Icome from the University of Bath and so Ithought it appropriate to start with a Bathastronomer, Caroline Herschel. Caroline

Herschel was born in 1750 into a large familyin Germany. Her father was a military musician;her mother was a hausfrau who was mystifiedby intellectual interests and who could neitherread nor write. Caroline’s brothers all trained asmusicians but she was refused an educationbecause she was a girl. Her father advised herthat she was unlikely to marry because she wasneither handsome nor rich; her role was to bea housekeeper for one of her brothers. Shebecame housekeeper to one of her elder broth-ers, Jacob. Jacob would not allow her to haveFrench lessons but he would, however, allowher to go to needlework classes, provided all herefforts went into making clothes for him. A sis-ter’s function, after all, was to make life com-fortable for her brothers. Another of herbrothers, William (a name that will be familiarto you), moved to England and bought Carolineout of Jacob’s service by paying for a maid toreplace her. He brought Caroline to Bath, wherehe was based, to train as a singer. She was 22at the time, with a nice soprano voice and shewas prepared to perform as a soloist providedWilliam was the conductor. She didn’t have theconfidence to work with anyone else. On com-ing to England she had to learn English, ofcourse, but she also learnt arithmetic and book-keeping. I have to say she was a serious-mindedwoman and found Bath social life and etiquettea little trying and irrelevant. She was physicallyvery slight and looked frail but I think she wasactually made of tough stuff.

William had been up to then earning his liv-ing as a musician. He conducted, he composed,he played various instruments and there wasquite a lot of music on the Bath–Bristol circuit,then as now. But shortly after Caroline arrived,William started making his own telescopes andhe became more and more hooked. Carolineregretted that every room in the house hadbecome a workshop and that the lace ruffleswere getting spattered with molten pitch. Whilemaking a seven-foot mirror, he worked contin-uously on it for 16 hours; Caroline fed himfork-fulls of food so that he wouldn’t have totake his hands off the job. In 1781 in Bath,William discovered the planet Uranus and he

was appointed Court Astronomer by GeorgeIII. They then moved to Windsor to be nearerthe court and had frequent distinguished visi-tors. What seems to have happened is that if theroyals had visitors and didn’t know what to dowith them, they bundled them into a coach andtook them round to the Herschels’ place to seethe telescopes. The Herschels’ visitors’ bookreads like a Debrett’s or Who’s Who of late18th-century society. If William was away,Caroline showed them the telescopes and itbecame very clear to everybody that Carolineunderstood the telescopes every bit as well asWilliam and could deputize for him excellently.

William and Caroline developed a wonderfulobserving system that allowed one of them toremain dark-adapted while the other worked ata small table with a light and recorded the data.Typically, William worked at the telescope call-ing out the transits while Caroline sat at a smalltable within earshot equipped with a clock, penand ink, record book and pointer showing thetelescope’s azimuth. As William called out thetransit she noted the time for each one. Theydiscovered variable stars, the ice caps on Mars,the heights of the mountains of the Moon.They made catalogues of thousands of stars,nebulae, clusters and even began to considerwhat they called “the structure of the heavens”.They observed whenever the weather permittedand several times when other, weaker soulswould have baled out. Caroline records whenthe Thames’ flood water was lapping at thebottom of the garden and a night when thetemperature dropped to 11 °F – the ink in theinkwell froze, and William’s feet froze to theground! Caroline was moved to protest, justslightly, on that occasion.

In 1787 the King gave Caroline an annualsalary as well as William being CourtAstronomer. We believe this is the first occasionthat a woman was so paid. OccasionallyWilliam was away and in these circumstancesCaroline observed on her own using a telescopeWilliam had given her – I think a wide-field tele-scope. With this telescope she found eight

comets and computed their orbits. She alsofound several star clusters and a number of newnebulae. She knew the constellations so wellthat anything strange like a comet stood outinstantly to her. She became known throughoutEurope as an astronomer in her own right.Typically, over breakfast after a night’s observ-ing, she would ask William questions and thatway taught herself spherical trigonometry andlogarithms. During the day, after these workingbreakfasts, she wrote up her observations, cal-culated stellar positions, prepared cataloguesfor publication, ran the house and perhaps gotsome sleep – then repeated it all the next night.

