Abstract
In 1869, Harvard’s new president, Charles W. Eliot, asserted that [t]he world knows next to nothing about the natural mental capacities of the female sex. Only after generations of civil freedom and social equality will it be possible to obtain the data necessary for an adequate discussion of women’s natural tendencies, tastes, and capabilities.
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It would take more than 50 years to get to the starting line of female suffrage, but Eliot was in no hurry. In the midst of his many reforms to the university, there was one thing he could not abide: the higher education of women. He only tolerated the establishment of Radcliffe College in 1894 because the Harvard President and Fellows would approve its faculty appointments; the Overseers were resolved that no woman should ever earn a Harvard degree. The goal of Radcliffe instruction, in Eliot’s mind, was to make the young women better helpmates to their husbands and families.
As readers of Dava Sobel’s book will learn, a more progressive stand was taken at the Harvard College Observatory, a few blocks up Garden Street from the Radcliffe and Harvard Yards. Edward C. Pickering, the director from 1877 to 1919, and his successors, Solon Bailey and Harlow Shapley, were beholden to many women in carrying out the observatory’s programme of photometric and spectroscopic research. If we follow the money, we can see how. Anna Palmer Draper funded the Henry Draper Memorial, which classified stars based on analyses of photographs of their spectra. Catherine Bruce paid for the most powerful photographic telescope in the world when it was completed in 1893. The Bruce telescope joined other instruments sent by the Harvard College Observatory to Arequipa, Peru, and then to Bloemfontein, South Africa in order to photograph the southern sky on glass plates. Plates of the northern hemisphere were taken in Massachusetts. As hundreds of thousands of photographic plates stacked up, Pickering needed a lot of labour to reduce the data in order to catalogue the stars in brightness and composition. He could not afford to hire more men. Women were cheaper, more patient, and detail-oriented. The first “computers” were daughters of Harvard faculty and astronomical observers. Qualified Radcliffe students landed unpaid internships. In 1895 and 1896, Henrietta Swan Leavitt and Annie Jump Cannon came from these ranks before being employed at an hourly wage of 25 cents. Between 1885 and 1927, the observatory employed some 80 women who studied glass plate photographs. Shapley boasted about the factory-style work. There was “a tremendous amount of measuring. I invented the term ‘girl-hour’ for the time spent by the assistants. Some jobs even took several kilo-girl hours. Luckily Harvard College was swarming with cheap assistants; that was how we got things done” (p. 189, rephrased following the original).
Sobel details the work of these assistants in The Glass Universe. Included are Williamina Fleming, who first found work as Pickering’s maid but soon specialized in variable stars and rose to become head of the computers; Leavitt, whose discovery of the period–luminosity relationship of Cepheid variables led to a new method for measuring the dimensions of the universe; Cannon, who created the Harvard Classification System for stars and personally catalogued more than a quarter million; and Cecilia Payne, whose doctoral research found the great abundance of hydrogen and helium in the stars. Sobel considers the daytime computers to be astronomers as much as the night-time male observers were. She credits Pickering and Shapley for giving them more credit than was doled out to women elsewhere at the university. Nonetheless, the observatory directors were products of their times and clear disparities persisted in social hierarchy and pay. Fleming was the first women to hold a Harvard Corporation appointment as Curator of Astronomical Photographs but complained in 1900: [Pickering] seems to think that no work is too much or too hard for me, no matter what the responsibility or how long the hours. But let me raise the question of salary and I am immediately told that I receive an excellent salary as women’s salaries stand. If he would only take some step to find out how much he is mistaken in regard to this he would learn a few facts that would open his eyes and set him thinking. Sometimes I feel tempted to give up and let him try some one else or some of the men to do my work, in order to have him find out what he is getting for $1500 a year from me, compared with $2500 from some of the other [male] assistants. Does he ever think that I have a home to keep and a family to take care of as well as the men? But I suppose a woman has no claim to such comforts. And this is considered an enlightened age! (p. 96)
Dava Sobel knows how to tell a good story, as readers of her first book, Longitude, know. The Glass Universe is a collective biography. Drawing on letters, diaries, observatory annals, and annotated photographic plates, Sobel sticks to the facts and does not invent romances or jealousies for which we have no evidence. Some readers will be disappointed that the book does not have a strong or dramatic storyline (as Longitude did), but it is a better piece of historical scholarship as a result.