Nominating Maria Mitchell

Call for Recommendations: Prominent American Women and the Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020

Thank you for your recommendation. If you have questions, please contact the National Women's History Museum here: https://www.womenshistory.org/about-us/contac

Name of the woman you are recommending for consideration: Maria Mitchell

The woman's year of birth, if known: 1818

 

The woman's year of death: 1889

 

Please list the field(s) most commonly associated with the woman you are recommending (sports, science, politics, etc.): science, astronomy, education

 

Briefly state why the woman you're recommending should be considered for inclusion in this project.

Maria Mitchell was the first American women to be internationally recognized as an astronomer. On the night of 1 October 1847, she was the first person to identify a new comet by using a telescope. Mostly self-educated, she later was appointed the first professor of astronomy at Vassar College. She took her students to expeditions to Iowa (1869) and Colorado (1878) to observe and record solar eclipses. Twenty-five of her students were listed in "Who's Who in America." 

 

Optional: Please provide a link to any supporting material about the woman you are recommending (bio, news article, etc.).

The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers by Thomas A Hockey; Virginia Trimble; Katherine Bracher; New York : Springer, ©2007.  

"America’s First Woman Astronomer: Maria Mitchell (1818-1889)" by Jascin N. Leonardo Finger, This Month in Astronomical History (18 September 2020), The American Astronomical Society. https://aas.org/posts/news/2020/09/month-astronomical-history-august-2020. 

Hoffleit, Dorrit. 1983. "Maria Mitchell's Famous Students - In celebration of the 75th Anniversary of the Maria Mitchell Observatory." Cambridge, Massachusetts: American Association of Variable Star Observers. 

And, of course, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Mitchell

  

Optional: Your Name - Michael E. Marotta

 

Optional: Your email address (used if we need further information and/or to provide updates about the project from the National Women's History Museum). - mike49mercury@gmail.com

 

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PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Maria Mitchell Quarter Dollar Circulating Commemorative

Unforgotten Sisters: Early History of Woman Astronomers 

The Madam Curie Complex

Ma Kiley: Railroad Telegrapher 

Females and Women

MARIA MITCHELL QUARTER DOLLAR CIRCULATING COMMEMORATIVE

Maria Mitchell deserves to be honored on the newest series of U.S. circulating commemorative quarter dollars, 2022-2025. She was the first American woman to be a professional astronomer, and one of the first American astronomers acknowledged by both European and American academic communities. An informally educated autodidact, she became the first professor of astronomy at Vassar. The spotlight of fame fell on her when she was the first person in history to discover a comet using a telescope. The year was 1847. She was 29 years old. For her work, she won the gold medal offered by the King of Denmark. 

Her name is pronounced “ma-RYE-ah” (like the wind in Paint Your Wagon). Born on August 1, 1818, she was raised on Nantucket where her father was a naturalist and banker. Her parents, William and Lydia (Coleman) Mitchell, were Quakers and her commitment to social equality was aligned to their faith. Largely self-taught, she attended classes at local schools, one of them run by her father. She studied mathematics (of course) and also learned astronomy, surveying, and navigation. One of her father’s occupations was setting the chronometers of whalers and other ships that harbored at Nantucket, and she did the work when he was away on the mainland, often at Harvard College.[1]

Annie J. Cannon
commemorative 
dollar coin 2019

 When she was 12, she and her father calculated an exact position of their home by measuring the Great Solar Eclipse of February 12, 1831. Two years later, she was setting chronometers for ship captains. When her father won a contract to work for the US Coast Survey, she accompanied him. 

 

Mitchell owned a Dollond-style achromatic ship’s telescope (3-inch aperture; 46-inch focal length).[2] In 1847, the family lived in the Pacific Bank Building on Main Street in Nantucket because her father was the head cashier there. She observed from the roof. On October 1, she saw a faint star that was new to her; and she soon verified that it was not listed in the tables and charts. Tracking it, she determined that it was a comet publishing her calculations of its orbit in Silliman’s Journal of Yale (later known as the American Journal of Science). That helped to secure her claim to primacy of discovery and the winning of the gold medal.[3] 

 

Email to the Board of the American Astronomical Society
recommending the Maria Mitchell Quarter.
(As with several others to astronomy leaderships, no replies have come.)

