Understated 03: Skywatcher
Maria Mitchell is an astronomer and professor who was way ahead of her time. Let's unpack her life in this week's issue Understated.
If this is your first time reading or receiving this newsletter, welcome! At Understated we take a person you won’t likely find in your history books and unpack the lives they led. Today’s subject? Maria Mitchell.
Growing Up Nantucket
Born in Nantucket in 1818, Maria Mitchell was raised as a Quaker1 to parents Lydia and William. Her mom, Lydia, was an assistant at the library, while her father was a schoolteacher and astronomer.
From an early age, Maria showed an appetite for astronomy and advanced mathematics, often helping her father with some of his calculations.
Furthermore, since Nantucket was a big whaling town at the time, local captains would pay people like Maria and her father for their calculations on tide changes and the like as it might predict a change in the whales’ behavior.
By the time she was 11, Maria had distinguished herself as a budding genius. She was hired as a teaching assistant to her father and when she was 12, she and her father calculated a solar eclipse down to the minute.
At the age of 17, Mitchell had opened her own school, employing some experimental teaching methods (we’ll unpack later) and even encouraging minority students to attend. This latter fact made her school one of the first in the United States to be integrated.
When she was 19, Maria began work as the first librarian at the Nantucket Atheneum, the public library that is still in operation today.2
Discovery of Miss Mitchell’s Comet
On October 1, 1847, Maria Mitchell would spot the comet that would bear her name, but it wasn’t until June of 1848 that she was able to submit a proof of discovery in a scientific journal using her dad’s name as a pseudonym.3 In July, her calculation of the comet’s orbit would give her the validity4 as the original discoverer.
A little more than a year after the discovery, Mitchell was awarded a gold medal prize for her discovery. The prize was originally created by King Frederick VI of Denmark for the discoverer of each telescopic comet. 5
Though Maria Mitchell was not the first woman to get credit for discovering a comet6 she was the first American (man or woman) to win the prize, and the first woman to win an award for astronomy.
Professor Mitchell
Despite her dominating intellect, Mitchell had never actually attended college. So when she was appointed as Director of Astronomy7 at elite Vassar College, the appointment was THAT much more impressive by her lack of structured education at that level.
Mitchell’s guiding hand (her tenure lasted from 1865-1888) would lead Vassar to enroll more students in math and astronomy than every other college in the country (including Harvard) over that period of time.
The teaching methods developed by Mitchell as a teenager in Nantucket would stick with her as a decorated professor at Vassar. Among other things, she advocated for smaller class sizes to give students more specialized help, not taking attendance, and tutoring as often as students wanted to be tutored. 8
Unfortunately, her hard work was not equally rewarded. Despite her prestige and sterling track record as an educator, Mitchell discovered that she was making half the salary of her younger, male counterparts at Vassar at the time. She asked for a raise soon after this discovery and was granted the raise, but likely missed out on several years of earnings because of this discrepancy. 9
Progressive Then, Progressive Now
Leading up to and after the Civil War, Maria would boycott clothes made of cotton picked in the American South to show her support for abolitionism.
She would also befriend suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and advocate for women to be allowed into the workforce. She believed that by enabling women to work, they could take some of the pressure off their husbands to be the sole earners, and women could then use their pay to go to school and close the gap between male and female societies. 10
Remembering Maria
Mitchell would die from brain disease in 1889, at the age of 70, having retired from Vassar in 1888. She spent the final year of her life on her beloved Nantucket Island.
Currently, the Maria Mitchell Association of Nantucket maintains a natural history museum, science library, an observatory, and a museum of her home for people to come and visit. 11
How can I see Mitchell’s comet?!
Mitchell’s namesake comet is non-periodic, meaning it won’t be coming back through our cosmic neighborhood.
However, you can still honor Miss Mitchell’s legacy by giving a seat at the table to those fringe members of society who are too often on the outside looking in.
Maria’s Quaker upbringing was important as Quakers believe that education should be equally accessible to everyone. This was a highly progressive view at the time, when women couldn’t vote and slavery was still legal in the US.
Originally constructed at the corner of India and Federal St, the Atheneum was built in 1837, and today is in the same block, but is now a different building that was constructed in 1847.
The magazine likely wouldn’t have published her proof if they knew it was a woman doing the calculation. Using her father’s name gave the proof credibility.
There was some debate as to who discovered the comet first. An Italian astronomer named Francesco de Vico saw the same comet, but two days after Maria, so even though he originally got credit for the discovery, he was supplanted when Maria’s calculation and journal entries were discovered.
a telescopic comet is defined as a comet that is too faint to be seen by the naked eye.
that honor actually belongs to Caroline Herschel and Maria Margaretha Kirch, discovering theirs in 1786 and 1702 respectively, though neither received full credit.
She was actually the first person appointed to Vassar’s faculty, having been hand-selected by the school’s founder, Matthew Vassar.
All of these are seen as current best practice, or progressive in today’s world of education, therefore they were truly ahead of their time in the 19th century.
Discrepancy is the most professional word I can think of that won’t harm my reputation as an unbiased reporter of facts. What occurred to her as a tenured, talented, and progressive educator, to make half of what her less crucial male colleagues were making, was a smudge mark on the face of Vassar College.
Her support for women would extend to getting more women into math and science (what we now call STEM fields) as well as encouraging people to support women’s colleges (like Vassar) and women’s campaigns for local school boards.
The SS Maria Mitchell was a Liberty class ship in World War II, and Maria Mitchell’s Comet is a train in upstate New York that’s route goes right by Vassar College.