When William married, Caroline no longerhad to keep house for him and she got a littlemore life of her own, but I think she was stillvery focused on William and astronomy. When William died she was lost. He had been

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Women have made significant contributions to the development of astronomy as a science,yet their work has been restricted, unregarded and little recognized. Here I outline somesignificant careers and show how these talented and determined women overcame therestrictions on their lives to make their marks. Their solid achievements came at considerablecost and attracted little professional recognition. I then consider how far astronomy hasprogressed at the present day. There remain limited numbers of professional womenastronomers; what still stops women choosing this career?

Abstract

A celebration of woJocelyn Bell Burnell ponders theachievements and status of womenin astronomy, past, present andfuture.

1: A statue of William and Caroline Herschelin the garden of the refurbished Herschelhouse in Bath. (Bob Mizon)

her lifeline: he had rescued her and given her alife. Whenever anybody attempted to praise her,she reflected the praise back to William. Shewas very self-effacing, apparently without per-sonal ambition and she underestimated her ownabilities. I wonder if this was because that wasthe only way she could be a lady, as defined bysociety, and still do science. I suspect she wascaught between her abilities and achievementsand the prevailing social attitudes that definedwomen as unaccredited assistants.

Ultimately she gained credit. In 1828 theRoyal Astronomical Society gave her a GoldMedal, but that was the first award she everhad, at the age of 78. At age 85, the RAS madeher an honorary member. A few years later theRoyal Irish Academy made her a member, andon her 96th birthday she got a Gold Medalfrom the King of Prussia. She died the following

year. I have enormous respect for her, not justbecause of her Bath connection, and I am sorryshe had to play out her life as an unaccreditedassistant for so much of it.

A revolutionary without a postCecilia Payne-Gaposchkin is another lady forwhom I have very great respect. I’d like to tellyou just a little bit about her life. She was bornin 1900 near Oxford. Her father had been anOxford don who resigned his fellowship inorder to marry; he was aged 56 by the time shewas born. She went to St Paul’s School whereher music teacher was Gustav Holst, who wasso impressed with her abilities that he tried topersuade her to become a professional musi-cian. I believe she played the violin particularlywell. However, she wanted to do science so shesaid no to music, but then had to fight quite

hard to get a science education at school. Shewent to Newnham College, Cambridge to readbiology, and this must have been about 1918,maybe 1919.

At this time, just post-World War I, Eddingtonwas setting up an eclipse expedition to theisland of Principe to attempt to verify some ofEinstein’s theory of relativity. It was also thetime when Rutherford and Bohr, and Einsteinand Heisenberg were coming into the frame.Eddington, however, was responsible for a hugechange in Cecilia Payne’s life. After the eclipseexpedition, he gave a public talk in TrinityGreat Hall and she got a ticket for it. It is inter-esting to note what Cecilia says about that talkby Eddington. This is her description of thatoccasion:

“The great hall was crowded. The speakerwas a slender dark young man. He gave an out-line of the theory of relativity in popular lan-guage that none could do better than he. Hedescribed the Lorentz–Fitzgerald contraction,the Michelson–Morley experiment and its con-sequences. He led up to the shift of the stellarimages near the Sun as predicted by Einsteinand described his verification of the prediction.The result was a complete transformation of myworld-picture … When I returned to my roomI found I could write down the lecture, word forword … For three nights I did not sleep. Theupshot was … I was done with biology, dedi-cated to the physical sciences for ever.”

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men in astronomy

2: Portrait of Caroline Herschel.

3: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin pictured on thecover of her autobiography.

She didn’t ask, she informed theCambridge authorities that she wasswitching to natural sciences. And it wasan exciting time. Rutherford was a lec-turer; Bohr occasionally visited and lec-tured in an incomprehensible accent!Chadwick – all these great names wereher lecturers.

