Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer among the American Romantics
Given the relative dearth of women scientists today, most of us assume that science has always been a masculine domain. But as Renée Bergland reminds us, science and humanities were not always seen as separate spheres. Astronomer Maria Mitchell is among the intellectual women of the nineteenth century whose crucial role in the philosophical, social, and scientific debates that roiled the era has not been fully examined.
Mitchell was catapulted to international fame after the discovery of a comet, became one of America's first professional astronomers, and joined the founding faculty at Vassar College, where she mentored 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. “The woman who has peculiar gifts has a definite line marked out for her,” she wrote, “and the call from God to do his work in the field of scientific investigation may be as imperative as that which calls the missionary into the moral field or the mother into the family...The question whether women have the capacity for original investigation in science is simply idle until equal opportunity is given them.” In Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science, Bergland chronicles the ideological, academic, and economic changes that led to the original sexing of science--now so familiar that most of us have never known it any other way (Reference and Review).
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