Figuring, page 19
Howe’s Boston publisher, home to such eminent authors as Maria Child, Emerson, Twain, Thoreau, and Hawthorne himself, had previously rejected a manuscript by her husband. Enraged upon finding out that his wife had dared to exercise such agency of mind, he grasped for control of her body with an ultimatum—they must resume sexual relations or he would throw her out of the house. After enduring this Faustian form of rape, Howe wrote to her sister: “I made the greatest sacrifice I can ever be called upon to make”—a sacrifice that resulted in yet another pregnancy.
Howe gave birth to her sixth and final child at forty, in the year that Darwin published On the Origin of Species. She endured another seventeen years of her nightmarish marriage. “My books are all that kept me alive,” she would recall of this tundra three decades wide. The day of her husband’s funeral, thirty-three years into their marriage, she recorded in her diary: “Began my new life today”—a life the remainder of which she would devote to the project of equality through abolition and women’s rights, hoping that her writings and lectures would transmit “the message of the good hope of humanity, despite the faults and limitations of individuals.”
Several months before her husband’s death, Howe had met Maria Mitchell at one of her “dome parties” at the Vassar observatory—gatherings during which Mitchell’s students and occasional esteemed guests played a game of writing extemporaneous poems about astronomy on scraps of used paper. Mitchell imbued the observatory with the old spirit of the Nantucket Atheneum, hosting lectures and discussions of pressing political and cultural issues by such prominent “platform women” as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Anna Dickinson. Howe visited in the spring of 1875 to deliver a lecture titled “Is Polite Society Polite?” In it, she issued an indictment against a society that had become so drunk on ambition and outward achievement that it had come to mistake surface polish and posturing for the “inward grace of good feeling” that constitutes true kindness. A greater understanding of this distinction, she argued, “would save us from the vulgarity of worshipping rank and wealth.” What makes the American people “polite,” Howe suggested to the women gathered under the dome, is a combination of democratic idealism and an unselfish impulse toward equality:
Partly the inherited blood of men who would not submit to the rude despotism of old England and old Europe, and who thought a better state of society worth a voyage in the Mayflower….Partly, also, the necessity of the case. As we recognize no absolute social superiority, no one of us is entirely at liberty to assume airs of importance which do not belong to him. No matter how selfish we may be, it will not do for us to act upon the supposition that the comfort of other people is of less consequence than our own.
[…]
The assumption of special merit, either by an individual or a class, is not polite….But we allow classes of people to assume special merit on false grounds. It may very easily be shown that it requires more talent and merit to earn money than to spend it. Yet, by almost common consent of the fashionable world, those who inherit or marry money are allowed to place themselves above those who earn it.
Howe argued that “sincerity is the best foundation upon which to build the structure of a polite life.” Perhaps this conviction is what drew her to Mitchell, a woman devoid of all insincerity, uninterested in any pretense. Conceived the month Maria Mitchell was born, Howe would eventually become, a year before the astronomer’s death, her first official biographer and would celebrate her as a “sister planet.” Both women would look back on their lives and recognize the pathbreaking influence of Margaret Fuller and her Woman.
10
DIVIDED, INDIVISIBLE
It is almost impossible to grasp the furor Fuller’s now-forgotten masterwork engendered when it made its debut in early 1845, or the far-reaching aftershocks of its impact. Sales of the book soared as it traversed the country to the farthest frontiers of the West. Copies pirated in London began circulating across Europe. New York and Boston, America’s centers of intellectual life and political reform, were ablaze with polarized debates about the taboos and daring questions Fuller had raised—questions revolving around the economic inequalities hardwired into marriage by the collusion of social convention and the law.
Fuller condemned women’s ineligibility to own property on a par with men as a legal relegation of women to the status of children. Exposing the millennia-deep roots of this sublimation, she rose above her love of ancient Greek culture to point out that even Plato, “the man of intellect,” treated woman as property in his political writings and wrote in one of his allegorical dialogues “that Man, if he misuse the privileges of one life, shall be degraded into the form of Woman; and then, if he do not redeem himself, into that of a bird.” Holding up Mary Somerville as a model of possibility, Fuller argued that when unblinded by the “narrowness or partial views of a home circle” and granted equal access to education, “women are better aware how great and rich the universe is.” Only with a full view of this richness, she asserted, would women be able to carve out their own path, rather than seeing all the endeavors of their youth as preparation for marriage. Marriage should be one of many options, chosen freely by those who prefer it over other courses, not forced upon all as the sole means to a fulfilling life:
A being of infinite scope must not be treated with an exclusive view to any one relation. Give the soul free course, let the organization, both of body and mind, be freely developed, and the being will be fit for any and every relation to which it may be called.
A frequent refrain of the complaint-choir of Fuller’s critics would be that “no unmarried woman has any right to say anything on the subject”—an argument of logical sophistication comparable to contending that Maurice Sendak had no right to compose his body of work because he never had children, or that no white person has the right to reflect critically on race and no man on feminism.
