#harvard computers

I learned about Los Angeles, California-based artist Lia Halloran via Dr. Rebecca Oppenheimer, and luckily she reminded me about these enormous, astronomy (& astronomer!) inspired cyanotype prints (try it yourself!) recently so now I am sharing them with you!

From the project’s website:

Your Body is a Space That Sees is series of cyanotype prints that sources historical imagery and narratives to trace contributions of women in astronomy since antiquity. The of series of large scale cyanotype prints will interpret a fragmented history and represent a female-centric astronomical catalog of craters, comets, galaxies and nebula drawing from narrative, imagery and historical accounts of Hypatia of Alexandria, Caroline Herschel, Helen Sawyer Hogg, and a group of women at Harvard in the late 1800’s known as Pickering’s Harem or the Harvard Computers.

Cyanotypes are printed from painted negatives that are based on the objects and narratives that were connected to these early astronomers. This process mimics early astronomical glass plates moving between transparent surfaces to a photograph without the use of a camera.

Discerning startorialists might recognize the Orion Nebula, the Horsehead Nebula, or even the pulsar graph from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy. The last image is based on this photograph of the “Harvard Computers” from 1918. (Some of these women are featured in the Star Women design by @pacalin.) Did you know you can help transcribe their work? Check out Project PHAEDRA.

Williamina Fleming didn't set out to have a career in astronomy. She married James Fleming in Scotland in 1877, and when she was 21 they emigrated to Boston, where shortly thereafter he abandoned her with their small child, leaving her to fend for them both. She'd worked as a teacher before, but as a single mother, she was ineligible for any teaching position -- those were only for men and unmarried women. Instead, she found a position as a maid.

It was a placement that turned out to be a happy accident that changed the course of her life. Her employer happened to be Edward Pickering, director of the Harvard College Observatory. She performed her duties efficiently, and earned his respect as a housekeeper. He was having trouble with the computers he'd hired to process astronomical data, running the seemingly endless computations needed to analyze the information from the photographs taken with the observatory's telescope. Frustrated with them one day, he scoffed, "My Scottish maid could do better!"

As it turns out, she could. In 1881 he taught her how to analyze stellar spectra -- the emissions of the stars they were studying -- as shown on the photographic plates, and to make the necessary calculations to understand what they were looking at. By 1886, she was in charge of a large group of women hired to run these calculations -- the Harvard calculators, as they've come to be known. Many of them are some of the brightest women in astronomical history, such as Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, and Anonia Maury.

Long-time startorial darling designer & space enthusiast Pauline Acalin (aka @pacalin) has several t-shirt designs on display at our AAS229 booth! Her Star Women is far and away our favorite*, but all three dozen astronomy, science, sci-fi, space travel, Lego, & gaming-themed designs, available at Neato Shop, are not to be missed!

--Emily

*I swear I have photos of men wearing this shirt, but somehow I can’t find them right now...

“She was an American astronomer and human computer, one of the first members of female computer group known as "the Harvard Computers." She made the most complete catalog of stars near the north and south poles of her era. She is also remembered for her calculations and studies of asteroids. In particular, she did calculations on 433 Eros and 475 Ocllo.”

Las contadoras de estrellas en el Observatorio de Harvard a finales del siglo XIX fueron claves para la astronomía moderna. Ayudaron a crear el Catálogo Estelar Henry Draper, colaboraron en la identificación de la composición de las estrellas, las dividieron en categorías y encontraron una manera de medir distancias en el espacio por la luz que emiten.

Sus carreras son un ejemplo perfecto de cómo la mujer fue entrando en el mercado laboral y más concretamente en el sector científico. Es cierto que todas ellas eran blancas y venían de familia de clase acomodada (según Sobel solo una de ellas podría ser considerada abiertamente feminista), pero seguían existiendo curiosidades como la de Williamina Fleming. Ella fue la primera jefa del grupo de ‘calculadoras’ y eso que nunca había estudiado nada relacionado con la astronomía. “Flemming consiguió su puesto en el laboratorio después de trabajar como criada para Pickering. Él sabía de su valía y decidió darle una oportunidad y bueno, la aprovechó”.

Si bien algunas de las mujeres del personal de Pickering estaban graduadas en astronomía, su salario era similar al de un trabajador masculino sin oficio. Ganaban aproximadamente entre 25 y 50 centavos la hora, más que una mujer trabajando en una fábrica, pero menos que una oficinista. En concreto, Fleming, como madre soltera que era, abordó el tema de sus bajos salarios con Pickering:

"Me dice que recibo un excelente salario como el de las mujeres... ¿Alguna vez pensó que tengo un hogar que mantener y una familia que cuidar tan bien como los hombres?... ¡Y esto se considera una era ilustrada!"