Later, she moved briefly to Boston and computed the orbit of Venus for the US Nautical Almanac [1]. She served as the librarian of the Boston Athenaeum and then toured Europe on her own, meeting with John Herschel, George Biddle Airy, and other astronomers. She returned to the States, and in 1865 she was appointed professor of astronomy at Vassar College, which, ironically enough paid her less than other professors, though not for her lack a university degree. She took her students to observations of the transit of Venus and solar eclipses (1869, 1878, and others) in Nebraska and Colorado. 

20 Prominent American Women To Be Honored On US 2022-2025 Quarters

Public Law No: 116-330 (01/13/2021 here 

at https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/1923/text.

The Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020

“(C) SINGLE PROMINENT AMERICAN WOMAN ON EACH QUARTER DOLLAR.—The design on the reverse side of each quarter dollar issued under this subsection shall be emblematic of the accomplishments and contributions of one prominent woman of the United States, and may include contributions to the United States in a wide spectrum of accomplishments ...

Nominations for women to be honored on the new series of coins are being curated in part by the Smithsonian Women’s History Initiative (https://womenshistory.si.edu and WomensHistory@si.edu).

 

Notes 

[1] The Maria Mitchell Foundation biography here: https://www.mariamitchell.org/about-maria-mitchell

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Mitchell (of course; but follow the footnotes)

[3] “Maria Mitchell at 200: a pioneering astronomer who fought for women in science, “ Richard Holmes, Nature, 26 June 2018, here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05458-6. 

Other Resources
“A Woman in Eclipse: Maria Mitchell and the Great Solar Expedition of 1878,” by David Barron, here: https://undark.org/2017/08/17/wilo-maria-mitchell-astronomer-eclipse/
“This Month in Astronomical History: Maria Mitchell,” History of Astronomy Division, American Astronomical Society, here:
https://aas.org/posts/news/2020/09/month-astronomical-history-august-2020

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

She’s Such a Geek! 

Females and Women 

Bringing Philosophy to Athens: Aspasia of Miletus 

Hypatia of Alexandria 

The Madame Curie Complex 

 

Females and Women

Recounting Barbara Gregory’s long and successful career at the American Numismatic Association, the organization’s own press releases were not alone in referring to her as a “female editor.” Ultimately, it seemed to me to be benign sexism. I found it to be a way to dismiss a person by placing them in an ascribed class. The essential problem would be impossible to ignore if we were to substitute other arbitrary distinctions of race, religion, class, or culture. Disguising our cognitive dissonance with soubriquets only makes it harder to ignore. I take my lead on this from Elizabeth Samet, professor of English at the U.S. Military Academy. 

“If the history of the military profession presents certain obstacles to women’s ambitions for meaningful service today, women in uniform likewise destabilize a military culture founded on essentially chivalric traditions. One linguistic solution to this problem attempts to obscure the presence of women by referring to them clinically with the noun females. Imagine a cultural history that boasted Euripides’ The Trojan Females, D. H. Lawrence’s Females in Love, and the Stephen Sondheim gem “The Females Who Lunch.” Already drilled in the replacement of women by females, my students don’t recognize how jarring it is to hear the term in the middle of some astute literary analysis. It completely ruins the mood. Such terminology appeals especially to those cadets and officers most disquieted by the presence of women in their ranks.” -- Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point by Elizabeth D. Samet (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux; 2007).

Allow me to suggest that all of the praise sublimates to condescension if we construct an equal and opposite narrative.

On April 30, 2012, Steve Roach, previously Coin World's associate editrix, became the first male editrix of Coin World in fifty years. On May 1, 2020, Caleb Noel became the first male editrix of The Numismatist in 38 years. Males have long been making inroads into the domains of famous journalists, writers, publishers, and editrices such as Nellie Bly, Clare Boothe Luce, Katharine Graham, Gloria Steinem, and Arianna Huffington. It should be no surprise, when you consider popular writers such as Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken, and Philip Roth, whose works are often considered the equal of Jane Austen, the Brontës, and Dorothy Parker, and even today sell almost as well as Danielle Steele and E. L. James.