Decrying the sublimation of women’s minds to domesticity, Fuller asserts that “a house is no home unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the body” and admonishes that “human beings are not so constituted that they can live without expansion.” Underpinning the book is precisely this insistence on expansion of possibility as the path to empowerment. Fuller must have known, given her mastery of the classics, that the words “possibility” and “power” share a common root in the Latin posse. Paradoxically, one of the most short-sighted criticisms of Woman was that it painted new horizons of possibility but did not outline the actionable steps to get there—a criticism with which even Horace Greeley, who was grateful for the fount of publicity now surrounding the author he employed, tempered his praise for the book: “No woman, no man, ever read it without profit; but many have closed it with but vague and dim ideas of what ought to be done.” Such indictments were then, as they are now, blind to the fact that possibility itself is a generator of power—that a mobilized mind is the prerequisite and catalyst by which the body springs into informed and inspired action. Maria Mitchell recorded the perfect retort to this strain of criticism in a diary entry penned a decade after Woman’s publication:
Reformers are apt to forget, in their reasoning, that the world is not made up entirely of the wicked and the hungry, there are persons hungry for the food of the mind, the wants of which are as imperious as those of the body….Reformers are apt to forget too, that the social chain is indomitable; that link by link it acts together, you cannot lift one man above his fellows, but you lift the race of men. Newton, Shakespeare and Milton did not directly benefit the poor and ignorant but the elevation of the whole race has been through them. They probably found it hard to get publishers, but after several centuries, the publishers have come to them and the readers have come, and the race has been lifted.
When Mitchell read Woman, it must have struck her with resonance not only political but personal. Fuller envisioned a day when a “female Newton” would be possible. And yet Mitchell never seems to have fully envisioned how her own life was making that possibility real for generations to come. In her beloved Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning had written of how those who ignite the profoundest revolutions are themselves blind to their own spark:
The best men, doing their best,
Know peradventure least of what they do:
Men usefullest i’ the world, are simply used….
Upon returning from her travels to the land of Milton and Shakespeare and Browning, Mitchell was greeted by an extraordinary gift—a five-inch refractor telescope, on a par with the instruments of the world’s greatest observatories, purchased through what may have been the world’s first crowdfunding campaign for science.
Elizabeth Peabody had envisioned the project and spent years raising the $3,000 for the telescope through a subscription paper, rallying Boston’s women to contribute. Just as Mitchell was departing for her European journey, Emerson had lent his voice to the fund-raising effort in the pages of his popular magazine:
In Europe, Maria Mitchell would command the interest and receive the homage of the learned and polite, while in America so little prestige is attached to genius or learning that she is relatively unknown. This is a great fault in our social aspect, one which excites the animadversion of foreigners at once. “Where are your distinguished women—where your learned men?” they ask, as they are invited into our ostentatiously furnished houses to find a group of giggling girls and boys, or commonplace men and women, who do nothing but dance, or yawn about till supper is announced. We need a reform here, most especially if we would not see American society utterly contemptible.
While touring Europe’s iconic astronomical institutions, Mitchell had been dreaming up an observatory of her own. The crowdfunded telescope came as a wondrous surprise after a particularly difficult stretch for her, marked by Ida’s death and her once-brilliant mother’s terrifying descent into dementia. The instrument became the first physical building block of her dream. Behind the school resembling a Greek temple where her father had once served as founding schoolmaster, she erected a simple eleven-foot dome that rotated on a mechanism made of cannonballs. A month before Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the observatory opened its doors and Mitchell, now the Newton of Nantucket, began welcoming boys and girls.
During her time in Italy the previous year, she had hungered to visit the Observatory of Rome, mecca of the latest research on spectroscopy, but was jarred to learn that the observatory was closed to women. Mary Somerville, by then celebrated as Europe’s most learned woman, had been denied entrance, as had Sir John Herschel’s daughter. Mitchell recorded wryly in her diary:
I was ignorant enough of the ways of papal institutions, and, indeed, of all Italy, to ask if I might visit the Roman Observatory. I remembered that the days of Galileo were days of two centuries since. I did not know that my heretic feet must not enter the sanctuary,—that my woman’s robe must not brush the seats of learning.
She was eventually allowed to enter with special permission from the Pope, obtained after American diplomats pressed on her behalf. An hour and a half before sunset, she was led through the church into the observatory, where she marveled at the expensive instruments the papal government employed in studying the very motions for which they had tried Galileo two centuries earlier. Mitchell had hoped to see nebulae through the observatory’s powerful telescope, but she was informed that her permission did not extend past nightfall and was hastily sent away. She must have resolved, as soon as the back door spat her out into the narrow alley behind Collegio Romano, that when she built her own observatory, it would welcome any and all who hungered to commune with the cosmos.
* * *
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Exactly twenty years after Fuller’s Woman lit a Promethean fire of possibility for women, Maria Mitchell took a job as the first professor of astronomy at the newly founded Vassar Female College—an institution powered by Matthew Vassar’s conviction that the intellectual emancipation of women was as vital to the nation’s flourishing as the liberation of slaves. Although a number of higher education options had become available to women over the previous three decades, Vassar was groundbreaking not only in aspiring to the standards of Harvard and Yale but in far exceeding those venerated colleges in its rigorous focus on science, practically nonexistent in the leading universities that prepared men for careers in theology and the law. But for all its progressive idealism, Vassar was still a product of its era: The original college handbook stated that women were not permitted to go outside after dark—a preposterous problem for the study of astronomy, which Mitchell had to overturn.
