A star in many fields, Maria (pronounced Mar-eye-ah) Mitchell, the first female astronomer in the United States, was also an educator, librarian, naturalist, suffragette and anti-slavery activist.
Born in Nantucket, Massachusetts in 1818, Maria’s Quaker parents believed all their children should be educated – not a common idea back then. Demonstrating an aptitude for astronomy and advanced mathematics at an early age, her father encouraged Maria by teaching her to use sextants and telescopes. She became a valuable resource to the local fishing community by reading the night sky.
At 16, Maria opened a school that trained young women in math and science, scandalizing the locals by allowing non-white children to attend. She became the local librarian two years later, using her free time to hone her astronomy skills in an observatory her father built on top of the local bank where he worked.
Her stargazing paid off when Maria discovered what would become known as Miss Mitchell’s Comet (she never married) in 1847. In 1848 she was celebrated at the Seneca Falls Convention (the first women’s rights convention); by the King of Denmark who awarded her a gold medal; and by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences where she became its first female member. Her celebrity saw the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville and Sojourner Truth traveling to meet her. Touring Europe (with Nathanial Hawthorne and his family) she shared her discovery and theories with Europe’s top astronomers, garnering more acclaim.
Maria became an outspoken advocate of women’s rights and was active in the anti-slavery movement, even refusing to wear clothes made with Southern cotton. After the Civil War she became the first female faculty member of the new women’s college, Vassar. She spent the next 20 years teaching and running the Vassar Observatory where she began photographing the planets and the sun, becoming the leading authority on the surfaces of Jupiter and Saturn. Her insistence that women be afforded the same education as men saw dozens of her students go on to renown in traditionally male-dominated scientific fields.
The accolades continued long after her death in 1889, including a crater on the moon being named in her honor. Her Nantucket family home is now a museum dedicated to the sciences and houses the Maria Mitchell Observatory, where her telescope still points towards the stars.