepers, where men were often away and Quakerism honoured gender equality. From early childhood she was encouraged to pursue science by her beloved father, a director of the local bank and an amateur astronomer with contacts at Harvard University’s observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Together they scanned the skies using a Dollond telescope from the rooftop ‘walk’ of their house. Early on, Mitchell revealed extraordinary observational powers, natural mathematical gifts and unusual sensitivity to stellar movements and colours. At 17, she opened her own school; a year later, she was appointed supervisor of the local library, the Nantucket Atheneum. Her constant companion was a notebook, carried in a capacious pocket. Her speech was direct, her ideas increasingly radical. “We cannot accept anything as granted,” she wrote in her journal, “beyond the first mathematical formulae. Question everything else.”   Maria Mitchell argued for women’s education.Credit: Bettman/Getty