The foundation of that hypocrisy stands out to me because most of the editors I have worked for were women. The reasons may be cultural or inherent, ascribed or attained but the fact is impossible to ignore. So, I have to ask: By what right do people who happen to be born (apparently) male declare that the majority of humans are “just as good” as they are? 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Madame Curie Complex

Bringing Philosophy to Athens: Aspasia of Miletos

Ma Kiley: Railroad Telegrapher

She's Such a Geek!

Thoughts on "Soldier's Heart"

Why Do Young Women Growl?

If you listen to young women, about age 35 and below, you will notice that they growl.  They also end every sentence and many phrases with an uplifting question tone.  The two mannerisms combine to deliver a distinctly female way of talking that is also demarcated by age. Whatever their other sins, Sarah Palin and Elizabeth Warren do not growl.

You can hear this on the radio, especially news radio, and most especially on public radio.  I do not know that this affectation is a cultural consequence of progressivism.  But that is where I hear it because that is what I listen to on the radio.  We have a Fox radio affiliate here in Austin, KLBJ-AM/FM, but the only deejays I hear there are middle aged white men.  And I do believe that this does cross ethnic lines: from certainly some to perhaps many young Black women who are college educated also mimic this linguistic artifact.

I noticed this first perhaps five years ago.  But thinking back, I suspect that this began in California with the “Valley Girls” of the 1970s.  I finally decided to log a few convenience samplings for my citations. We have several non-profit radio stations here in Austin, and our NPR affliate is KUT-FM.

KUT Kate McKee

“Why Don’t Austin Community College Trustees Represent Specific Districts?”

(October 20, 2016)

http://kut.org/post/why-dont-austin-community-college-trustees-represent-specific-districts

KUT  Audrey McGlinchy

(Audrey is from Brooklyn, NY)

http://kut.org/post/why-dont-austin-community-college-trustees-represent-specific-districts

KUT Ashley Lopez

“What Mexico Can Teach Texas About Birth Control”

http://kut.org/post/what-mexico-can-teach-texas-about-birth-control

NPR All Things Considered

Melissa Block

“Going for the Gold…”

(September 8, 2016)

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetorch/2016/09/08/493111873/after-going-for-gold-athletes-can-feel-the-post-olympic-blues

What is interesting here is that the first two women that she interviews also growl.

NPR Rae Ellen Bichell

http://www.npr.org/people/488507788/rae-bichell

NPR Here and Now

Sarah Cliff

Perhaps the best offender I found right away is Alyssa Rosenberg  of the Washington Post. She was interviewed for her series “IN POP CULTURE, THERE ARE NO BAD POLICE SHOOTINGS:  DRAGNETS, DIRTY HARRYS AND DYING HARD: PART III” which was published on Wednesday, October 26, 2016, and for which she was interviewed on NPR’s “All Things Considered” Thursday, October 27, 2016, by Kelly McEvers. McEvers also growls, but Rosenberg is deep into it. Here: http://www.npr.org/2016/10/27/499637421/washington-post-reporter-explores-how-pop-culture-influences-views-of-police

In this last example, the interviewer, McEvers, growls in a more typical fashion, at the end of sentences or at the end of significant clauses within sentences.

I could suggest several origins.  For one thing, we all project tentative, unproven beliefs. “I think, like, maybe, there is no God?, in the traditional sense?, but there might be a Higher Power? out there on, like, a higher metaphysical? plane.”  That just begs for growling and upward tones.  Valley Girls of the 1970s would have been unsure about homework but certain about make-up and clothing, like ya know what I mean?

