Maria Mitchell Broke Taboos When She Reached for the Stars

                 

                                   Astronomer Maria Mitchell from an 1851 portrait by H. Dassell. 

Today is the birthday of the woman who many consider the first professional female scientist in the world. Maria Mitchell was born on August 1, 1818 in Nantucket, Massachusetts. All of you with dirty minds can compose your own limerick now.

She was raised as one of 10 children in a Quaker family and was a distant cousin of Benjamin Franklin. Her father William was an amateur astronomer who believed that observation of natural phenomena revealed the glory of God’s plan. Alone among her siblings young Maria was captivated by her father’s enthusiasm. At an early age she began reading his books and recording his observations. Her father was her best teacher.

Maria got what formal education was then available to young women at Unitarian minister Cyrus Peirce’s School for Young Ladies, where she impressed the schoolmaster with her diligence so much that he kept her on as an assistant after she completed her course work. In 1835-38 she operated her own school.

The following year she was hired by the Nantucket Atheneum as a librarian. She pursued a self-directed program of education from the volumes in her charge. She worked there for 18 years. Meanwhile, she continued to assist her father. Together they made observations of stars for use in celestial navigation and surveyed the coastline of Nantucket Island, both of which were very useful for local mariners.

                   

                               Mitchell as a young woman.

Shortly after beginning her career at the Atheneum, Mitchell was expelled from her local Friends Society for expressing doubts and misgivings. She had little use for religious dispute. Like her father, she found her God in nature. She shifted her attendance to the Unitarian congregation but did not become a member.

The Atheneum provided intellectual and even spiritual nourishment itself.  It hosted lectures by the leading lights of the day, including key figures in Transcendentalism, anti-slavery, and early feminist causes such as Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, William Agassiz, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lucy Stone, William Ellery Channing, Horace Greeley, and Theodore Parker. Many were guests in the Mitchell home and Emerson, among others, was invited to view the heavens through Maria’s telescope.

Mitchell’s life changed in the autumn of 1847. One night she observed an unusual blurry object in the night sky through her telescope. She noted its precise location. The following night she discovered it had moved, confirming her suspicion that the object was a comet. The discovery of Comet Mitchell (C1847 VI), or Miss Mitchell’s Comet, as it came to be popularly known, made her an instant celebrity. She was awarded a gold medal by King Fredrick VII of Denmark for being the first person ever to discover a comet that could not be observed with the naked eye.

                      

                              Mitchell's certificate of election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

She also received honors at home. In 1848 Mitchell was elected as the first female member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1850 to the new American Association for the Advancement of Science. The latter organization’s leading figure, Matthew Fontaine Maury, Superintendent of the United States Naval Observatory, helped her secure a commission from the U.S. Nautical Almanac Office calculating tables of positions of Venus.

Mitchell also used her fame to lend support to the causes of women and abolitionism. She was a friend and supporter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy Stone. Later in life, in 1873 she was a founder and early president of the American Association for the Advancement of Women. To show that she would not support slavery, she refused to wear any cotton garments tainted by the misery of enslaved persons.

In 1857 Mitchell gave up her position at the Atheneum. She accepted the invitation of Chicago banker General H. K. Swift to become a traveling companion to his daughter Prudence. It was Mitchell’s first real chance to travel beyond Massachusetts. She first toured the American West and South, where firsthand exposure to slavery encouraged her increasing abolitionist fervor. 

                                 

                                                Mitchell in middle age.

Then she accompanied Prudence and author Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family on the Grand Tour of Europe. She found herself a greater celebrity on the continent than at home. She was introduced to many of the leading scientists and given personal tours of observatories in Greenwich and Cambridge. After some difficulty she was even given admittance to the Vatican Observatory. She latter commented, “I did not know that my heretic feet must not enter the sanctuary, that my woman’s robe must not brush the seats of learning.”

Upon her return to the States Matthew Vassar asked her to join the faculty of his new college, the first to offer women “the same education, with the same standards, as that offered in men's colleges.” Despite the founder’s support the Board of Trustees resisted the appointment of women to the faculty for several years. Mitchell finally became the first female professor in 1865. She remained on the faculty until 1888.