She decided not only that she was keenon astronomy but that she wanted to dopostgraduate work in astronomy. Sheconsulted Eddington, who advised hernot to stay in England. He told her to goto the States, so she went to Harvard towork on stellar spectra. This was at thetime that atomic theory was being devel-oped – and she helped develop itthrough providing astronomical data.She also got involved in an interesting bitof history. Her work as a PhD studentsuggested that hydrogen was a milliontimes more abundant in the stars than itwas on Earth. Shapley, the director ofthe Harvard Observatory where she wasworking, and Henry Norris Russell bothsaid this was clearly impossible. Sheheard them and when she published thisresult she said the abundance was prob-ably inaccurate. But actually she wasright. Subsequently Russell recognizedthat there is lots of hydrogen in the uni-verse but, regrettably, he did notacknowledge her work when he pub-lished that conclusion.

Why didn’t she argue her case withhim? Well, she was just 25. She had beento a girls’ school and a women’s collegeat Cambridge. She was the first-everPhD student in astronomy at Harvardand of course the first female one. Shewas in a foreign country. She was thelone woman scientist in the place. Therewere several women computers but theywere paid to classify spectra, not to bescientists. I judge it took all her persis-tence and assertiveness just to be there.She probably had none left over toargue. She had very little experience ofworking with men and they withwomen, and she probably didn’t knowhow hard to push to be believed; maybeshe’d never have been believed anyway.So she, in a sense, backed away from herown conclusion. But she was right andshe continued to be at the forefront of allsorts of things – an amazing woman.

Cecilia lived almost 80 years, the first80 years of the 1900s. Just think of thechanges there were in that period.Besides Rutherford, Bohr, Einstein andHeisenberg, whom I’ve already men-tioned, understanding of the nature ofthe nebulae – that they were external

galaxies – came in the 1920s; under-standing about the energy sources in starscame by the 1930s; and recognition thatthere was an interstellar medium in thelate 1930s. Then came the expansion ofthe universe, the 3 K radiation, followedby all the things that spun out of theSecond World War: radio astronomy,satellite-based astronomy, the opening upof the electro-magnetic spectrum and thegrowth of high-energy astrophysics.

She saw many revolutions in the sub-ject and she was in the midst of severalof them. She was frequently right up atthe front helping the revolution alongand she was totally unfazed by the paceof change. She was active in researchusing satellite data until her death in her80th year. She never moved back toEngland. She stayed in Massachusettswhere she married a Russian émigré,Sergei Gaposchkin, and they had severalchildren. For many years she was paidout of the observatory’s equipment bud-get. She didn’t have a proper post. Andby my judgement she’s never had therecognition she deserves. And nowthere’s a little rhyme:

Twinkle, twinkle little star, I do not wonder what you are,For by spectroscopic ken, I know that you are hydrogen!

And we heard it first from Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin!

The other Gold MedallistThe Royal Astronomical Society hasbeen handing out Gold Medals for 180years, including the one to CarolineHerschel in 1828. How many GoldMedals do you think we have awardedto women in total in those 180 years?Two? Four? Ten? It’s a lot isn’t it? It istwo! There have been 224 Gold Medalsand two of them have gone to women:Caroline Herschel in 1828 and VeraRubin in 1996. That’s 160-odd yearsbetween the two, and none since 1996.

Vera Rubin didn’t have it too easyeither. She wanted to go to Princeton tostudy – she’s American – but they didn’taccept women. In fact they wouldn’teven send her a prospectus because shewas a woman. She was the first womanto gain time on Palomar Observatory inher own right, in 1965. I think MargaretBurbidge might have been there before,but she got it in her husband Geoff’sname. Vera is noted for two particularpieces of work concerning velocities ofgalaxies. She did a lot of the very impor-tant observational work on the waygalaxies rotate that established that there

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Table 1: Percentage of womenIAU members by countrynational member no. of members % of total % women