Harvard hizo dinero con su fuerza laboral femenina si se considera que los sistemas de clasificación que desarrollaron llevaron a la identificación de casi 400,000 estrellas. Williamina Fleming fue la primera en descubrir enanas blancas y la Nebulosa Cabeza de Caballo en la constelación de Orión, además de otras 51 nebulosas, 10 novas y 310 estrellas variables.

Las Computadoras de Harvard fueron:

Mary Anna Palmer Draper, Williamina Fleming, Antonia Maury, Anna Winlock, Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta Leavitt y Florence Cushman.

As team names go, the Harvard Computers has kind of an oddball ring to it, but it’s far preferable to Pickering’s Harem, as the female scientists brought in under the Harvard Observatory’s male director were collectively referred to early on in their 40-some years of service to the institution.

A possibly apocryphal story has it that Director Edward Pickering was so frustrated by his male assistants’ pokey pace in examining 1000s of photographic plates bearing images of stars spotted by telescopes in Harvard and the southern hemisphere, he declared his maid could do a better job.

If true, it was no idle threat.

In 1881, Pickering did indeed hire his maid, Williamina Fleming, to review the plates with a magnifying glass, cataloguing the brightness of stars that showed up as smudges or grey or black spots. She also calculated—aka computed—their positions, and, when possible, chemical composition, color, and temperature.

The newly single 23-year-old mother was not uneducated. She had served as a teacher for years prior to emigrating from Scotland, but when her husband abandoned her in Boston, she couldn’t afford to be fussy about the kind of employment she sought. Working at the Pickerings meant secure lodging and a small income.

Not that the promotion represented a financial windfall for Fleming and the more than 80 female computers who joined her over the next four decades. They earned between 25 to 50 cents an hour, half of what a man in the same position would have been paid.

At one point Fleming, who as a single mother was quite aware that she was burdened with “all housekeeping cares …in addition to those of providing the means to meet their expenses,” addressed the matter of her low wages with Pickering, leaving her to vent in her diary:

I am immediately told that I receive an excellent salary as women’s salaries stand.… Does he ever think that I have a home to keep and a family to take care of as well as the men?… And this is considered an enlightened age!

Harvard certainly got its money’s worth from its female workforce when you consider that the classification systems they developed led to identification of nearly 400,000 stars.

Fleming, who became responsible for hiring her coworkers, was the first to discover white dwarfs and the Horsehead Nebula in Orion, in addition to 51 other nebulae, 10 novae, and 310 variable stars.

An impressive achievement, but another diary entry belies any glamour we might be tempted to assign:

From day to day my duties at the Observatory are so nearly alike that there will be little to describe outside ordinary routine work of measurement, examination of photographs, and of work involved in the reduction of these observations.

Pickering believed that the female computers should attend conferences and present papers, but for the most part, they were kept so busy analyzing photographic plates, they had little time left over to explore their own areas of interest, something that might have afforded them work of a more theoretical nature.

Another diary entry finds Fleming yearning to get out from under a mountain of busy work:

Looking after the numerous pieces of routine work which have to be kept progressing, searching for confirmation of objects discovered elsewhere, attending to scientific correspondence, getting material in form for publication, etc, has consumed so much of my time during the past four years that little is left for the particular investigations in which I am especially interested.

This March, Flat Earth Theatre smashes the glass ceiling and expands the universe with the melodious, evocative Silent Sky by Lauren Gunderson, the most popular living playwright of 2016. Silent Sky will run March 10th – 25th at the Mosesian Center for the Arts. Tickets can be purchased for $25, online in advance or at the door, or $10 student rush.

Exploding preconceptions of gender, family, and our very universe, Silent Sky tells the story of real-life Cambridge astronomer Henrietta Leavitt and her female colleagues at the Harvard Observatory. Like the women in 2016’s box office smash Hidden Figures, the “Harvard Computers” use math and measurement to chart the heavens without being allowed to touch a telescope, a task prohibited to women at the turn of the 20th century. Leavitt studies celestial bodies just out of reach while balancing the needs of love and family close at hand, and ultimately discovers the method to measure the distances of faraway galaxies, paving the way for modern astronomy.

“Silent Sky tackles issues such as women not being seen as equals in the workplace, choosing between love and work, and science versus religion,” says director Dori A. Robinson, who serves as Stoneham Theatre’s Director of Education. “Although it takes place between 1900–1920, the play resonates easily with us today.”

At this critical moment for the arts, the country, and the world, Flat Earth Theatre believes in the power of representation in theatre, and is proud to produce a play featuring a majority female cast and written by a female playwright. “Not only is gender parity a timely issue both nationwide and here in Boston, these particular women were extraordinary,” adds director Robinson. “Despite their work ethic, brilliant minds, and concrete discoveries, they could not break the glass ceiling. If ever there was a time to tell their stories, it’s now.”