Discovering stars in 1911

I've been wondering for a while about the reason for this blog - not the obvious reason, that time travel has not been invented yet and somebody has to try to compensate, but the deeper one: why anyone would want to time travel in the first place.

And it struck me the other day that I'm looking for role models.  Obviously, the challenges facing women today aren't what they were in 1911. But as I've researched this blog it's become clear that things weren't as different back then as I had thought. I've also realised that it's not been a few charismatic, controversial leaders who have moved women's liberation forward: it has been a crowd of people taking each a small step, from the hundreds of women who persuaded reluctant fathers to send them to university to the thousands today pushing through to the highest ranks of the professions while working out how to balance that with family lives.

Many of those small steps have gone little remembered. Last week I found the story of Williamina P Fleming. Her obituary was published a hundred years ago this month. As Curator of Astronomical Photographs at Harvard she spent thirty years working with a catalogue of very early glass plate photographs of the night sky. She analysed images of over ten thousand stars, discovering ten entirely new ones. And she faced the question of what stepping into a male sphere does for your essential likeability as a woman. Annie Cannon, the author of Fleming's obituary in Science, (Vol 33(861), 987-88, June 1911), gives full credit to her discoveries and to her thorough, systematic approach to a library of 200,000 fragile glass plates. She then concludes that ...'of a large hearted, sympathetic nature, and keenly interested in all that pertains to life, [she] won friends easily, while her love of her home and an unusual skill in needlework prove that a life spent in the routine of science need not destroy the attractive human element of a woman's nature'

Williamina P Fleming was one of many who demonstrated, through living out her life,  that female and scientist were not mutually exclusive. We no longer use needlework to make that proof, and thanks to Fleming and hundreds more we don't have so many exclusions to eliminate.  But I think we are still facing that challenge on some fronts.