On Sunday night I was standing on the banks of the Charles River (Quinobequin), listening to the alewives slapping against the rocks and watching the full flower moon go eclipse just before the advance of a great, dark cloud. The moon was red, and the riverbanks and the bridges were full of people, looking up.
I thought, in honor of the eclipse, that I would share with you some New England women whose work furthered astronomical understanding.
Mabel Loomis Todd was the wife of Amherst College astronomer David Peck Todd, though she is better known as the first editor of Emily Dickinson’s poems, and even better known still for being Emily’s brother Austin Dickinson’s lover, in a particularly high-stakes, high-Victorian case of homewrecking (seriously, the public narrative about her is so ridiculous I will not even link to it). But what I want you to know about her was that Mabel was lusty, in the best and most life-affirming way, and she took her aesthetics into space.
Todd and her husband traveled around the world to document solar eclipses with an international cadre of eclipse-followers, using new optical and photographic techniques. She wrote Total Eclipses of the Sun in 1894. The book included many illustrations, some of which Todd, an artist and singer, made herself, which are just breathtaking.
I love how Todd uses the word “wonderful” here, to describe the “ascending spiral” of the solar protuberance produced by colliding jets of hydrogen, sodium, and magenesium vapors. In moments like these she is able to completely inhabit both the aesthetic possibilities of the sun, and the technical specificities of new scientific understanding, in the way an earlier generation might have combined religious undersanding with science. You can check out the whole book here.
Mabel Loomis Todd was also a history lady. In the 1890s-early 1900s she founded a chapter of the DAR in Amherst, MA (she was, like me, a descendent of the Mother Annsister, Priscilla Alden) as well as the Amherst Historical Society, creating the beginnings of its collection. She collected Japanese artifacts on an expedition to Japan (they are now in the collection of the Peabody-Essex Museum), where she was the first white woman to climb Mt. Fuji. She traveled around the nation and published in major periodicals, telling stories of her global travels. She also became a conservationist at the same time as many other white women of her set: working with the early Audubon Society to protect the Everglades and Hog Island, Maine, where she died while camping in her 70s in the 1930s (!).
What was she searching for, in the past, in the ocean, in the sky, in bed? Most accounts of Mabel remark upon these interests and passions side-by-side - “wasn’t she a remarkable woman?” - but don’t really consider what how they might have worked together. I find myself wondering how local history in rural Massachusetts might have elicited the passion of such a world traveler; how the aesthetics of a solar eclipse resonated for her alongside collections of antique New England artifacts. My guess is that there was something about modern life - about the pace of change, and discovery - that was so exciting in her breathless youth, but which she saw become rapacious. The historical preservation movement began in this time, as direct memories of Colonial life were fading and the stories of early colonization transformed into myth, but also as automobiles, radios, and telephones transformed space and time. Mabel Loomis Todd was one of the ones who remembered how things were, and didn’t want anyone to forget (if you’re interested in another character like this, check out my interview with Curator Shana Garr, who worked with the collection of Clara Endicott Sears at Fruitlands Museum). My guess also is that Todd was hungry for beauty, and to express herself, and did it in the ways that were available to her. She stopped singing publicly when she was 40.
The era between the Civil War and World War Two was a changing time for women, intellectually and professionally. Radcliffe College for Women was founded in 1879, which meant that women (with enough money and willing families) were able to pursue higher education, rather than solely focusing on self and community education. Mabel Loomis Todd attended the New England Conservatory, which was known for educating women musicians. Though these women usually didn’t become academics (they couldn’t even vote, of course, until 1920), the professional disciplines weren’t formalized enough yet to decide who had the authority to publish or lecture on a topic; there was a true flowering of women publishing on travel and science and history.
Around this same time, the Harvard Computers were a group of women scientists who worked in the Harvard Observatory making astronomical measurements. Both projects relied on emerging photographic technology to better understand the cosmos. The Harvard Computers, essentially, calculated measurements from the glass plates that were created by taking photographs through telescopes, using prisms. Henrietta Swann Leavitt, for example, is known as the woman who figured out how to “measure the universe.”
