Among the Stars: The Life of Maria Mitchell , Margaret MooreBooker , Mill Hill Press, Nantucket, MA, 2007. $59.95 (621 pp.). ISBN 978-0-9612984-8-7

Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics , RenéeBergland

Beacon Press, Boston, 2008. $29.95 (282 pp.). ISBN 978-0-8070-2142-2

Astronomer Maria Mitchell (1818–89) was arguably the most important American woman scientist of the 19th century. The child of Quaker parents, Mitchell grew up on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, which was then still a whaling powerhouse. As Margaret Moore Booker states in her book Among the Stars: The Life of Maria Mitchell, the combination of locale, religion, and culture meant that Mitchell grew up “in an environment of strong-willed, independent island women” (page 11). In contrast, in Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics, Renée Bergland views Mitchell’s story as a tragedy.

Mitchell’s life spans a dynamic period in the history of US science and, as such, has drawn considerable scholarly interest and been the subject of several popular works. The engaging and well-annotated biography by Booker, an amateur historian and award-winning writer, provides a valuable addition to the collection. Mitchell rose to prominence in an era when it was not uncommon for amateur scientists to make impressive accomplishments. Her father, William, who was also an active amateur astronomer, taught his daughter early on to observe with a telescope. William Mitchell’s part-time work with the US Office of Coast Survey brought him and, through his efforts, Maria into contact with many of the leading scientific minds of New England.

At 18, Mitchell was hired as the librarian of the Nantucket Atheneum, from whose respectable collection of books she taught herself higher mathematics. The broad range of public lectures held in the Atheneum’s meeting rooms made the library one of the intellectual and cultural focal points of the island, and those lectures brought Mitchell into contact with the web of artists, abolitionists, educators, philosophers, poets, preachers, and scientists who made up the mid-19th-century American intelligentsia. It wasn’t college, but for a motivated young woman, such intellectual discourse provided a decent education.

Her position as librarian left Mitchell with ample time to sweep the skies from her father’s rooftop observatory. In 1847 she observed the faint fuzzy image of a comet that was to change her life substantially. Mitchell recorded the time and the position of the fuzz; over several nights she was able to make enough measurements to calculate the comet’s orbit. Her father urged her to publish the findings. But Mitchell’s reticence—natural, cultural, religious—made her reluctant to do so. Regardless, her father wrote to William Bond, founder of the Harvard College Observatory, about his daughter’s discovery. The priority of Mitchell’s find was recognized early on, although it took a year of international wrangling before she received the gold-medal prize established by King Frederick VI of Denmark to reward the telescopic discovery of a comet. Stipulations for the prize required reporting the observation to the British Astronomer Royal. Edward Everett, the president of Harvard College back then, championed Mitchell’s cause in part to bring greater recognition to Harvard. Mitchell’s sighting was worthy of international prizes and attention; to quote Booker, it bought Mitchell “international fame as America’s first female astronomer” (page 73). Caroline Herschel, while observing in England, had been recognized in the late 1700s as the first to sight at least five comets, and she received a royal stipend for her astronomical work. In general, though, both telescopic discoveries and women astronomers were few and far between. As a young nation, the US was proud to claim Mitchell and her accomplishment as its own.

Mitchell’s renown, and her mathematical skills, enabled her to become one of the first professional astronomers in the country. She was hired in 1849 to compute positions of Venus for The Nautical Almanac ; in 1865, when newly founded Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, was establishing its faculty, Mitchell accepted a job offer that, as Booker puts it, was “a major turning point in her life” (page 272). For many years she and her father literally lived in the observatory; students were often present, whether to use the telescope or to join Mitchell for tea, where they might chance to visit with prominent women.

Mitchell’s final decades coincided with the increasing professionalization of science in the US, the rise of collegiate education for women, and the agitation for women’s suffrage. Blessed with good health for most of her life, Mitchell had time and energy for an eclectic range of activities, from helping to found the Association for the Advancement of Women to visiting observatories in Europe to writing poetry. As a college professor, she made a conscious decision to apply her considerable energies to the cause of women’s education. Mitchell deliberately chose research projects in which her students could participate; she taught them careful observing methods and current techniques in astronomical photography and published their work, along with her own, in a regular column in Scientific American. Many of Mitchell’s students went on to become professors at women’s colleges.

By the time Mitchell retired, however, opportunities for women in science were becoming more restricted than those for men. In Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science, Bergland, a professor of English and of gender and cultural studies at Simmons College in Boston, points out that the expanding opportunities for antebellum women that brought Mitchell acclaim and employment were followed in the 1870s by a backlash that was particularly acute in the sciences. Drawing on the work of, among others, Kim Tolley, author of The Science Education of American Girls: A Historical Perspective (RoutledgeFalmer, 2003), Bergland argues that girls of Mitchell’s generation were often more likely than boys to study science, whereas by the 1880s science was well on its way to being perceived as a masculine endeavor.

Such a thesis should provide an interesting framework for a study of Mitchell’s life, yet Bergland’s book is problematic. Her prose is repetitive; more troubling, many references are inaccurate and hard to follow, and explanations of the astronomy are too often misleading. For instance, Bergland asserts on page 176 that, “Under Maria Mitchell’s leadership, Vassar would enroll more students in higher mathematics and astronomy than Harvard did from 1865 to 1888.” As supporting evidence, the author refers to an 1865 letter by Mitchell in which she enthuses over her first class of students, speculating that it’s unlikely there are “17 students in Harvard College who take Mathematical Astronomy.” Although Bergland’s claim may be true, the 1865 letter provides no data about the numbers of Harvard astronomy or mathematics students in 1865, or in any other year.

In another example that may frustrate readers, on page 63 Bergland quotes from a 1997 article in which, on the occasion of the sesquicentenary of discovery, the authors calculate the modern position and magnitude (that is, brightness) of Mitchell’s comet. They muse that, although now an approximately 32nd-magnitude object, which is incredibly faint, the comet might in the future become detectable to telescopic observation should technology improve as “dramatically” over the next century as it has over the past century. Their statement hardly constitutes, as Bergland describes in her book, a report “to the American Astronomical Society that telescopes could still find the comet.”

In her book, Booker recalls Mitchell’s statement at the 1875 Women’s Congress in Syracuse, New York, that “science needs women” (page 384). Her words are ambivalent, for they are at once a call for more opportunities for women in the sciences and an excuse for the gendered division of labor. Mitchell, who by all accounts hated to sew, could, when convenient, argue that women’s skill with a needle showed that they should be readily employable for scientific tasks requiring patience, a careful eye, and a steady hand. Although she might have hoped that this argument would promote the hiring of women, she may not have anticipated that those women would be consigned to hunch over photographic plates to measure star positions or magnitudes or spectral types, while men designed the observing program and worked at the telescopes.

But Mitchell’s words are also relevant: The individual choices she made—how to balance fame and family obligations, teaching and research, social constraints and personal ambitions—have faded with the passage of time, just as her handwritten verses or her photographs of the Sun have. Yet those issues, more broadly considered, are as crisp and sharply focused as ever. Mitchell is definitely worthy of our attention, and Booker’s biography is a fine place to make her acquaintance.

Andrea Dobson is a professor in the astronomy department at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. In addition to examining gender issues in science, her interests are in solar—stellar connection studies.