Macedonia 1 0.01 100.00Romania 37 0.41 37.84Argentina 106 1.17 34.91Philippines* 3 0.03 33.33Bulgaria 50 0.55 30.00Georgia 17 0.19 29.41France 633 6.96 25.91Lithuania 16 0.18 25.00Peru* 4 0.04 25.00Serbia & Montenegro 24 0.26 25.00Uruguay 4 0.04 25.00Venezuela 13 0.14 23.08Portugal 35 0.38 22.86Italy 443 4.87 20.77Brazil 143 1.57 20.28Hungary 45 0.49 20.00Ukraine 162 1.78 19.14Mexico 91 1 17.58Spain 245 2.69 17.55Russian Federation 377 4.14 17.51Estonia 23 0.25 17.39Tajikistan* 6 0.07 16.67Croatia 13 0.14 15.38Ireland 35 0.38 14.29Malaysia* 7 0.08 14.29Belgium 110 1.21 13.64Greece 105 1.15 13.33Latvia 15 0.16 13.33Finland 54 0.59 12.96Total national members 9027 99.22 12.82Slovakia 32 0.35 12.50Sweden 108 1.19 12.04Denmark 59 0.65 11.86Austria 34 0.37 11.76Indonesia 17 0.19 11.76Turkey 51 0.56 11.76China (Nanjing) 291 3.2 11.68China (Taipei) 28 0.31 10.71New Zealand 28 0.31 10.71Egypt 57 0.63 10.53USA 2457 27.01 10.34Poland 128 1.41 10.16Australia 217 2.39 10.14UK 582 6.4 10.14South Africa 53 0.58 9.43Norway 22 0.24 9.09Netherlands 178 1.96 8.99Chile 56 0.62 8.93Canada 197 2.17 8.63Czech Republic 74 0.81 8.11Armenia 25 0.27 8.00Germany 492 5.41 6.50Korea 67 0.74 5.97India 224 2.46 5.80Switzerland 89 0.98 5.62Israel 64 0.7 4.69Japan 504 5.54 3.97Algeria 4 0.04 0.00Cuba* 5 0.05 0.00Iceland 4 0.04 0.00Iran 24 0.26 0.00Morocco* 7 0.08 0.00Nigeria 4 0.04 0.00Saudi Arabia 12 0.13 0.00Uzbekistan* 11 0.12 0.00Vatican City 5 0.05 0.00Bolivia* – .– .–*interim status

IAU information as at 15 December 2003, taken fromhttp://www.iau.org/organization/member/mship_statist.html.

simply had to be some sort of dark matter pro-viding the extra gravitational attraction – invis-ible material but undoubtedly there. You couldnot explain the rotation of these galaxies with-out a lot of extra invisible gravity, if I can putit that way. She also, along with Ken Ford,found evidence for the peculiar motions of thelocal group, although this work was somewhatdisputed to begin with. It didn’t meet with uni-versal acceptance but it is now recognized asbeing right and providing important informa-tion on motions of galaxies.

Vera is distinguished among women of hergeneration by bringing up four children all ofwhom went on to do PhDs in science and areactive scientists. I also recognize her because ofwhat she has done for the career developmentof young astronomers and how shehas been a representative and a rolemodel for women in astronomy.

Now I have somewhat criticized theRAS for the lack of Gold Medalsawarded to women, but I also have tosay that the RAS has a lot of goodpractices that I think we should recog-nize. As long as I’ve been around, theRAS has always had a fair number ofwomen on its Council, and rather ahigher proportion than you find onmany physical sciences bodies. Some ofyou will be acutely aware that ifyou’ve been organizing a nationalastronomy meeting or a specialist dis-cussion meeting, or something like thatfor the RAS, and have sent in a provi-sional programme, sometimes it isbounced back to you with the com-ment that there aren’t enough women as chairsor speakers in your beautifully crafted pro-gramme. Where we fund meetings, we do watchwhat is euphemistically called “gender balance”,but actually it’s still “gender imbalance”. We tryto ensure that women get some exposure, notoverdoing it, but ensuring women get properrecognition. There’s an active RAS committeeconcerned with women in astronomy and geo-physics. But there’s still something we don’t do.We’re quite good about making women associ-ates, we’re quite good about awarding thenamed lectureships to women, but will we givea medal to a woman? The last time we awardeda medal to a woman was Vera Rubin in 1996.It reminds me of a big university I used to workat that regularly gave women honorary mastersdegrees and gave the men honorary doctorates.Or the system that used to pertain in the nation’shonours system where women got the MBEsand men got the OBEs and CBEs. We’re perpe-trating something like that here, folks, and I’mnot comfortable with it.

