In the 1860s and 1870s, women’s access to advanced astronomical instruction in the United States took a sudden and majestic turn for the better, even as women’s prospects to enjoy a career as astronomical researchers were taking a turn for the worse. In 1865, Vassar’s first students matriculated, and found the legendary Maria Mitchell at the helm. Shortly thereafter, in 1869 Swarthmore opened its doors, with Susan Jane Cunningham, Mitchell’s former student, taking charge of astronomy instruction there for the next four decades. In 1875, two important women’s colleges opened, Smith College (the observatory of which would soon come under the direction of Mary Emma Byrd) and Wellesley College, which featured the powerful presence of Sarah Frances Whiting (1847–1927) as the head of both its revolutionary physics and astronomy programs.
One of the great problems that immediately arose for the founders of these new colleges was how to staff them with trained and professional women. Part of the reason that the colleges were formed was to meet the American dearth in higher education for women. Not many women had the chance to pursue a college degree, and of those that did have the opportunity, many did not make it to the end of their studies (in Whiting’s Wellesley, for example, of a first class of 246 students, only 18 ultimately received their degrees) due to family or financing problems, and of those that did get their degrees, many married soon thereafter which, in 19th century America, meant the end of their hireability as teachers, with many states having laws on the books declaring it illegal for a married woman to hold a teaching position. Staffing four ambitious colleges with the remaining talent was a challenging matter, but fortunately for the Fowle Durants, the patrons of Wellesley, the perfect individual for their new physics department had just recently emerged from the women’s academic pipeline, such as it was in that era.
Sarah Whiting was a graduate of Ingham University, which upon its founding in 1835 became the first women’s college in New York, and the first women’s fully chartered university in the United States. By 1892, Ingham had closed, but fortunately Whiting attended during its more robust middle years, earning her degree in 1865. For the next decade, she taught at a Brooklyn secondary school, as graduate study opportunities for a woman in that era were distinctly thin on the ground. Well might she have expected to spend her entire career in that position, or in a series of similar ones, all leading to a semi-comfortable if threadworn retirement. She had not, however, given up entirely on the prospect of expanding her horizons, and attended whatever lectures she could in what would become a lifelong habit of seeking out the Latest Thing in scientific developments and learning all she could about it directly from those working on the cutting edge of research.
In 1876, she was tapped to become Wellesley’s first professor of physics, and in preparation for that work, she attended lectures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by none other than Edward Charles Pickering, whose name will recur many times in this volume as a result of his assumption of the directorship of the Harvard Observatory in 1877. Pickering had a novel idea about how physics should be taught, as a hands-on experimental course where students gained experience as undergraduates handling scientific equipment and carrying out their own research projects. Whiting resolved that Wellesley’s physics program would continue and deepen this example, as she took charge of stocking the nation’s second undergraduate laboratory (and first accessible to women), and designing engaging curriculum around it.
Whiting’s methods proved so successful that she was soon given broader responsibilities, and started teaching astronomy courses in addition to her physics classes, beginning in 1880. Teaching astronomy, she employed similar methods to those she had used in her physics courses, and her students found themselves, as undergraduates, learning real astronomical techniques, particularly in the booming field of stellar and solar spectral analysis, in which pursuit dozens of women would soon be employed (though at near-starvation wages) in observatories across the country. Until 1900, the only telescope Whiting had available to offer students was a 4 incher they used to plop on the roof of College Hall, but in 1896 a Mrs J.C. Whitin wrote to Whiting about a good deal to be had on a 12 inch refracting telescope, and soon proposed to purchase not only the telescope for Wellesley, but a building to house it as well, to be built of white marble. In 1900, the Whitin Observatory opened, with not only the 12 inch telescope, but a micrometer, polarizing photometer, and a variety of spectroscopes, and it was only natural that Whiting was named its first director.
In addition to her work as a professor, observatory director, laboratory manager, and department head, Whiting was also an author, popularizing the new experimental approach to astronomy pedagogy through a number of articles as well as the textbook Daytime and Evening Exercises in Astronomy, for Schools and Colleges (1912). She retired from teaching in 1912, and from her position at the Whitin Observatory in 1916, after some forty years of service to Wellesley, in which time she saw a number of her students rise to important positions in the sciences, including Annie Jump Cannon, whom we shall soon meet, and who put the spectrographic training she learned with Whiting to truly epic use during her time on the Henry Draper Catalogue project at Harvard, the physicists Isabelle Stone and Louise McDowell, and the meteorologist Grace Evangeline Davis.
Speaking of her experience attending numerous conferences on new developments in physics and visiting laboratories all over the world, Whiting once spoke of ‘the somewhat nerve-wearing experience of constantly being in places where a woman was not expected to be, and doing what women did not conventionally do’. Undoubtedly the experience for Whiting was something more than nerve-wearing, as many of her male colleagues made little secret of their contempt for women attempting to do research in science, but thanks to her, and her innovative methods for putting practical experimental experience into the hands of her undergraduates, those that followed her could enter those male spaces, where they were not expected or often welcomed, stroll to the nearest spectrometer, and show just what stuff they were made of.
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