For the most part, her association with Vassar College for Women was a happy one. She oversaw the construction of a modern observatory of which she was named Director so that she could continue her own observations and research in addition to her teaching duties. But there were challenges. When she discovered that she was being paid less than new male instructors just beginning their careers, she demanded equal pay. After a struggle she got it. Baptist members of the Board of Trustees also tried to have her dismissed for being “a rank Theodore Parker Unitarian.” She beat back that challenge, too.

Meanwhile Mitchell continued to reap honors. In 1869 she became one of the first three women elected to the prestigious American Philosophical Society, founded by her cousin Ben Franklin. In 1887 Columbia College in New York City awarded her an honorary Doctorate in Science and Philosophy.

Mitchell retired from Vassar after the 1888 school year. The following June she died in Lynn, Massachusetts at the age of 70. She was buried next to her father on her beloved Nantucket.

An early souvenir post card of the Maria Mitchell Memorial and Observatory on Nantucket Island.

In 1908 the Maria Mitchell Society opened the then state of the art Maria Mitchell Observatory on the island. The institution continues to keep her legacy alive and provides science education opportunities to generations of young people, many of the young women.

Margaret Attwood's They Are Hostile Nations—National Poetry Month 2026

Modern war--the innocent are only in the way. 

The bizarre, wildly out of control war with Iran born of Donald Trump's ego and desperation and egged on by Pete Hegseth's deranged bloodthirsty Cristian nationalism, and the on-going brutal war in Ukraine are  only two of the most visible of dozens of armed conflicts across the globe—insurrections, rebellions, civil war, tribal battles, intractable conflicts spanning decades if not centuries.  Nuclear sabers are being rattled by Russia, China, North Korea, Israel, and, yes, even the United States.  The nagging Cassandras at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have reset the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight—the closest to oblivion it has ever been.  Peace is not only not at hand, it seems increasingly impossible.

Margaret Atwood in the 1970's.

Even back in the 1970’s Canadian Margaret Atwood despaired.  The feminist poet, novelist, cultural critic is best known for her frightening dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale. 

They are Hostile Nations

i

 

In view of the fading animals

the proliferation of sewers and fears   

the sea clogging, the air

nearing extinction

 

we should be kind, we should

take warning, we should forgive each other

 

Instead we are opposite, we   

touch as though attacking,

 

the gifts we bring

even in good faith maybe   

warp in our hands to

implements, to manoeuvre

 

ii

 

Put down the target of me

you guard inside your binoculars,   

in turn I will surrender

 

this aerial photograph   

(your vulnerable

sections marked in red)   

I have found so useful

 

See, we are alone in

the dormant field, the snow

that cannot be eaten or captured

 

iii

 

Here there are no armies   

here there is no money

 

It is cold and getting colder,

 

We need each others’

breathing, warmth, surviving   

is the only war

we can afford, stay

 

walking with me, there is almost   

time / if we can only   

make it as far as

 

the (possibly) last summer

 

—Margaret  Atwood

 

They are Hostile Nations from Selected Poems 1965-1975. Copyright © 1974, 1976 by Margaret Atwood.

Dear John--Abigail's Note to Hubby

                 

Abigail Adams, painted here as the first mistress of the Executive Mansion in Washington D.C., kept up a frequent and detailed correspondence with her husband John while he was in Philadelphia attending the Continental Congress.

Note—This has become a semi-traditional wind-up for Women’s History Month here. 

 

On this date in 1776 as the Revolutionary War was still young and Boston was besieged by George Washington Abigail Adams sent a letter to her husband John who was in Philadelphia as a Delegate to the Continental Congress from their home in Braintree, Massachusetts. The success of the war against the most powerful empire in the world was far from being assured and the Declaration of Independence, of which John was a prime mover, was yet months away. But amidst the turmoil Mrs. Adams admonished her husband not to neglect, as male governors had done from time immemorial, rights and needs of women. 

 

In the midst of a lengthy, chatty letter filled with news from home she included one remarkable passage, not even a full paragraph: 

 

I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation. 

