Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science

The story of one of America''s first professional astronomers and the changes that led to science being a male-dominated fieldThere are a number of intellectual women from the 19th century whose crucial roles in the philosophical social and scientific debates that roiled the era have not been fully examined.Among them is the astronomer Maria Mitchell. Given the relative dearth of women scientists today most of us assume that science has always been a masculine domain. But as Rene Bergland reminds us science and humanities were not seen as separate spheres in the nineteenth century; indeed before the Civil War women flourished in science and mathematics disciplines that were considered less politically threatening and less profitable than the humanities. Mitchell apprenticed with her father an amateur astronomer; taught herself the higher math of the day; and for years regularly swept the clear Nantucket night sky with the telescope in her rooftop observatory.In 1847 thanks to these diligent sweeps Mitchell discovered a comet and was catapulted to international fame. Within a few years she was one of America''s first professional astronomers; as computer of Venusa sort of human calculatorfor the U.S. Navy''s Nautical Almanac she calculated the planet''s changing position. After an intellectual tour of Europe that included a winter in Rome with Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne Mitchell was invited to join the founding faculty at Vassar College where she spent her later years mentoring the next generation of women astronomers. Tragically opportunities for her students dried up over the next few decades as the increasingly male scientific establishment began to close ranks.Mitchell protested this cultural shift in vain. In this compulsively readable biography Rene Bergland chronicles the ideological academic and economic changes that led to the original sexing of sciencenow so familiar that most of us have never known it any other way.