​
First Session: Penelope's Loom
Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered in the storms at sea, and how
he worked to save his life and bring his men
back home.  He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,
they ate the Sun God's cattle, and the god
kept them from home.  Now goddess, child of Zeus, 
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.

                                                 The Odyssey, Book One, 1-11, Emily Wilson translator.
Women And History
Why begin with a pottery shard depicting Penelope at her loom followed by the opening lines of the Odyssey?
Penelope's story is an apt paradigm for the place of women in traditional history, her weaving an  apt metaphor for the contribution of women to the story of civilization.  Homer begins by telling us that this is a story about a "complicated man".  In the Western cannon, most of our historical and literary narratives celebrate the exploits of famous men, most especially when they are involved in conflict, military, political or otherwise.  Women appear as marginalized adjuncts to the activities of men rather than standing alone.  ​As Margaret Crocco, chairperson at Michigan State University’s Department of Teacher Education, put it:
​
“If women have had half the world’s experience, there’s a truth value associated with [teaching and writing] history in a way that reflects those experiences, even acknowledging the fact that [putting together a historical narrative] is a selective process.  If you aren’t telling the broader story about all human beings, then what you are representing is partial and flawed.”
​
​The implications of Crocco's observation are profound, not only in terms of equity for women and other disenfranchised groups in the historical narrative, but in the distortion of reality she references.  Rather than documenting the all encompassing "dailyness" of human experience in all its diversity, traditional history presents a virtual reality dominated by white males engaged in an exciting historical panorama.  Thumb through the table of contents of any high school U.S. History textbook and you will find chapter titles such as "Chapter 6: Conflict on the Edge of the Empire, 1713–1774, Chapter 7: Creating a New Nation, 1775–1788, Chapter 8: Contested Republic, 1789–1800." [Of The People, Oxford University Press]  A hundred years of American history dominated by males engaged in conflict and revolution and little else.  The most you can expect to find is perhaps a brief reference to John Adam’s letters to Abigail or Betsy Ross’s sewing skills.  But what of the rich tapestry of life during this period?  These political events were embedded in a much broader historical context that shaped their development and evolution. 

So too for Penelope in the background of the Odyssey.   She patiently awaits the return of Odysseus whose exploits and travails dominate the tale.  She is not even certain he has survived, yet she holds his domaine together, raising her son Telemachus, and fending off the advances of 108 insistent suitors. Her world is one in which gender roles are well defined and although at times overlapping are largely separate.  Elite men are in the foreground, they take part in councils, fight wars, trade, travel, slay opponents, seduce and are seduced.  Women are in the background creating and sustaining a household involving all the usual domestic tasks.  

 Our first subject in this course is taken from Laurel Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale, a portrait of Martha Ballard's life at the end of the eighteenth century in Hallowell Maine, I was struck When I first read A Midwife's Tale by how little had changed over three millennium.  Like Penelope, Martha lived in a separate sphere from that of her husband Ephraim.  While she maintained their household, raised their children, tended her garden and practiced midwifery, it was Ephraim and the other men of Augusta who attended town meetings, mustered and drilled, practiced professions and traveled far, and received acknowledgement in the various town chronicles and histories.  Where their lives intersected they complimented one another.  It was Ephraim who planted the flax that Martha and her daughters would transform into linen.  But when Ephraim would be off for weeks or months surveying the back country, or yet again confined to jail for debt, it was Martha who, like Penelope soldiered on alone shouldering her husbands tasks in addition to her own.  If it were not for the survival of her diary Martha and her considerable contributions to the web of community life in Hallowell would be unknown to history.  Laurel Ulrich becomes her Muse.  Ulrich's exegesis of the diary her Odyssey.  "Tell me about a compassionate women..."

