Day 21
Happy spring! The winter is ending, and soon we will see flowering and blooming plants, the birds will return, and…it will get hot. Okay, so I managed to point out the downside of summer…let’s just say, some like it hot. I am not one of those. Back on subject, tonight I give you an essay inspired by one of the assignments I give my students. In this essay, we will talk about some Amazing Women.
AMAZING WOMEN
I want to talk about some amazing women; you may have heard of some or all of these women. You may have heard of none of them. Their accomplishments have not been the highlight of the media, though many of them are beginning to get some notice in recent years. I want to start with a woman I admire greatly.
Rosalind Franklin was a chemist at a time when women weren’t supposed to be chemists. Her work was in X-ray crystallography. If you don’t know what this is, it is a technique used to discover the structure of a crystal. She worked for a time on coal, but began turning her skills to the hot molecule of her time: DNA. She took pictures of DNA to see if she could figure out its structure. You might be tempted to say “Everybody knows that!” Nobody knew the structure of DNA at that time, though. Everybody was in a race to be the first to find it. Rosalind Franklin actually discovered the structure of DNA.
One of her most famous pictures shows the double helix structure in the form of an X in the middle of the photograph. She realized what this meant, and presented her discovery at a conference in London. This conference was attended by one James Watson, a young scientist trying to discover the structure of DNA. There is no record he realized what she had said. Did he even hear? Or was he too busy ignoring the woman scientist to understand her discovery? We will never know. What we do know is that he derided her and demeaned her in his book about the discovery of the structure.
If Franklin discovered the structure, why is she not one of the people credited with it? No one actually knew she discovered it. That might seem peculiar when she announced it at a conference attended by many scientists. Think about that. She made a major, important discovery, announced it publicly, and…no one knew she made it. We know it isn’t because they were busy checking their smart phones; such things didn’t exist. They simply didn’t hear her, even though they were sitting in the room.
A little bit now about Watson. He and Francis Crick were working on the structure of DNA, mostly using wire models. Their first model was not correct, and there were several structural problems they couldn’t solve. Then one evening, Maurice Wilkins, a man working in the lab with Franklin, smuggled out some of her pictures and took them to Watson and Crick, working in a rival lab. This might be enough to make you say WTF? Why would someone help their rivals? It worked out for him…Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize with Watson and Crick…but not with Rosalind Franklin. To be completely fair, though, she died young, and by the time it was presented to them, she was no longer living. They don’t award the Nobel Prize posthumously.
She wouldn’t have won the prize, anyway. No one knew she had any role in the discovery…including her. She never knew they used her pictures. They were replaced in her lab before she could miss them. If Watson hadn’t written his book, it’s possible no one would ever know. He was abrasive, unpleasant, and dismissive of Franklin, but one thing was crystal clear – he used Franklin’s pictures, and he used them without her knowledge. A number of sources have now attempted to clean up the film he pulled over her legacy by noting the many inaccuracies in his descriptions of her, but Watson and Crick are still considered to have discovered the structure of DNA.
Let’s be up front; I don’t want to be accused of muddying the picture. Franklin had discovered the double helix structure, but she had not discovered the details of the structure. These were discovered by Watson and Crick as they put together information gathered by other people to correctly establish the pairings of the nucleotides and the structure beyond just the double helix. Would they have discovered it so quickly without Franklin’s pictures? It seems unlikely, but we will never be sure.
The next amazing woman is one who is finally starting to get some press – Henrietta Leavitt. She was one of the women known as Harvard computers back in the early twentieth century, working for nearly no pay to help map the stars in the Milky Way. She worked with stars known as Cepheid variables, stars that fluctuate in brightness. Using the period of fluctuation and the luminosity, or brightness, she worked out a way to determine the distance to a star. This was an amazing discovery, and is still used today.
