In contrast to the previous year’s conference in St. In August 1879, the American Association for the Advancement of Science held its annual meeting in Saratoga Springs, New York, a resort famous for its spas, gambling, and high society. And when it came to the needs of women in science, the gap between the real and the ideal remained even wider, as Mitchell was reminded the following summer. “One thing is very clear to my mind - that is, that the world is not yet awake to the needs of women in Education - but whether such as I can awaken it is very doubtful,” she wrote to a friend. T he eclipse expedition achieved its aim, but Mitchell - soon to celebrate her 60th birthday - was feeling her age and was frustrated that she had not accomplished more in her life. “omen of low and high degree throughout the territory turned during that day their thoughts toward the hill…” wrote another correspondent, “for from the mound where the group stood there radiated a light, that sent its rays hopefully into more than one woman’s heart - a heart with longings for study, culture, improvement, that the simple fact of her being a girl had unjustly deprived her of because old prejudices had hedged her path and defined her duties.” The Vassar astronomers also proved inspirational to members of their own sex. mitchell herself, as with iron-gray curls fluttering under a broad-brimmed Leghorn, she swept the heavens with a four-inch telescope, or directed with native majesty and grace the operations of her assistant nymphs, was a figure, and perfectly commanding.” The astronomers in pleated dresses provided “an attraction to the gaping, yet respectfully distant, multitude of masculines, almost as absorbing as the eclipse,” a reporter wrote. They set out wooden chairs, erected a small tent for shade, and mounted three telescopes on tall tripods.
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On eclipse day, the Vassar scientists chose for their observation post a hill on the edge Denver. These women would demonstrate to the American public that science and higher education were not anathema to health or femininity. She invited a crew of Vassar graduates to join her, not only to conduct astronomical studies, but also to serve as role models. government - assembled expeditions to the frontier, Mitchell independently organized her own eclipse party.
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While groups of men - encouraged and assisted by the U.S. As America’s most prominent female scientist - she had gained renown for discovering a comet, which earned her a gold medal from the king of Denmark - Mitchell toiled as a staunch advocate for women’s higher education, and with the eclipse looming she saw a political opportunity. Vassar’s professor of astronomy, Maria Mitchell, considered such claims preposterous. Clarke had warned in an incendiary book titled “Sex in Education” that the recent push for female colleges and coeducation could undermine women’s health by taxing their brains and causing their reproductive organs to atrophy - leading to “a dropping out of maternal instincts, and an appearance of Amazonian coarseness and force.” And not just science: Even higher education was deemed risky for the “fairer sex.” In 1873, the prominent Boston physician Edward H. The Vassar College eclipse party, an all-female expedition from that pioneering women’s institution, came to Denver in an era when science was a male bastion. Naval Observatory aimed their gaze and equipment skyward.Īnother team arrived with more than scientific goals in mind.
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Barker, armed with a spectroscope, joined Edison beside the transcontinental railroad elsewhere along the Rocky Mountains, scientists from Princeton, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and the U.S. The University of Pennsylvania physicist George F. At lower elevation, in Wyoming, Thomas Edison readied his latest invention - an infrared detector called the tasimeter - to look for heat in the solar glow around the blackened moon. Samuel Pierpont Langley, director of Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Observatory, climbed Colorado’s Pikes Peak to examine the sun’s outer atmosphere - the solar corona - through the thin mountain air. In this installment, David Baron shares a story that was left out of his new book, “American Eclipse: A Nation’s Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World” (Liveright Publishing). WHAT I LEFT OUT is a recurring feature in which book authors are invited to share anecdotes and narratives that, for whatever reason, did not make it into their final manuscripts.