Regardless of the etiology of this linguistic disease – if it is that and not a mutation? with survival benefits?—it remains a cultural artifact.  I first learned of this studying Japanese.  (I had two college classes in "Japanese for Business" before working for Kawasaki and Honda.)  Japanese women speak in different tones than Japanese men. They also have different words for the same things.  I understand that this phenomenon of gender differentiation in active language is not limited to the Japanese, only that I learned of it while studying their language and culture.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Virtues of Aviation Culture   

Police in a Global Culture 

A Culture of Reality, Reason, and Freedom
The Problem of Cultural Patrimony

Hypatia of Alexandria

Two events are sign posts along the 1000-year history of ancient Rome: the death of Cato the Younger, and the death of Hypatia of Alexandria.  They point to the collapse of the republic and the waning of the empire.

Marcus Porcius Cato the Younger took his own life at Utica rather than surrender to Gaius Julius Caesar.  That act of defiance was rediscovered when Britons relearned classic literature in the Renaissance.  Cato became a symbol for British republicans John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in the early 18^th century.  The name was rejuvenated by the Charles G. Koch Foundation at the suggestion of Murray N. Rothbard to create the Cato Institute.

Helen Mirren and Rachel Weisz: Hypatia Re-imaged

We have no Hypatia Institute.  Hypatia is a journal of feminist philosophy.  A type font from Adobe also carries the name.  Nonetheless, the roots of Hypatia’s life story ran long and deep before her flower blossomed in the 19^th century.  Like Aspasia of Miletus, she was rediscovered and then reinvented.  Artists painted her in dramatic vignettes.  Most recently, a 2009 cinematic account of her final year was created by director Alejandro Amenábar working with writer and director Mateo Gila and a team of producers headed by Fernando Bovaira.  Justin Pollard was the historical advisor. In that film, Rachel Weisz played Hypatia. However, the most reliable floruit suggests Helen Mirren as a better choice.  We agree that Hypatia died in 415. Depending on the clues you accept, she was born between 350 and 370.

"Although this outrageous crime has made Hypatia a powerful symbol of intellectual freedom and feminist aspiration to this day, Deakin makes clear that the important intellectual contributions of her life’s work should not be overshadowed by her tragic death." – Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician and Martyr by Michael A. B. Deakin. (From the publisher’s website.) 

The facts of her life come mostly from three sources: The Ecclesiastical History by Socrates Scholasticus, a fifth-century writer in Constantinople; the Chronicle of John of Nikiu, a Coptic bishop of about 696; and the surviving letters of Synesius of Cyrene, a wealthy intellectual of the fifth century.  Synesius was a pupil of Hypatia. 

Deakin asserts – and it seems accepted – that the version we have today of Ptolemy’s Almagest is the work that Hypatia edited.  Developing his story only from English translations, Deakin also attributes commentaries on the works of Diophantus, Apollonius, and Euclid to her. The commentary on Euclid was perhaps a continuation of the edition begun by her father, Theon.

Hypatia type font created
by Thomas Phinney of Adobe

In addition, Hypatia probably constructed or had built for her several complex mechanisms.  Whether they were for computing time (water clock) or some other purpose (hydrometer for specific gravity) is not clear.  She apparently did create an improved astrolabe. 

In the recent movie, we witness Hypatia edging toward the heliocentric model of the solar system and even speculating that the orbits may be elliptical.  It is tempting to build sand castles on bedrock.  The blog Armarium Magnum, which is dedicated to books about ancient Western cultures, took the movie apart in a lengthy complaint. We also had a brief discussion on Rebirth of Reason.  Unfortunately, the official movie company website was taken down. Of course, you can find trailers and more on YouTube.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Aspasia of Miletus

She’s Such a Geek!

Nerd Nation 4.5: Mayim Bialik

Nerd Nation 2.0: McKellar, Portman, and Day

Lovers Offline

“Lovers Offline”

Anonymous, Telegraphic Journal, January 15, 1875.

(written by a telegraph clerk on the back of a message form)

In times that are over, full many a lover

Was won by the power of electrical fire;

There was working; then sporting -- conversing, then courting,

And letters by post followed wooing by wire.

Telegraph Vignette uncredited from
A Brief History of Communications
by IEEE Communications Society, 2002. 

The couples then mated are closer related,
And many a one who was helped in his work,

By patience, attention, and care beyond mention,

Has found a kind helpmeet in his fellow clerk.

