Maria Mitchell

American astronomer

• Born: August 1, 1818
• Birthplace: Nantucket, Massachusetts
• Died: June 28, 1889
• Place of death: Lynn, Massachusetts

The first woman in the United States to become a professional astronomer, Mitchell discovered a comet in 1847 and became the most famous American female scientist of her time, as well as a leading voice for educating women in the sciences.

Early Life

Maria Mitchell was born into a Quaker seafaring community that encouraged women to become self-reliant and well educated. Her mother and grandmother were both teachers. Her father, William Mitchell, was also a teacher who had a part-time position with the U.S. Coast Survey, for which he observed stars to check the accuracy of the chronometers that were used to tell time and chart longitude on whaling ships. From the age of twelve, Maria counted seconds for her father. She attended the academy of Cyrus Peirce, served as her father’s teaching assistant at the age of sixteen, and opened her own school at the age of seventeen.

In 1836, Maria closed her school to accept the job of librarian for the Nantucket Athenaeum, which had just been founded. She taught herself mathematics, astronomy, German, and Latin by reading the books from the collection. These included textbooks by Charles Hutton and Nathaniel Bowditch and treatises by Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Pierre-Simon Laplace, and Karl Friedrich Gauss. At night, she and her father continued to study the sky, making observations with a circle and transit lent by West Point and a four-inch equatorial telescope from the Coast Survey. William Mitchell was by that time a clerk for Pacific Bank; his employers provided living quarters in which he built an observatory.

Life’s Work

During a dinner party on October 1, 1847, Maria Mitchell slipped away to use the family telescope and noticed a previously unknown comet at a position five degrees above the North Star. She and her father monitored the comet for several days, computed its orbit, and shared the discovery with William Bond, the director of the Harvard Observatory. Bond then communicated the Mitchells’ observations and calculations to the European scientific community. Their findings were published in England’s Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and King Frederick VII of Denmark awarded to Maria the gold medal that he had offered to the first person to discover a comet with a telescope. In 1848, Maria Mitchell was elected the first female honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention cited her achievement.

Mitchell’s discovery made her one of the most famous astronomers in the United States, and she was invited to join the Coast Survey in 1849. She computed the position of Venus for the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac and assisted with a survey of the Maine coast in 1852. Meanwhile, she was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1850, and she wrote scientific articles and began to travel outside Nantucket more frequently. She continued to work at the Athenaeum even as her fame grew but finally quit in 1856 to chaperon a wealthy girl on tours of the American South and Europe. After the girl returned home to the United States, Mitchell remained in Europe to meet other astronomers. During that trip, she became the first woman admitted to the Vatican Observatory; however, she was allowed to enter the observatory only during the daytime.

When Mitchell returned to the United States, a group that called itself “Women of America” presented her with a five-inch equatorial telescope, built by Alvan Clark, that permitted her to make more precise observations. She continued to work as a computer and field researcher for the Nautical Almanac. After her mother died, she moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, with her father and established a small observatory. By this time, she had become a nominal Unitarian in her religious beliefs, but she maintained Quaker values of simplicity and abolitionism. Because of her opposition to slavery, she boycotted southern cotton and always wore silk clothing.

As the U.S. Civil War came to an end in 1865, Mitchell accepted an invitation to become professor of astronomy and director of the observatory a new women’s college that was being founded by Matthew Vassar. The twelve-inch telescope at Vassar College was the third-largest in the United States. Mitchell never married, so her father again accompanied her to the college campus at Poughkeepsie, New York.

At Vassar, Mitchell became known as a demanding but respected instructor who treated her students as intellectual equals and involved them directly in scientific work. For example, she and her students recorded the passage of four thousand meteors during a meteor shower in 1868. Mitchell also wrote papers on double stars, the daily photography of sunspots, an 1878 solar eclipse, and the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn that originated in part from her teaching practices. She also successfully challenged the college on the level of her salary, which was half that of younger and less-accomplished male professors. In 1869, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

In 1873, when Mitchell visited Europe a second time, she met with proponents of higher education for women and was ready to campaign nationally for women’s rights. Afterward, she became a founder and the president (1875-1877) of the American Association for the Advancement of Women (AAW). She encouraged women to join AAW and to present scientific papers at its annual meetings. She believed both that women benefited from scientific education and that science needed women’s special skills in detailed observations and teaching. From 1876 to 1888, Mitchell chaired the AAW’s science committee, which prepared yearly reports on women in science. She also conducted open-ended surveys to determine where opportunities in science for women actually existed in 1876 and 1880. On June 28, 1889, she died in Lynn, Massachusetts, toward the end of her seventy-first year.

Significance

As an astronomer and educator, Maria Mitchell played a seminal role for women in the history of science. She repeatedly proved by example that women could contribute new knowledge and observations. She was the most famous American female scientist of the nineteenth century. She received honorary degrees from Indiana University (1853), Rutgers Female College (1870), and Columbia University (1887). Mitchell always sought to bring other women along with her. For example, her students included the academic and scientific leaders Mary Whitney, Christine Ladd-Franklin, and Ellen Swallow Richards. She promoted collaborative approaches to science in her teaching and involved her students in important research. She spoke out publicly for women and helped create a place for them in which to raise their voices through the AAW.

Despite the honors she accumulated, Mitchell always saw herself as a data collector rather than as some kind of genius. Although she hoped women would hold academic positions as professionals, she expected that most of her students would remain amateurs. She was careful never to challenge men directly in her speeches. Meanwhile, the importance of the AAW as an advocate for scientific education for women ran its course during the 1880’s, as other, specialized women’s organizations emerged. The AAW then shifted its emphasis to philanthropy and eventually became the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.

Mitchell’s significance was symbolic as well as concrete. She herself was well aware that because few women were in the scientific community, those who wished to succeed were expected to demonstrate exceptional abilities. Her willingness to talk about that double standard inspired later generations of women, who founded the Maria Mitchell Association in 1902 to preserve Mitchell’s Nantucket home. In 1908, an observatory was built at her home where student research is still carried out under the auspices of Harvard astronomers.

Bibliography

Albers, Henry, ed. Maria Mitchell: A Life in Journals and Letters. Clinton Corners, N.Y.: College Avenue Press, 2001. A well-documented account by an emeritus Vassar professor that is especially strong at conveying Mitchell’s daily routine and intellectual energy.

Kendall, Phebe Mitchell. Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1896. A mostly accurate account by Mitchell’s sister, who destroyed several of Mitchell’s papers.

Kidwell, Peggy. “Three Women of American Astronomy.” American Scientist 78 (1990): 244-251. Describes the scientific contributions of Mitchell, Annie Jump Cannon, and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin and discusses what each of these women said about the role of women in astronomy.

Kohlstedt, Sally. “Maria Mitchell and the Advancement of Women in Science.” In Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science, edited by Prina G. Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987. Emphasizes Mitchell’s teaching techniques and advocacy for women’s education. Concludes that Mitchell employed deliberate strategies for a changing but cautious world.

Oles, Carole. Night Watchers: Inventions on the Life of Maria Mitchell. Cambridge, Mass.: Alice James Books, 1985. Poems inspired by and drawn from Oles’s study of Mitchell’s manuscripts. Provides a literary perspective on Mitchell’s significance and personal idiosyncracies.

Wright, Helen. Sweeper in the Sky: The Life of Maria Mitchell. Reprint. Clinton Corners, N.Y.: Attic Studio Press, 1997. A popular biography by a Vassar alumna and astronomer that carefully reconstructs Mitchell’s childhood.