Working alongside Leavitt was another amazing woman, Annie Jump Cannon. She developed a system of star classification we still use today. She classified stars based on their temperature. She also discovered 300 of the variable stars in the catalog she eventually published. Like Leavitt, she didn’t get the benefit of her amazing work. Their work was turned over to male astronomers who went on to use that to eventually get star maps completed. One of the men using their work was Edwin Hubble; as far as I can discover, he appeared to be the only one that wanted to give them credit for their work, and wanted Leavitt to win the Nobel Prize. Like Franklin, however, she died young and again, they do not award the prizes posthumously.
One thing that makes this story so important is that the women who made these discoveries were not known to have made them until rather recently. They were not permitted to use the telescopes, or even to make use of their own data. They were kept “in their place” – counting and cataloging stars. They were brilliant mathematicians, but have not served as role models for the generations of girls to follow, most of whom were brought up believing women could not do math. Now they are becoming known, and they can serve to inspire the current generations of young women.
Finally, I would like to talk about Maria Mitchell. She lived earlier than the women above; her work was done in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. She was the first female astronomer in the United States. She was also the first American to discover a comet. She was not the first woman to discover a comet; that honor belongs to Caroline Herschel, a German astronomer. She went on to discover eight comets. Maria Mitchell didn’t discover more comets, but she worked as an astronomer and a teacher for a number of years. She worked and taught until the winds of public opinion changed.
When Miss Mitchell began working, astronomy (and some other forms of science) were considered suitable for women. They were not areas that were believed would introduce women to new ideas that might make them doubt their place in the world. Astronomy also had not yet developed the prestige it has now. Once the field became prestigious, women were pushed out, telescopes were shut off to them, and they weren’t considered proper teachers any more. This occurred during Mitchell’s lifetime, leading to her moving back home and doing more informal teaching.
One key thing ties these women together, besides their love of science and their immense contributions to their fields. None of them ever married. Back when Maria Mitchell, Henrietta Leavitt, and Annie Jump Cannon were working, they couldn’t work if they were married. Not much is known about Leavitt or Cannon in terms of their views on marriage, but Mitchell did feel marriage was important for women – though apparently not for her. She did express the wish at times to have become a mother, but she knew she could not continue to work if she married, so she remained single her entire life. At the time Franklin was working, it was still unusual for women scientists to be married; she never married, and is not reported to have wished to marry.
Marriage has always been a plus for a male scientist. He would have someone to take care of him, and wouldn’t have to worry about normal everyday things. He could devote his life to science, knowing that he would have hot meals, clean clothes, and, if he wanted, children. For women, it is not so easy, even today. As a woman scientist, I frequently have noted that my life would be easier if I had a wife. Most people expect that a married woman will do the same things after work that she would do if she wasn’t working outside the home, though few people will admit to that. It is unconscious for many of us, but it is an expectation that gets communicated loud and clear. Fortunately, my husband doesn’t have that sort of requirement, which has allowed me to pursue my career. Many women don’t have that sort of support.
It has been, and still is, common to assume that the bulk of housework and childcare will be done by the woman of the house. In the event she has a demanding career, people suggest the husband might ‘help’. The very language we use to talk about it, even when we are enlightened enough to recognize that women have the right and ability to hold demanding jobs, assumes it is the woman’s job. The man may ‘help’, but the man isn’t expected to have the role of caregiver. A man who puts his children in daycare to hold a job will be treated with sympathy; he must take care of his family. A woman who does the same will be treated with contempt; why is she letting someone else raise her children? (Never mind that studies have shown that daycare is good for children.)
Most of us believe the changes in our society have been immense. To some extent, that is correct. There are, still, many underlying attitudes that make it difficult for women. Until we change the way we talk about women, the way we think about women, and the way we look at women, these attitudes won’t change. And while all the women I talked about in this piece were white, there are millions of women of color also contributing to science throughout time. One article isn’t enough to detail all the amazing women, but perhaps I’ll be able to cover more of them in the future. These are the ones I chose because I have read books about them. Once I get through all the books waiting on my shelves, I may write about some more…providing I can live that long.