But, now, things are changing, stern rules are estranging

The workers, and striving all likings to baulk;

Lest people should choose them, and Government lose them,

"The Staff, on the wires, are forbidden to talk!"

Odd moments of leisure, once given to pleasure,

Are spent in dull idleness through the day;

And kept thus asunder, can anyone wonder

If patience, at times quite exhausted, gives way?

It is so annoying, one might be enjoying

The cosiest chat with the nicest of friends;

But there's always the fear now that somebody's near now,

And "taking us down from the slip" at both ends.

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Love, Loss, and Redemption in Atlas Shrugged

She's Such a Geek

Natalie Portman, Danica McKellar, Felicia Day

Ma Kiley: Railroad Telegrapher

Ma Kiley: Railroad Telegrapher

Thomas C. Jepsen’s biography, Ma Kiley: the Life of a Railroad Telegrapher (Texas Western Press, University of Texas at El Paso, 1997) comes from Mattie Kuhn’s autobiography, “The Bug and I: Parts 1-4,” Railroad Magazine, April-June 1950.  Jepsen took his lead from the narrative and tracked down the records that substantiated the story.  Just as we have usernames, so did telegraphers; and Mattie Kuhn called herself Ma Kiley for 40 years, actually some years after she began working.  Her first message was on the death of Queen Victoria, January 22, 1901.  She had learned to send and receive some months before, desperate to earn a living after leaving the first of several husbands.

By that time, women were a visible minority, first in railroading (from 1832), then in telegraphy (from 1846).  Jepsen’s introduction and his annotations to Mattie Kuhn’s story provide footnotes to sources.  At the end of the book, he cites Carolyn Marvin’s When Old Technologies Were New (1989) to substantiate some of the parallels between women in telegraphy and women in computing. The computer is, after all, only a prodigious telegraph; and the roots of ASCII are in Morse Code.

When not a boomer pounding brass, Kuhn also waited tables, drew water, and even sold life insurance.  She knew nothing but hard work and hard fortune when not making money as a telegrapher, though she did break down and cry when another telegrapher bought her dinner and a train ticket; and slipped five dollars into a magazine - as much a gesture of camaraderie as any deference to her womanhood. Usually, she rode free: her pins for the Commercial Telegraphers Union of American and the Order of Railroad Telegraphers were her pass. 

They were different lines of work.  Railroads were 20 years slow in figuring out that they could manage and control trains with the only thing that traveled faster.  In addition, commodities brokers, hotels, banks, and many other enterprises also needed telegraphers.  Mattie Kuhn worked for both.  So, she belonged to both unions. 

The telephone impacted telegraphy but did not finally make it obsolete until 1940.  The telegraph was generally more reliable when accuracy and precision were at a premium. Paper tapes for recording messages went out of common use in the 1850s, but still were installed when legal issues demanded a recording.  Compared to that, a telephone call was mere hearsay.

Mattie Kuhn worked until 1942.  Encouraged by a published author she met, she spent eleven days typing up her narrative. She sent her story to Railroad Magazine, as did many veterans.  The age of steam was passing.  The telegraph was gone.  “I can find no one who speaks my language,” she wrote.  It is not known when Mattie Kuhn taught herself to type.  Telegraphers owned their own typewriters, as they owned their own “bugs” - Vibroplex sending and receiving keys.  

The telegraph and the typewriter were both machines that liberated women by rewarding their intelligence while granting no privilege to men’s strength.  The first female telegrapher was Sarah G. Begley in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1846.  Elizabeth Cogley was the first woman employed as a railroad telegrapher, in 1852, for  the Ohio and Atlantic Telegraph Company. (Railroads and commercial companies found a hand-in-glove relationship with the railroads providing rights-of-way, and telegraph companies providing operators who also worked as station clerks.)

