Sobel's 'The Glass Universe' shows that the old cliche that until Rosie the Riveter and World War II, all educated women stayed at home, relegated to perfect homemaking, an occasional Lyceum, and gossipy book clubs just wasn't true. The time has come for these engrossing books and the brilliant women they portray.

There's Margot Lee Shetterly's 'Hidden Figures: The American Story and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race' (2016 book, movie) Nathalia Holt's 'Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon' (2016) and now, Dava Sobel's 'The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars' (2016). There's been a trifecta of great books about women in physics, astrophysics and astronomy in the last year. Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin, who in 1956 became the first ever woman professor of astronomy at Harvard - and Harvard's first female department chair.Įlegantly written and enriched by excerpts from letters, diaries, and memoirs, The Glass Universe is the hidden history of a group of remarkable women who, through their hard work and groundbreaking discoveries, disproved the commonly held belief that the gentler sex had little to contribute to human knowledge.īut the seeing, which was everything, was better Their ranks included Williamina Fleming, a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid who went on to identify 10 novae and more than 300 variable stars Annie Jump Cannon, who designed a stellar classification system that was adopted by astronomers the world over and is still in use and Dr. They helped discern what stars were made of, divided the stars into meaningful categories for further research, and found a way to measure distances across space by starlight.

Anna Draper, whose late husband pioneered the technique of stellar photography - enabled the women to make extraordinary discoveries that attracted worldwide acclaim. The 'glass universe' of half a million plates that Harvard amassed in this period - thanks in part to the early financial support of another woman, Mrs. At the outset this group included the wives, sisters, and daughters of the resident astronomers, but by the 1880s the female corps included graduates of the new women's colleges - Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith.Īs photography transformed the practice of astronomy, the ladies turned to studying the stars captured nightly on glass photographic plates. In the mid-19th century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as calculators, or 'human computers', to interpret the observations made via telescope by their male counterparts each night. Number-one New York Times best-selling author Dava Sobel returns with the captivating, little-known true story of a group of women whose remarkable contributions to the burgeoning field of astronomy forever changed our understanding of the stars and our place in the universe.

The Glass Universe by Dava Sobel