 

Abigail may have regarded the threat of rebellion with tongue firmly in cheek. For his part John did not seem to take it seriously, although he frequently relied on his wife’s advice. Certainly, neither he nor Congress did anything about it. To lawyer Adams, women’s rights and privileges would certainly continue to be constrained by English Common Law which is to say they hardly existed. Women were and would remain virtual chattel first of their fathers and then of their husbands. Even widows and spinsters had precious little control of their property or affairs. 

 

Abigail's noted comment was contained in a short passage of the lengthy three page letter.

Mrs. Adams was 32 years old that year and the mother of five children. She was every inch the match of her husband, well read, keenly intelligent, strong willed, and independent. She comfortably mastered raising her brood and managing the affairs of the family and their small stone farm during the long absences—months, even years—while her husband was away helping to invent America and serve its interests. In New England where many wives of merchant traders, fishermen, and seafarers had to cope with such long absences perhaps women were more used to self-sufficiency than in other regions where they mostly stayed with their mates on family farms or tended house in villages and towns. 

 

Since the letter was not a public document, it roused no movement among women who might have been similarly disposed. It was not published until 1848 when Abigail’s grandson Charles Francis Adams included it in his multi-volume compendium of their correspondence. Of interest mostly to serious historians, the books were not widely read, and little special notice was given to a single passage which was not echoed anywhere else in the collection of missives. 

 

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton cited Abigail's phrases in the first volume of their monumental History of Woman Suffrage more than 100 years after she wrote it.

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton took note of the letter in the first volume of their epic History of Woman Suffrage which was first published in 1886. Slowly the quote spread in the suffrage movement largely to add a connection to the nation’s founders. 

 

But it was the second wave feminist movement of the 1960s and ‘70s that really made the passage famous. Gloria Steinem featured it in early issues of MS. Magazine and was featured on t-shirts, bumper stickers, and demonstration placards. 

 

 

Dozens of widely circulated memes keep Abigail's words alive on the internet.

In the 21st Century it has become widely shared as a meme. Whatever Abigail intended by her passing comment, it certainly has grown legs.

Remembering Prophetic Feminist Poet Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich as a young poet.

Adrienne Rich was 82 when she died on March 26, 2012 in California, a long way from the life of privilege and learning into which she was born in Baltimore on May 16, 1929.   

Her father was a noted professor of medicine at prestigious Johns Hopkins and her mother had been a concert pianist.  He was a secular Jew, she a lady-like Southern Protestant.  Adrienne and her sisters were raised as nominal Christians.

Both parents cherished learning.  Before she was of kindergarten age Adrienne was reading from their vast library, mostly English poets.  Not trusting their bright children to a drab public education, Adrienne and her sisters were educated at home in that library until the fourth grade.  In her later years she was sent to a prestigious girl’s school, Roland Park Country School, which she later credited with providing “fine role models of single women who were intellectually impassioned.”

The progression to Radcliff College for her undergraduate degree was a natural one and she continued to flourish in the all-women environment.  She also took classes, mostly in poetry, at very male Harvard.  Her very first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was written as an undergraduate, selected by none other than W.H. Auden for publication as the Yale Younger Poets Award winner.  Auden wrote a thoughtful introduction lauding her technical competence, craftsmanship, and “…elegance and simple and precise phrasing.”

Thus, impressively launched on a noteworthy literary career she traveled to Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952.  Part way into the year she abandoned formal study to linger in Italy.

Adrienne Rich's husband economist Alfred H. Conrad n 1959.

On returning to the United States in 1953 Rich married Harvard economist Alfred H. Conrad and settled into the life of an academic wife in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Her first child, David, was born in 1955, the same years as her second collection, The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems, earned praise and garnered awards.  Two more sons were born and she struggled to balance the demands of marriage, motherhood, and writing.  She felt a failure at all of it.

Despite continuing to publish successfully, Rich could have been the model of the kind of accomplished, highly educated woman stifled by conventional domesticity that Betty Friedan wrote about in Feminine Mystique.

The themes began to emerge more forcefully in her poetry.  She abandoned the carefully crafted lines of metered rhyme which characterized her earlier work and began to work in blank verse.  The poems became more frankly autobiographical.  Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law in 1963 delved into that struggle followed in 1966 with Necessities of Life.