Weaving As Metaphor
For three years, while the suitors feasted and caroused, Penelope retreated to her private quarters where she wove a shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes.  It was a ruse employed to fend off the suitors.  She can't possibly consider marriage until it is done.  Of course, in the evening while they sleep, she unravels the threads she has so painstakingly woven together.  There is a very close relationship between the crafts of weaving and story telling.  In attic Greek, hyphainein is to weave, and hyphos is the web of threads created.  Ancient Greek poets are described as "weaving" their words together.  Both literally and metaphorically Penelope has woven a tapestry, a narrative to protect her home and Telemachus's patrimony.  But in a larger sense the loom and its textiles are an apt metaphor for the contributions of women to the fabric of civilization.  The underlying threads that create a social web and sustain a community are largely the product of women's lives and interactions.  As with Penelope in Ithaca  if one entered the Ballard homestead in Hallowell the first floor living space was dominated by the implements of weaving: loom, spinning wheels, reeds, shuttles, large iron kettles for boiling.  This was a community activity.  Daughters were borrowed as well as reeds and shuttles.  There was a constant coming and going among this community of women.  The weaving of textiles not only produced cloth, but it sustained a social web that knit the community of Hallowell together.

History From The Bottom Up
I began my graduate studies in American History in the nineteen-sixties during a period when teaching history "from the bottom up" was beginning to inform the curricula of universities as well as secondary schools' history departments.  The "new social history" endeavored to enlarge the  scope of traditional political, economic, military and "great man" history by incorporating the lives of ordinary people, including their ethnicity, race, gender, labor, values, lifestyles. Much of this was driven by a new interest in statistics, data, demographics and quantification.  Statistical analysis became a new requirement in many history departments.  While this was all well and good, it often resulted in a stilted, dry, unsatisfying picture.  Memoirs, diaries, letters and other first hand accounts restore the missing narrative which gives life and depth to analysis.  A skillful historian brings together the narratives of particular persons and integrates them into the overall context of time and place, each one informing the other.  One could  redress the gender inequity inherent in history by highlighting the lives of famous women, but this perpetuates the same distortions as the "great man" narratives.   This is not to say that John Adams, Woodrow Wilson, Jane Addams, Ida B. Wells are not important and did not make contributions, they were, and they did.  But to focus on them exclusively is to miss the larger context, the texture, the warp and weft, of the communities they were part of.

Over the course of the next several weeks we will explore the lives of six women whose lives spanned the late 18th century through the 19th, from Martha Ballard, born in Oxford Massachusetts in 1735, to Rachel Colof, a Russian Jewish immigrant  who homesteaded in North Dakota in 1894. They represent diverse social and ethnic backgrounds and their lives span American History from the Revolution through the Gilded Age.  Unique and different, each life holds up a mirror informing us about the times they lived in, and the contributions of women to the communities in which they lived.  We may well find echos of their lives in our own.
Readings

​Is This the End of the Crusade for Gender-Equal Curricula?
For decades, the push to acknowledge women’s contributions gained traction, but progress may have flatlined.
 Elizabeth Weingarten, The Atlantic, June 15, 2017
the_push_for_gender-inclusive_curricula_marches_on_-_the_atlantic.pdf
​Is History Written About Men, by Men?
A careful study of recent popular history books reveals a genre dominated by generals, presidents—and male authors.  
By Andrew Kahn and Rebecca Onion, Slate, January 6, 2016.
popular_history__why_are_so_many_history_books_about_men_by_men_.pdf

Women Underrepresented in History Textbooks 
October 30, 2015 by Megan Gospe, Women's Center, 
women_underrepresented_in_history_textbooks.pdf

Women in History textbooks - What message does this send to the youth?  Women are portrayed as historically unimportant and incapable, contributing little to society outside of the domestic sphere. We furthermore argue that this type of portrayal sends powerful messages to the youth about men and women in history and in contemporary society.
Annie Chiponda; Johan Wassermann, Yesterday & Today, The South African Society for History Teaching, January, 2011 
women_in_history_textbooks.pdf
​
Session Two & Three ~ Martha Ballard, A Midwife's Tale, 1735 - 1812
This is a book well worth owning and I encourage you to obtain your own personal copy.  It is also widely distributed throughout the Minuteman Library Network.

