AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of May 1, 2009
eds. Joan Schmelz, Caroline Simpson & Michele Montgomery
This week's issues:
1. History of Women in Astronomy - Part 2
2. Note on Beta Lyrae
3. Women in Early British and Irish Astronomy
4. Mothers in Science: 64 Ways to Have it All
5. How to Submit, Subscribe, or Unsubscribe to AASWOMEN
6. Access to Past Issues of AASWOMEN
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1. History of Women in Astronomy - Part 2
From: Joan Schmelz [jschmelz
memphis.edu]
[Several weeks ago, we featured several famous 'computers' from Harvard
College Observatory. As these women began to retire, the next generation
followed a new trail blazed by Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin - four of the
earliest PhDs in Astronomy from Harvard-Radcliffe went to women! Their
lives and careers took very different paths. Here are some highlights
-- Eds.]
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900 - 1979) was born in England and studied at
Cambridge University. Since Cambridge did not grant degrees to women at that
time, she left in 1923 to work for Harlow Shapley, the director of the
Harvard College Observatory. Shapley put the Harvard plate collection at her
disposal. In 1925, she became the first person to earn a PhD in astronomy
for her thesis: "Stellar Atmospheres, A Contribution to the Observational
Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars". By applying the
Saha equation, she was able to relate the spectral classes of stars to
their temperatures. She showed that the variation in stellar absorption
lines was due to differing amounts of ionization, not to different elemental
abundances, and that stars were made primarily of hydrogen. Astronomer
Otto Struve characterized it as "undoubtedly the most brilliant PhD
thesis ever written in astronomy."
For more, see, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilia_Payne-Gaposchkin
Emma Williams Vyssotsky (1894 -1975) was born in Philadelphia and received
her PhD in 1930. She spent her career at the McCormick Observatory of the
University of Virginia, where her specialty was motions of stars and
kinematics of the galaxy. She married the Russian-born astronomer
Alexander Vyssotsky in 1929 and had one son, Victor. She won the Annie
J. Cannon Award in Astronomy in 1946. The asteroid 1600 Vyssotsky was named
in her honor; it was discovered by Carl Wirtanen, who received his MS while
working at McCormick Observatory.
For more, see, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Vyssotsky
Carol Anger Rieke (1908 - 1999) earned her PhD in 1933. She established
the relationship between absorption line width and luminosity for A and B
stars in M7 and the Pleiades. She compared the absolute and apparent
magnitudes of these stars in 54 clusters to measure their distances. Her
work inspired a newspaper article with the headline "Girl Measures Light
from Stars," but the real news, according to the article, was that a girl
had done the work. She married in 1932 and followed her husband from city
to city, eventually settling in Chicago where she raised her family and
worked teaching mathematics and astronomy at a local community college.
For more, see, e.g., http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2000BAAS...32.1685R
Ellen Dorrit Hoffleit (1907 - 2007) was born in Alabama and earned her PhD
in 1938. She was hired as an astronomer at Harvard in 1948 and moved to
Yale in 1956. She was the author of the Bright Star Catalogue, a compendium
of information on the brightest stars in the sky. She co-authored The
General Catalogue of Trigonometric Stellar Parallaxes, which contains
information critical to understanding the kinematics of the Milky Way and
the evolution of the solar neighborhood. With Harlan Smith, Hoffleit
discovered the optical variability of the first-discovered quasar 3C 273.
She was a director of the Maria Mitchell Observatory on Nantucket Island.
In 1988, Hoffleit was awarded the Biesbroeck Prize by the AAS for a
lifetime of service to astronomy. She lived long enough to celebrate
her 100th birthday.
For more, see, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorrit_Hoffleit
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2. Note on Beta Lyrae
From: Linda M. French [lfrenchiwu.edu]
I greatly enjoyed the brief biographies of pioneering women in astronomy in
a recent email. Without quibbling, I'd like to point out one slight
misstatement in the biography of Williamina Fleming. I am not an expert on
Fleming, but the statement that she "...discovered...the first spectroscopic
binary, Beta Lyrae" is not correct. The star, of course, was known far
earlier, and its variability was established by John Goodricke of York,
England, the discoverer of the periodicity of Algol and Delta Cephei.
He reports on the star and gives a good estimate of its period in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 75,
(1785), pp. 153-164. Goodricke's accomplishments are even more
impressive when one remembers that he was totally deaf and lived less
than 22 years. I suspect the intent was to say that Fleming established
the binary nature of Beta Lyrae through interpretation of spectroscopic
data, a fine accomplishment in itself.
[Note: this was indeed the intent. The most challenging part of writing
these biographies was to keep them short. There is so much to say about
these amazing women! With this goal in mind, however, I was less precise
in my wording than I might have been. The emphasis was intended to be on
the _spectroscopic_ nature of the discovery -- Ed.]
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3. Women in Early British and Irish Astronomy
From: Geoff Clayton [gclaytonfenway.phys.lsu.edu]
Women in Early British and Irish Astronomy: Stars and Satellites
By Mary Bruck
Jointly published with the Royal Astronomical Society
Careers in astronomy for women (as in other sciences) were a rarity in
Britain and Ireland until well into the twentieth century. The book
investigates the place of women in astronomy before that era, recounted in
the form of biographies of about 25 women born between 1650 and 1900 who in
varying capacities contributed to its progress during the eighteenth,
nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. There are some famous names among
them whose biographies have been written before now, there are others who
have received less than their due recognition while many more occupied
inconspicuous and sometimes thankless places as assistants to male family
members. All deserve to be remembered as interesting individuals in an
earlier opportunity-poor age. Placed in roughly chronological order,
their lives constitute a sample thread in the story of female entry into
the male world of science.
http://www.springer.com/astronomy/book/978-90-481-2472-5?token=3DdC6qWE2aEbM55Ab
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4. Mothers in Science: 64 Ways to Have it All
From: HannahWomen in Astronomy Blog, April 26, 2009
Here is a review by AstronomumAstronomoms of
Mothers in Science: 64 Ways to Have it All (available as a pdf download):
http://royalsociety.org/page.asp?id=1196
I recently had my attention drawn to Mothers in Science: 64 Ways to Have it
All, which is a Royal Society publication made up of one page
career/family timelines and profiles of 64 different mothers in science.
The idea behind the book I think is a great one - that we spend a lot of
time with depressing statistics about women in science, and often "blame" the
disproportionate burden of childcare women often face for the lack of
women at the higher levels of science. This has given young women the idea
that if they want children they cannot have a science career, or that they
must have children at only very specific times to succeed (I cannot count
the number of times I have heard that having babies as a postdoc is a death
sentence for your career). This book then presents a random selection of
women with children who work in science as a move towards "dispelling these
myths" and being more encouraging (it's all written a lot more fluently
in the introduction to the book) . . .
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