Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Maria Mitchell at 200: a pioneering astronomer who fought for women in science

Richard Holmes celebrates Mitchell’s pedagogic fire and salty opinions on the bicentenary of her birth.
By
  1. Richard Holmes

    1. Richard Holmes is the author of The Age of Wonder and This Long Pursuit.

Access through your institution
Buy or subscribe

She was the first woman in the United States to become a professional astronomer, and a dauntless champion of science education for women. Maria Mitchell, whose bicentenary is celebrated this August, was a scientific revolutionary. That is encapsulated in her prophetic speech, ‘The Need for Women in Science’, delivered in 1876 to the Fourth Congress of the Association for the Advancement of Women, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It posed a historic challenge. Mitchell declared that the laws of nature are discovered not through “the hurry and worry of daily toil; they are diligently sought ... And until able women have given their lives to investigation, it is idle to discuss the question of their capacity for original work.” Or, as she put it in her journals: “better to be peering in the spectrograph than on the pattern of a dress”.

Access options

Access through your institution

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

from$1.95

to$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Nature 558, 370-371 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-05458-6

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 26 June 2018: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that Mitchell had a reflecting telescope at Vassar College; it was a refracting telescope. The text has been corrected.

Subjects

Latest on:

Nature Careers

Jobs

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing

Search

Advanced search

Quick links