Harvard University Archives, UAV 630.271 (391). Harvard Library, olvwork432043
If we had an annsisters book club I would choose The Glass Universe as one of our books, because I have not read it yet and it looks amazing. What got my attention when I first learned about the Computers was that today, there are conversations going on about how to conserve these glass plates, because the traces of the women’s handwriting on the plates makes them less astronomicially useful (which they still very much are!) but the handwriting is an essential reason why the plates are important artifacts. Here is a key thing about studying people who study the world: whether historians or astronomers, the records they make are as much about them as what they are studying, and they leave behind traces of themselves in their research. And as with anything we preserve or remember, we are making choices about what is important, and what gets left out.
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Glass Plate Collection
Here’s one of Willamina Fleming’s notebooks. I love how the marbling on the cover looks like a nebula of stars.
For decades, the traces of these women were not connected to names. Only recently have their notebooks begun to be catalogued and identified with their makers. People just “forgot they were there.” As is so often the case with women’s history, it’s not that women weren’t making things, weren’t being creative and intellectual and groundbreaking. It’s that the memory of their work was erased, often because they worked without the professional credentials and affiliations that the academic fields were beginning to require. Willamina P. S. Fleming, a single-mother who had recently immigrated from Scotland, was originally the astronomy professor’s maid. Here’s an article written in 1901 by Miss Annie Cannon with Prof. Edward Pickering as co-author (Cannon became the manager of the Computers in later years), which cites the work of Mrs. Fleming, as well as Miss Maury and Miss L.D. Wells. Fleming is credited with having discovered the Horsehead Nebula in the constellation Orion.
Section of plate B2312 (1888) showing Orion's belt and the horsehead nebula. Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Glass Plate Collection.
But now…Project PHaEDRA is transcribing all of the notebooks by these women, through crowdsourcing! Some of the other women being recorded with this work are: Anna Winlock, Selina Bond, Nettie A. Farrar, Antonia Maury, whose grandfather is credited as the first person to photograph the moon, and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who later received a PhD in astrophysics. As you can seee from the links, there is so much to learn about these women and their research. Enjoy!
In the News
Mabel Loomis Todd had one daughter. I am kinda wondering why, if her sex life was so notoriously active. Maybe she was managing her reproduction? This amazing reporting by Jessica Bruder talks about another area of science in which women’s knowledge and labor was systematically co-opted by a male-dominated profession in the early 20th century: midwifery and abortion. It may come as no surprise to you as an Conventicle reader that this co-option also had to do with white racial replacement anxiety! In the late 19th century, immigration to this land was increasing, and the white old guard was losing their political and financial (and numerical) prominence, both locally and nationally. The solution? Make sure those white women descended from the founding mothers were having babies. It’s another part of the same story of women in white supremacy: they curated the memories, and they were supposed to provide the next generation to tell the stories to.
This new resource guide about abortion in New England is really useful.
Solidarity Space
I thought I’d finish this week by sharing some organizations who are working to support reproductive justice and domestic workers’ rights today, since this work is a space of solidarity across the experience of womxn, across time. This is somewhat in honor of Mother’s Day, or as I like to call it, “Reproductive Labor Day,” which is a time when I think of both the work of gestating and birthing and nourishing new life, and all the domestic work that happens after. In the tradition of materialist feminism, this is labor that we need to talk about, and make a redistributive priority. Perhaps Annie Cannon hired a maid so that she would have more time for astronomy. That maid, whether she became an astrophysicist or not, is part of our story too.
So: I began by looking at national networks that support local grassroots work with capacity building and financial support, because they are the ones who are in dialogue with the communities of struggle everyday, and know where resources ought to go. Groundswell Fund is working to move $80M to grassroots organizing led by women of color and transgender and gender non-conforming people of color by 2026. Then I looked at their grantees in my state. I did the same thing with the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Some Massachusetts organizations I found are MA Coalition of Domestic Workers and Matahari Women Worker Center. There is also an effort to create a community birth center in Boston, serving and run by BIPOC womxn, that is in the middle of a capital campaign.
What work are you doing in this space? We’d love to know.