Maria Mitchell

            Probably the most famous female American scientist of the nineteenth century , Maria Mitchell was a pioneer astronomer. She was so obviously gifted as a girl that her father encouraged her studies, but no colleges were yet open to women, and Mitchell did not leave her Nantucket home for Harvard, as she doubtlessly would have done had she been male. Instead, she taught briefly and then worked as a librarian for two decades, where she educated herself by reading widely.

            Meanwhile, she studied the skies. Though it was unconventional for a young woman to spend her nights on the roof of the local bank, this behavior was less eccentric on her island home, where everyone was concerned with everything relating to sailing, than it would have been elsewhere. Her father and other men continued to encourage her, and the observatory they built had ties to both the Harvard Observatory and the U.S. Coastal Survey, which gave her specific  tasks to accomplish and, after 1849, an annual salary of three hundred dollars. Much of the work she did involved computing distances, and Mitchell and others who did this work were known as “computers.”

            In 1847, when she was just twenty-nine, Maria Mitchell discovered a new comet. After overcoming a challenge from an Italian man based on who had seen it first, she received an international prize offered by the King of Denmark. Moreover, in the year of the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention, this young woman also became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences – a position she would hold for almost a century before a second woman was added.

            The accolades continued, as did her work. Louis Agassiz, famous naturalist and husband of Elizabeth Agassiz, nominated Mitchell for membership in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and she was also elected to the American Philosophical Society by her male colleagues in 1869. With an improved telescope given to her by women organized by the energetic Elizabeth Peabody, Mitchell continued her largely home-based life until the opening of Vassar College in 1865.

            Though initially reluctant to accept Vassar’s invitation because of her lack of formal schooling, she was lured by the prospect of new observatory equipment. The only woman in the initial faculty, Mitchell eventually used this innovative position to exert a tremendous influence on the evolution of higher education. She took her students seriously and refused to enforce the petty rules common to educational bureaucracies (especially those for young women). Several of her students became noted astronomers.

            Mitchell also continued her own research, thus setting another model for faculty. She led the way in photographing stars, predating the work of Williamina Fleming and Annie Jump Cannon, and she specialized in the surface features of Jupiter and Saturn. A founder of the Association for the Advancement of Women (AAW), she served as its president and, in 1873, was elected vice-president of the mixed-gender American Social Science Association. Becoming more openly feminist and antireligious as she aged, Mitchell also served as president of the Women’s Congress in Philadelphia during the Centennial Exhibition of 1876.

            Maria Mitchell enjoyed only a brief retirement before her death at seventy in Lynn, Massachusetts, the same town where Lydia Pinkham had died a few years earlier and where Mary Baker Eddy built Christian Science. All were women who were exceptionally interested in science, even though they came from radically different approaches and only Mitchell was acceptable to the mainstream.

                                                         In 1905, Maria Mitchell was one of the first three women chosen for the Hall of Fame. The comet she discovered is named for her, and her Nantucket home is open to visitors today.                                              

 

Reprinted with permission from: Doris Weatherford. American Women's History: An A to Z of People, Organizations, Issues, and Events, (Prentice Hall, 1994), 231-232.

 

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