Star struck
Nantucket astronomer Maria Mitchell, a pioneer in her field, still couldn't break through the overhead ceiling
Maria Mitchell and The Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics
By Renée Bergland
Beacon, 300 pp., $29.95
Most Bostonians remember the tempest in 2005 when Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University, suggested that the scarcity of women scientists might be due to their innate lack of aptitude for the subject. Reports, studies, and editorials poured forth lamenting this undercutting of women's progress. But as Renée Bergland argues in "Maria Mitchell and The Sexing of Science," when it comes to women in science, "progress" is the wrong word. As the remarkable life of Mitchell, America's first great astronomer, demonstrates, this is a story of deliberate and shocking decline.
Mitchell had the good fortune to be born in 1818 on the island of Nantucket. In this whaling community where men went to sea for years at a time, competent, intelligent women were prized, as were good astronomers. Science in those years was still the province of enthusiastic amateurs. Botany, geology, and astronomy were popular hobbies where significant discoveries could be made by anyone with a keen eye and diligent records. Unlike politics, medicine, or law, science - with its emphasis on patient observation and attention to detail - was considered especially suited to women's talents.
Even on worldly Nantucket, the Mitchell family stood out. Maria's mother was renowned as the only person to have read every book on the island. Her father was an intellectual jack-of-all-trades, serving as schoolteacher, banker, and astronomer, a critical job as mariners depended upon the stars for navigation. He trained Maria to help him run the small observatory he set up atop the Pacific Bank on Main Street. From the first, she demonstrated remarkable discipline, an aptitude for advanced math, and a passion for the stars. At age 12, she helped her father calculate the exact timing of a total eclipse. At 18, she became the first librarian of the Nantucket Athenaeum. By day she read voraciously, and at night she swept the skies.
Then one chilly October night in 1847, Mitchell discovered a new comet. When the king of Denmark awarded her a gold medal of achievement, she was catapulted into world fame and the highest ranks of American science. She became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences the following year, and in 1850 to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Dubbed a heroine by the popular press, Mitchell became one of Nantucket's main tourist attractions, with visitors pouring into the Athenaeum to see her. Inspired women across the country donated money to purchase a first-rate telescope for the small observatory that Mitchell built on the island. In 1865, Mitchell became the first - and most famous - member of the faculty of the newly established Vassar College for women, where she also designed and directed the school's observatory.
Here Mitchell's story takes a tragic turn. The upheaval of the Civil War brought an abrupt end to five decades of rapidly expanding opportunities for women. In the 10 years after Mitchell arrived at Vassar, women began to be systematically and ruthlessly excluded from the sciences. "This was a sudden and dramatic shift," writes Bergland, a professor at Simmons College. "There is no parallel story in the arts of an institutional shift in gender association, nor of men suddenly being barred from the humanities."
Part of this shift was market-driven. With the technological boom of the war, scientific knowledge gained economic value, driving it from amateur to professional status. Science was now the work of government institutions, university laboratories, and large corporations. As Bergland notes, "Women were always encouraged to study the least useful subjects, those that were farthest from preparation for professional careers. What changed was the prevailing social opinion on what was useful and how a professional was defined."
Equally important were the changes within scientific thought. Controversial thinkers like Charles Darwin changed science from "a strategy for describing and cataloging nature to a highly theorized method of inquiry." Instead of making life more orderly, their theoretical speculations often upended conventional, Christian notions of the world. "Science was no longer the place to learn docile obedience and respect for hierarchy," Bergland observes. Clearly, it was no place for women.
For Mitchell, this turn was especially painful. Although she was, by far, Vassar's most prominent professor, her salary was less than half that given to the male faculty, who also were assigned comfortable houses, while she was given a cot in the corner of her observatory. Under protest, the college finally gave her a raise and renovated a closet into a bedroom.
"Although Mitchell is often named as one of the first American woman scientists, later in her life she feared that she might be the last," Bergland observes. Mitchell redoubled her commitment to women's intellectual advancement. In 1873, the same year that Edward Clarke of Harvard Medical School was arguing "that science itself could prove that women were physiologically unable to study it," she cofounded the American Association for the Advancement of Women. Despite her efforts, when Mitchell died in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1888, it seemed her worst fear had come to pass. She remained the only female member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences until 1943.
There is a lot to like about this book. Mitchell is a charming subject, and the story is fascinating and important. Yet, I admit to some disappointment. This could have been the sort of classic biography that breathes new life into a long-lost figure while transforming our understanding of our own history. And it would have been, had her editor reshaped Bergland's repetitious prose. But if it's not a masterpiece, Maria Mitchell is still fun for anyone with a love of history, Nantucket, or the night sky.
Debby Applegate is author of "The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher," which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for biography. 