In a testament to the power and ever-shifting provisions of language, controversy erupted over the word nestled between the institution’s namesake and its function. Since Darwin had ignited the dawn of evolutionary theory several years earlier, the term “female” had taken on animalistic undertones associated with sexual reproduction—connotations some women saw as dehumanizing and some men used deliberately to dehumanize, particularly in referring to slave women as “females.” One woman, who had previously lauded Matthew Vassar’s plans for the college, charged at him in a spirited letter condemning the name:
Female! What female do you mean? Not a female donkey? Must not your reply be “I mean a female male woman”? Then…why degrade the feminine sex to the level of animals?
She amplified the argument in print, proposing a renaming in a popular magazine:
Does it seem suitable that the term female, which is not a synonym for woman and never signifies lady, should have a place in the title of this noble institution? The generous founder intended it for young women. The Bible and the Anglo-Saxon language mark, as the best and highest style, VASSAR COLLEGE FOR YOUNG WOMEN.
Language is not the content of thought but the vessel into which we pour the ambivalences and contradictions of our thinking, afloat on the current of time. The article appeared in Godey’s Lady’s Book—a magazine whose title is syntactically analogous to “Vassar Female College,” its own middle word just as objectionable to the modern ear as “female” was to those of our ancestors, bounded by the very chains of convention and limiting possibility that Margaret Fuller had set out to break.
Within a year, Vassar College had scrubbed the word “female” from the inscription above its stately entrance.
Maria Mitchell didn’t concern herself with the naming controversy, for she believed that a “solid phalanx of figures is a formidable opponent to a flourish of rhetoric.” She spoke the purest language of the universe, and it was with mathematics that she set out to empower women. When she began teaching her first class of students—seventeen young women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two—she estimated that there weren’t as many men studying mathematical astronomy at Harvard, which had long ago dropped its mathematics requirement beyond the freshman year. By 1851, only two students in the entire Harvard class elected higher mathematics. Both later dropped it.
During the twenty-three years of Mitchell’s reign, Vassar would graduate more students in astronomy and higher mathematics than Harvard. Her students were the first generation of Americans trained in what we now know as astrophysics, a product of Mitchell’s insistence on marrying rigorous mathematical physics with observational astronomy—something Harvard would replicate by reinstating the mathematics requirement. Mitchell was the first university professor to turn her observatory into an exploratorium for hands-on learning, arming her students with instruments and encouraging them to use the observatory’s meridian circle, transit devices, and telescopes at their leisure. Like Margaret Fuller, she conducted her lectures not as a top-down delivery of answers for rote memorization but as conversations encouraging questions and critical thinking. Near the sculpture of Mary Somerville that graced her observatory-classroom lay a notebook titled “Book of Questions,” in which her pupils recorded their unanswered questions—those knowable unknowns that stretch science forward. The final exams of her advanced students challenged them to make computational predictions of solar eclipses, but Mitchell detested the grading that the college required and refused to do it. “I cannot express the intellect in numbers,” she wrote defiantly. For all her faith in figures, she knew their limitations—more than a century before IQ tests became the battleground for psychologists who exposed the fool’s gold of quantifying general intelligence, Mitchell boldly asserted that “there is no intellectual unit.”
For the first three years of her tenure, Mitchell labored to reconcile the conflicting demands of original research and teaching while still performing her mathematically rigorous work for the Nautical Almanac and caring for her ailing father. Exhausted to the bone and battling severe sleep deprivation, she eventually cautioned herself in her diary: “I dare not repeat the brain struggle of last year—it is suicidal to attempt.” In 1868, seven weeks after her fiftieth birthday, she finally relinquished her Navy job after twenty years as computer of Venus. Shortly after her resignation, she wrote in her journal:
RESOLVED: In case of my outliving father and being in good health, to give my efforts to the intellectual culture of women, without regard to salary.
Her self-sacrifice to a higher sense of purpose was far from an abstraction: Since the moment she arrived at Vassar, and for the next ten years, Mitchell slept on a small cot in the clock room atop her observatory, which also served as her office and classroom—the college had failed to provide her with a bedroom, apparently assuming that a woman of genius is a disembodied intellect with no need for basic creaturely comforts. A makeshift bedroom was fashioned for her father in the observatory basement. For ten years, she lived with great autonomy—there were only two buildings on Vassar’s campus: the main college, nine hundred feet away, and the observatory, of which Mitchell and her father were the only residents. But she had no privacy—an arrangement that was the polar opposite of the closet she had claimed for a calculating room of her own as a child. Now she had not even a door on which to hang the notecard inscribed “Miss Mitchell is busy. Do not knock.” After she rose each morning, she spread a velvet throw over her cot and neatly arranged several pillows to conceal any trace of the only private life she had—her sleep.