A few years ago the International Astron-omical Union had a look at its statistics ofmemberships in countries with more than 50

members. I list the country, the number of mem-bers it has and the percentage that is female,and they are listed in order of female percent-age (see table 1, data from the IAU Bulletin).The UK is not only not very near the top, it’salso well below the average. This is a little sad.I have to say that in this country, IAU mem-bership tends to be restricted to those who have

tenured posts and so it does reflect the moresenior levels, but “could do better” I think is theappropriate comment.

Physics and poetryAnother astronomer that I want to name for you who I think a number of you may haveknown is Rebecca Elson. She was Canadianoriginally and she died in Cambridge in 1999 ata very young age (you’ll find her obituary inA&G 41 2.38). She went to Smith College,Massachusetts, which is a women’s college,where she was converted to astronomy. After ascience degree at Smith she recognized that sheneeded more physics before doing a PhD inastronomy and went to do an MSc in physics atthe University of British Columbia. She almost

didn’t make it. It was a predominantlymale body, unsupportive, and she said“often going in to class felt like walk-ing into the men’s bathroom by mis-take”. She didn’t do well there, partlybecause I think she felt so uncomfort-able, but she did get her MSc and shecame to do a PhD in Cambridge,England.

Becky was much happier there. Shedid a PhD on globular clusters, spend-ing time observing in Australia. Shethen moved to Princeton and, onceagain, she nearly gave up. She tactfullydescribed it as a mismatch betweenher needs and the place, but she foundit fairly hostile. She was at the Institutefor Advanced Studies there. I have tosay, still on the theme of bathrooms,that I spent time in Princeton

University’s Physics Department and thewomen’s bathrooms in that department wereremarkable. They were the men’s bathroomswith only the name on the outside of the doorchanged! What a brilliant way to make womenfeel honoured and welcome members of yourdepartment.

While Becky was at Princeton she started writ-ing poetry and that was her lifeline. Her poetryis wonderful. Becky Elson moved to Harvardwhere life was quite a bit easier, then came backto Cambridge for about the last 10 years of herlife. She died very early of cancer, having latterlyworked quite a lot on the Magellanic Clouds,on stellar populations and star clusters. But itmay be that her poetry lasts even longer thanher science; I think there is a power to it.

“Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”wondered Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady,and I think he is not the only one, certainlyamong the academic community. Well, the firstwomen into a subject area have to be like themen; they don’t survive otherwise. They have tobe, indeed, even better than the men to survive,I judge. The first few women into our field were,I think, exceptionally able. In the next phase

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Let There Always Be Light: Searching for Dark MatterFor this we go out on dark nights, searching for the dimmest stars, for signs of unseen things, to weigh us down, to stop the universe from rushing on and on into its own beyond, til it exhausts itself and lies down cold its last star going out.

What ever they turn out to be, let there be swarms of them, enough for immortality. Always a star where we can warm ourselves. Let there be enough to bring it back from its own edges, to bring us all so close we ignite the bright spark of resurrection.

Rebecca Elson

4: Vera Rubin, circa 1970.

5: Rebecca Elson and, above, one of her poems.

women are made more assertive, braver,better at putting their heads above theparapet. There have been, in recentyears, programmes that offer womenspecial training: mentoring, role models,helping them to make themselves moreassertive and promote themselves. This isknown in the game as the “women asdeficit” model. There are things thatwomen lack, so the story goes, so theseinitiatives are to make them fit in betterto the existing culture in science. It’s notworking terribly well. It’s making a bit ofdifference but, despite this, there’s a lossof people from our field. We know wetrain more PhDs and postdocs than cancontinue in the field. But a higher pro-portion of women than men leave sci-ence, engineering and technology, atevery stage. At every hurdle, there is ahigher proportion of men than women inour field. It’s also true that the womenseem to progress more slowly than themen. They tend to get left behind. Whymight this be? Some of these are hoaryold explanations: lack of childcare facil-ities or the “two body” problem, or it’sthe cultural conditioning that a lot of usgot at school, or maybe the playingfield’s not level. These are all probablytrue at some level. But maybe it’s thewrong game. Maybe the science gamethat we play is not actually attractive toa lot of women.

