“Pickering’s Girls”

Both the Royal Observatory in England (a museum since 1998) and the Harvard College Observatory (now the sprawling, part private, part government institute called the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) each began programs for “women computers” in the late 1800s. At the Harvard observatory, the first lady assistant was brought on in 1875. At Greenwich, these women did more than replace the largely young male “computers” who performed the routine computations for the daily observations and measurements (and who suffered similar career dead-ends like their female counterparts, and in some cases worse). Some in England became full partners with the hired male staff. Few chose to do so however, and the British program died out. The same was true for the woman computers at the Harvard College Observatory. But any sense of a shared social status was missing. Some archives and the inevitable anecdotes suggest that it was very much a “child – to – father” relationship between the women computers and the regular male staff, and particularly, with the director.

Pickering was under the eugenicist pall that painted women as being fit well for routine and mundane labor, but not the flashing brilliant stuff, which is why he presumably began the program (others argue tightfistedness, some, like me, a bit of idealism). Men were supposedly better in the “quicksilver brilliance” department (still a bugbear of bias, today). An implied mental inferiority, common amidst American eugenics thinking then within top universities like Princeton, was also widespread and pervasive in most middle class society and amongst the wealthy. Mental inferiority was the reason for much denying of social, employment, and legal status in 19th and early 20th Century America for many ethnic and racial groups, and for all women. (Such thinking as this was in full bloom in mid-20th Century Germany, with predictable results, until this growth was permanently, and painfully, plucked.)

For all this, the pay was often the deciding factor as to why many women chose not to begin careers in the institutions (25 cents an hour in the U.S. case, poor pay even then). Being a constantly inferior “girl” (in the American case perhaps) could have been another. Some lost their jobs for relatively minor infractions within an unavoidably infantile hierarchy. If all this sounds terribly cruel by today’s standards, then please, examine briefly some facts that place it into perspective. Japan still had “sun kings” and millions who believed in this, women being totally ornamental, alternately property. In most European courts, women were just about the same thing. In the U.S.A’s far west, women were at the level of Indian fighter/squaw/pioneer, tending rifle and child. The machine age had not quite kicked in: women could expect to trundle laundry by hand and pump water from the backyard and empty it, used, from sinks and tubs by hand. Such daily observed facts reinforced the idea that women were good drudges and poor pioneering thinkers. It is small wonder the view the privileged had (who had all this done for them) downward, was oft times a bleak and deprecating one.

A desperate love for the work as well as talent for it could be a reason why some persisted. Mr. Pickering had, after all, created an opportunity for a few of the fortunate, no matter how small. Some of the American women, talented in math and science as witnessed by the instructors at the women colleges, were hired as volunteers at first, eventually obtained full time jobs at the institution and stayed there for many years. Bad pay notwithstanding (but for these women, “protected flowers” all in a financial sense, money was barely the issue). Along with dedication came the flairs of temperament and ego, but this is always the case, everywhere, among anybody construing their work as “important.” That Pickering often sided with them in the face of male colleagues regarding conflict hardly surprises us, either. In Leavitt’s case, she was a volunteer for several years before gaining a paid position in 1902.

Some were recognized for the work they did towards making possible the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (one of these reputedly was Antonia Maury, who was laid off, and later, Leavitt) and the nascent star classification scheme - much changed since - by mid century (such as Annie Jump Cannon, who was to thrive). Others had to be content with realizing their work, such as cataloguing or observing – or in Leavitt’s case, even their refined discoveries among the astrophysical laws - via the name of the observatory director, HCO or random newspaper clippings, even though some balked against this to their detriment (Maury). But when egos were in line and tempers calm, we can imagine what great pride these women took in their work and in themselves, accepting with a grain of salt what we today would justifiably damn as discrimination. We can well imagine the price they paid. Yet lest some of us think of what savages the men at HCO were (or were in general at that time) it would be simplistic and far more savage to insert vastly altered views and mores unto their thinking and actions from our current perspective.

In any case, a truly powerful woman for that age (for money always tips the hand) - Draper’s widow - made Pickering a patron (I suspect Pickering liked being babied by grateful women). The Draper Memorial had as one aim the making of a chart of 10,000 stars’ spectral classes. Included were magnitude measurements and the classification of variable stars, noted by Solon I. Bailey, the Harvard’s Arequipa Boydon Observatory chief, in abundance in globular clusters in 1895, and which was to form the basis of Leavitt’s discovery inside of open clusters. Photographic photometry (light measurement for determining stars’ distance) increased as advances in chemistry and optics prodded technical photography onward into the new century, and “Pickering’s girls” (or “lady assistants”, or “computers,” or – as one French writer uncharitably put it, the “harem de Pickering”) did the patient work from the photographic plates Donald Menzel, a subsequent director, wanted to throw out years later. The plates would be shipped from Peru on a regular basis and then the woman observers would “observe” off the finished photographic plates made of these clear, southern mountain skies. Literally, “Pickering’s girls” were astronomical observers in many senses of the word.

Over the years 1877 to 1919, Pickering in his long term as director had brought some 45 women into the observatory. Draper’s widow’s money financed the catalog work, later to become known as the Draper Catalog. Indirectly, Mrs. Draper’s endowment, however penny-pinching, favored Pickering’s women staff, howsoever meanly. To be fair to Pickering on this charge, he had to split hard-won endowments several ways to finance a California and South American site, as well as the expanding one at Harvard. These weren’t cheap. (But it is on record that Pickering’s younger brother, the influential if embarrassing William, first at Mt. Wilson and then Arequipa - from which he was removed - and elsewhere siphoned off much money from the foundation).

Henrietta Swann Leavitt: brief biography

Leavitt was born in the then very leafy, rural farming community of Lancaster, Massachusetts U.S.A. of Puritan stock on the 4th of July, three years after the American Civil War’s end. She was the daughter of George R. Leavitt, a clergyman born in Lowell, Massachusetts. Her mother and namesake, Henrietta Swann Kendrick, was born in the then-whaling town of New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1844, daughter of Henry C. Kendrick – a dentist - and Henrietta A. Swan, both of New Bedford. Kendrick was the pastor of the First Congregational Church of Lancaster from 1865 to 1870, leaving there for Cambridgeport for financial reasons (Cambridgeport was the home of the prominent telescope maker Alvan Clark, giving one to speculating on her ever seeing some of these then-world class scopes in her childhood). Family members to include grandparents may have accompanied each other from place to place, and the family eventually moved to Cleveland, Ohio after Massachusetts and finally to Beloit, Wisconsin, where Leavitt’s father died at age 72. Her brother, Darwin, was a missionary in Turkey at the time of his father’s death. Such was the tight family group of devout persons with a burnished faith who came and went together – Henrietta remaining near Boston as an astronomer and Darwin travelling the world, spreading the Christian faith.

Leavitt graduated from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1892. Radcliffe was known by another name then and its position as a woman’s-only college is long gone (Women weren’t allowed at Harvard at that time.) She developed a hearing problem even before a fascination with the stars, possibly helped along by seeing Clark’s products, prompted her to seek an astronomy career. Or, as a French writer put it, “Enfermée dans son silence intérieur, Henrietta Swan se tourne alors vers le silence des étoiles.” Apparently, the solitude involved in this work could have agreed with the hearing impaired, leastwise to this particular woman astronomer, which makes the French quote (above) so apt. But she shared this trait with a leading “gun” (if I may pun) among the women astronomers at the HCO: Annie Jump Cannon. Never married, with few details yet known of her private life, Leavitt died of cancer in 1921 while still an active member of the observatory.