Miss Mitchell's Comet

...a dispatch from bewilderness

Maria Mitchell was America’s first professional female astronomer, she was also the first woman employed by the federal government for a “specialized non-domestic skill.”

She discovered a comet, was hired to perform complex mathematical calculations to help sailors navigate the globe — a one-woman global positioning system a century and a half before Einstein’s theory of relativity made GPS possible.

When she began teaching at Vassar College as the only woman on the faculty, the college handbook mandated that neither she nor her female students were allowed outside after nightfall — a somewhat problematic dictum, given she was an astronomer.

She overwrote the curriculum, creating the country’s most ambitious science syllabus, soon copied by other universities — including Harvard, which like most universities was, all male. She was the first woman elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science.

Maria Mitchell’s students went on to become the world’s first class with academic training in what we now call astrophysics. They happened to all be women. Of course, Maria Mitchell couldn’t vote and neither could they. Although she referred to “her” comet as named her comet C/1847 T1, it is known today as Miss Mitchell’s Comet.