Typically, women were paid less, on the assumption that they would soon marry, though this seems statistically not at all true.  Mattie Kuhn eventually demanded and got the wages she wanted wherever she worked, but that was based on a long string of references for both railroad and commercial offices – and her own strength of character.  She was willing to walk away from a deal she did not like.  The telegraph was the medium by which operators sent out inquiries, just as software developers use the Internet.  Like today’s programmers, telegraphers also had to know hardware.  Mattie Kuhn passed ad hoc examinations in the wiring of switchboards, the maintenance of circuits and batteries, and the proper grounding of her own direct current device.

She never recovered from the death of her second child.  She left him at an orphanage, apparently with money for his care, but she returned to find him unconscious from fever and he never woke up.  It was a long time before she could cry. 

She herself missed three months of work because of typhoid fever.  Suffering from appendicitis, she was given an array of concoctions before paying for her own transportation and surgery. 

The book runs 138 pages, notes and all.  It is dense with feeling, insight, and expression. 

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

She's Such a Geek

Mayim Bialik

Aspasia of Miletus

The Family Business

The classic entities of businesses, households, and governments might be useful constructs for conceptualizing market operations, but, really, like planets, meteors, and stars, they all must obey the same same general laws – and distinctions among them can be blurred easily. In fact, every family is a business. The most successful family businesses are those that perceive themselves as such.  Academic economics - even from "free market" professors - teaches from false assumptions.

"Households produce goods and services for their own consumption and not for the market."
Firms have internal accountants, rather than hiring accounting firms – which they also do. Shipping and receiving, sales, etc., all could be contracted but are produced internally. If nothing else, households export labor – and capital goods such as the lawn mower and dishwasher enable that. Hans Rosling's TED Talk, "The Magic Washing Machine" (here) praises the liberating power of this capital good. We just moved from Ann Arbor to Austin. I have no idea how many fractional horsepower motors I packed – drills, sander, saber saws; mixer, blender. We have several computers networked here. I did not count the obsolete 5.25-inch diskettes I dumped. (My Carmen Sandiego and SimAnt were still pretty fresh.) The tax laws that allow businesses to write off obsolete capital do not apply to households, but they should.

"Households do not exist in an environment that could meaningfully be called competitive."
The Capulets and Montagues would disagree, as would the Rothschilds and Warburgs. They competed against each other and cooperated in joint ventures. Even the families that do not understand this at least must export labor. In that, they compete. 

The two axioms in bold come from a paper by Steven Horwitz and Peter Lewin, "Heterogeneous human capital, uncertainty, and the structure of plans: A market process approach to marriage and divorce," in The Review of Austrian Economics (2008; 21:1-21; available here.) The paper offers much to consider. It nonetheless repeated many of the basic flaws of academic economics, and did so from a middle American point of view. 

 It is true that the institution of marriage in modern America has changed over the past 100 years. However, the authors over-reached by ignoring the many folkways that define "family" and "family business" in other cultures. Dowery and bride price are real and functional economic considerations. In ancient China, a woman’s production of silk cloth was the creation of household savings – and she knew it. In rural America of the 19th-20th centuries, cash income from the sale of butter and eggs was the wife's own.

Feminists rightly pointed out that "women's work" i.e., housework is undervalued: washing, cooking, shopping, caring for children, cleaning, gardening, and all the other tasks are not income; and their costs of production are not tallied. Neither is "man's work." Mowing the lawn, cleaning the gutters, and the other chores are invisible to economists.

This reflects another error in academic economics: confusion about consumer goods and capital goods. Easily, capital goods are tools that are employed to create other goods or services. Of consumables, food is perhaps the paradigm. But food is also the primary capital good.

Capital goods such as machineries wear out; they are abandoned when obsolete.  Also, they can be reconfigured, recombined, or redeployed to other ends. A factory worker may require protective clothing, a capital good. But an office worker also requires special clothing. Yet, the prints and patterns, styles, fads, and fashions are not recognized for their productive power.

We all produce... and consume... The laws of economics are not to be ignored, no matter what convenient labels allow us to isolate actors and their actions.  Governments, businesses, and families are helpful concepts when considering markets, but they are not essentially different from each other in any economic sense.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

A Man's Home is His Market 

Capitalist Culture 

The Success of the WEIRD People 

Engines of Creation 

Entrepreneurship