It’s becoming increasingly a concern ofmine that the climate in which we workin our departments, in our institutions,is not attractive to a lot of women. Iwant to commend particularly – andwant you to take up – a programme thatthe Institute of Physics has recently insti-tuted, called “Site Visits” (some detailscan be found at http://diversity.iop.org/academia/index.html). What happens isthat an enlightened department or headof department will invite a group puttogether by the Institute of Physics tovisit their department and take a look athow it functions, and advise them onwhether or not it’s women-friendly andhow it could be more so. It’s a programme thathas only started very recently and there is nota lot to point to in the way of outcomes yet. Ithink it’s an excellent idea – it’s one of the fewthings I see that I think might produce a cli-mate-change and encourage more women tostay in the field and might improve the genderbalance around us all.

It’s very hard to explain what is wrong withthe climate and I am really at quite a loss at thispoint. There are lots of horrendous things onecan point to. All of us who have been in thefield have a collection of horror stories, yet I

don’t want to maintain that my male colleaguesare being deliberately malevolent. I think atworst it is lack or thought, or lack of enlight-enment. The snag is that as time passes, theseare no longer excuses. It feels a bit like it wouldfeel if one was left-handed in an aggressivelyright-handed society. You can operate, you canfunction, but it’s not quite natural and it costsmore. I have a couple of illustrations, one veryclose to home, the other slightly further way.

The Institute of Physics has a dining club whereI think quite a lot of business is done. On oneoccasion, three or four years ago, I was invited

to be their after-dinner speaker. But I wasinvited to be their after-dinner speaker ontheir Ladies Night. What does that sayabout their perception of the normalmembership if they have a Ladies Night?They have now changed it to a GuestNight. This is what we must considerprogress! And just two or three years ago,as I started as Dean at the University ofBath, the Head of the Medical SciencesDepartment came to me and said, and Iswear this is true, that he was very con-cerned for the future of medicine nowthat more than 50% of the undergradu-ate population was female. Year 2000and people say things like that! I hopethat wouldn’t happen in astronomy, butyou do wonder. You laugh these thingsoff; you have to, there’s no other way tohandle it, but at what cost ultimately?

Now I want to go back to CarolineHerschel, and finish this address with her,just as I started. I want to tell you a littlestory from the RAS and show youanother poem. At one point there was ajoint project between the RAS and theNational Portrait Gallery here in Londonto run a series of lectures about famousastronomers using, mainly, pictures ofthose famous astronomers held by theGallery. I was on Council at the time andthere was at least one other woman – Ithink it was Yvonne Elsworth. Yvonneasked very tactfully, as the list of famousastronomers was being drawn up, if wecould have a woman on the list. Councilchewed on that one for a bit and aftersome talk said yes, we could do a talk onCaroline Herschel. Great. Fast forward amonth to the next Council Meeting. No,it’s not possible to do a talk aboutCaroline Herschel because this is the onlypicture we have of her and she’s notattractive enough! I was gob-smacked.Yvonne recovered her wits quickest Ithink of all of us and finally persuadedCouncil that attractiveness and scientificability were not linked. And there was atalk about Caroline. She’s not terriblyattractive, I admit, but does it matter?

Hang on to this idea about the attractivenessof Caroline Herschel. I’m going to finish witha poem – not quite all of it – by Adrienne Rich,an American feminist author. It was written fol-lowing a visit to a planetarium and it’s calledPlanetarium: Thinking of Caroline Herschel(1750–1848), Astronomer, Sister of William;and Others. It was written in 1968, the year thediscovery of pulsars was announced. Thank youfor your interest. ●

Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Department of Astrophysics,University of Oxford.

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Planetarium: Thinking of CarolineHerschel (1750–1848), Astronomer,Sister of William; and OthersA woman in the shape of a monstera monster in the shape of a woman the skies are full of them

a woman ‘in the snow among the Clocks and instrumentsor measuring the ground with poles’

in her 98 years to discover 8 comets

She whom the moon ruled like us levitating into the night sky riding the polished lenses

Galaxies of women, there doing penance for impetuousness ribs chilled

in those spaces of the mind

…

Heartbeat of the pulsar heart sweating through my body

The radio impulse pouring in from Taurus

I am bombarded yet I stand

I have been standing all my life in the direct path of a battery of signals the most accurately transmitted most untranslatable language in the universe I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo- luted that a light wave could take 15 years to travel through me And has taken I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind.

Adrienne Rich