 

Rich in the '60s--fierce and feminist.

Now both a recognized literary superstar and open feminist, Rich’s career began to eclipse that of her husband.  He moved with her to New York City when she accepted a post at Swarthmore.  She latter also taught in the Graduate School of Columbia University and a free style “open university” at the City Colleges of New York.  During this period, she became deeply and publicly involved not only in the feminist movement, but in opposition to the Vietnam War, and moved in increasingly leftist circles.  She hosted events for the Black Panthers and was a noteworthy signatory of the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest to the war.

Her poems were now overtly political.  The publication of Leaflets, an examination of the turmoil of the 1960’s, secured Rich’s place as a leading radical voice.

All of this placed a strain on her marriage.   He husband felt she was literally losing her mind and moved out.  He was quite wrong.  Rich hadn’t lost her mind but had decided to become the quintessential class traitor.  Three months after the separation Alfred Conrad shot and killed himself.  It was a naturally traumatic event for Rich and her children.

 

A cartoon by Alison Bechdel demonstrates the enormous influence Rich had on many women writers and artists.

Yet the accolades and awards continued to pile up. There was the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize from Poetry Magazine, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, another Guggenheim Fellowship, and various prestigious academic appointments.

She reached perhaps the pinnacle of her literary career with the publication in 1973 of Diving into the Wreck. It was her most intensely personal work yet, anguished and angry yet clear of thought and expression.  She was picked to share the National Book Award in Poetry with Allan Ginsberg in 1974 but declined to accept it as an individual. Instead, she made national headlines by going to the podium with Alice Walker and Audre Lorde to accept the award on behalf of all women writers. 

Rich’s life and work changed dramatically in 1976 when she began her life-long relationship with Jamaican-born novelist and editor Michelle Cliff.  She later said that her lesbianism was both the natural fulfillment of desires and yearnings suppressed since girl’s school and a political statement.  Her writing began to express this new life, both philosophically in works like Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, her first significant prose work, and lyrical frankly erotic verse in the pamphlet Twenty-One Love Poems.

 

                                   Michelle Cliff became Rich's life partner, inspiration, and collaborator.

She continued to hold important teaching posts at Rutgers, Scripps College of San Jose State University, and Cornell.  She dedicated more time to essays, literary criticism, and political theory, publishing several well received books.

Rich and Cliff settled in California and co-edited an important Lesbian journal, Sinister Wisdom in 1981.  She published three more books of poetry in the 1980s and garnered more literary awards—the Ruth Paul Lilly Poetry Prize in 1986, the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award in Arts and Letters from NYU, and the National Poetry Association Award for Distinguished Service to the Art of Poetry both in 1989.

A revived interest in her Jewish identity and what it means to be a leftist Jew led her to found. Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends in 1990.

An Atlas of the Difficult World, published in 1991, won the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry, and the Lenore Marshall/Nation Award, Commonwealth Award in Literature as well as the Poet’s Prize in 1993.  In 1994 she tagged for a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” All the while she served in mentoring positions to women writers around the world.

In 1997 Rich made headlines by publicly snubbing the National Medal of Arts in protest to a House of Representatives vote to end the National Endowment for the Arts and policies of the Clinton Administration.  She told reporters “I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration... [Art] means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage.”

In the new century Rich was slowed by advancing rheumatoid arthritis but continued to speak out publicly, especially against the looming war in Iraq. 

 

Adrienne Rich--the elder still untamed.

She was named a Chancellor of the Board of the Academy of American Poets in 2004.  That decade she produced four more collections of poetry, the last being Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010 and three more collections of essays. 

In 2006 she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters followed in 2010 with the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Poetry Prize. 

That’s more than enough official honors for anyone.  But Adrienne Rich’s legacy cannot be measured in plaques, certificates, and engraved bowls.  It is in the hearts of all the readers whose lives she touched and enriched, all the students she nurtured, all the writers she encouraged.

 

What Kind of Times Are These

 

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

 

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled

this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

 

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light—

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

 

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

anything?  Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it’s necessary

to talk about trees.

 

—Adrienne Rich