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Women Astronomers at Harvard and Radcliffe
Williamina Paton Fleming, 1857–1911
The first curator of astronomical photographs at the Harvard College Observatory, Fleming was also the first of the women “computers” to work on classifying stars in terms of their spectra.
Antonia Caetana De Paiva Pereira Maury, 1866–1952
The second of the “computers” to classify spectra at the Harvard College Observatory, Maury devised a system of classification that revealed the difference between supergiant stars like Betelgeuse and dwarfs like our sun. A niece of noted scientist Henry Draper, she graduated from Vassar in 1887.
Annie Jump Cannon, 1863–1941
The third of the “computers,” Cannon devised a system that allowed her to classify stars very rapidly, and she eventually catalogued more than two hundred thousand.
Henrietta Swan Leavitt, 1868–1921
An 1892 graduate of Radcliffe College—the first among the “computers”—Leavitt discovered the correlation between true brightnesses and pulsation periods of the stars called Cepheid variables, a vital step that led to scientists’ discovering the existence of other galaxies and the expansion of the universe.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, 1900–1979
Harvard’s first graduate student in astronomy and the first woman to receive a PhD at Harvard, Payne-Gaposchkin was also the first woman outside of the medical school to become a full professor at Harvard. Her doctoral thesis showed that nearly all stars have the same chemical composition, and that they consist mostly of hydrogen and helium, the latter conclusion disbelieved by older male astronomers until they confirmed it a decade or more later.
Dorrit Hoffleit ’28, AM ’32, PhD ’38, 1907–
The oldest living American woman astronomer, Hoffleit spent twenty-five years at Radcliffe and Harvard before going to Yale University, where she is now a senior research astronomer emeritus. At the Harvard College Observatory, she became an expert at determining spectroscopically the absolute brightness of stars. She knew Maury, Cannon, and Payne-Gaposchkin.
A group of staff members at the Harvard College Observatory, circa 1917. Left to right: Ida E. Woods, Evelyn F. Leland, Florence Cushman, Grace R. Brooks, Mary H. Vann, Henrietta S. Leavitt, Mollie E. O'Reilly, Mabel A. Gill, Alta M. Carpenter, Annie J. Cannon, Dorothy W. Block, Arville D. Walker
Photos by Harvard College Observatory; Harvard College Observatory; Dorrit Hoffleit; Harvard College Observatory