Digital copies
Apple iBook $12.99
Barnes & Noble Nook edition $12.99
Amazon Kindle $13.99
The Author
​Laurel Thatcher Ulrich Biography
Picture

By Sarah Pearsall, Oxford Brookes University, and Kirsten Sword, Indiana University
From the General Meeting Booklet, 2010 American Historical Association Annual Meeting

A Pail of Cream" 'I was raised to be an industrious housewife and a self-sacrificing and charitable neighbor, but sometime in my thirties I discovered that writing about women’s work was a lot more fun than doing it.' So declared Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in her most recent book, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History.1 Even before this epiphany—indeed by the time she was in the fifth grade—Laurel knew she wanted to be a writer. Her first publication, “Sugar City Magic,” appeared in Seventeen in 1957, when she was a sophomore studying English and journalism at the University of Utah...."
Continue Reading Here
Book Review
The Hidden Life of New England
 by Carl N. Degler, New York Times Book Review Section, Sunday, March 4, 1990

The historian Charles A. Beard liked to distinguish between history and written history - the latter being that which appeared in history books, the former that which had actually happened. Martha Ballard's life will never enter the histories that tell the story of the United States or even those of Maine, where she spent most of her life. But her life, as Laurel Ulrich, a professor of history at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, has reconstructed it, opens an enlightening window onto those ''Hidden Ones,'' as Cotton Mather once called the pious women of New England.

Martha Ballard spent most of her life in Hallowell, a town just below Augusta on the Kennebec River. For 27 of those years she kept a diary, the entries of which were so elliptical, even incoherent, that until Mrs. Ulrich came along, no one had found much use for the document. Each chapter begins with excerpts from the original diary, and what, after all, can one make out of entries like: ''At My Sons to see John who we were aprehensive was near the Close of life?'' Then the next day: ''At my sons. Tarried again this night.'' To decipher the entry it helps to know that Martha Ballard was not only a mother but a midwife, indeed the deliverer of two-thirds of the babies in the region, despite the presence of other midwives and two male physicians. Only with the additional and careful collating of entries in the diary and scores of other contemporary documents does the story come out - that John was an illegitimate child, fathered, fully acknowledged and financially supported by a leading judge of the town, who was already married, and that John's mother was closely related to Martha's son. That revelation gives Mrs. Ulrich the opportunity to place the event in the broader history of seductions, illegitimate births and the fates of unmarried mothers.

Continue Reading Here
The movie
The Midwife's Tale 
We will spend our second session discussing A Midwife's Tale Analysis, produced by Blueberry Hill Productions of Watertown, Ma. the 98 minute docudrama was the opening feature of PBS's American Experience in the fall of 1998. This award winning film made with the cooperation of Laurel Ulrich  captures the life, persona and social milieu of Martha and will provide more context to the reading to follow.   https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/11867296
The Reading
Chapter 2, September 1788 "warpt a piece"
 You can download a copy here.
We will spend our third session discussing chapter 2 of A Midwife's Tale.  You can download a copy here.  Because of academic fair use restrictions I can share one copy of one chapter with you, you may not reproduce it in any form, digital or otherwise.  It is strictly intended for non profit in class use.
​
FAIR USE NOTICE: This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of the role of women in American history.  We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A. Knopf, Inc., New York, 1990.
Things to ponder as you read
I chose this particular chapter because it highlights the intricate web of relationships, forming a "social web" among the women of the Hollowell community.  Ulrich's  research  provides us the larger historical context needed to tease out the very rich story embedded in Martha's otherwise brief, compressed entries.  While this piece of history is enjoyable in and of itself, it can inform us about our contemporary society as well.  Of course, such comparisons need to be made gently and with humility.  There is nothing more perverse for a historian than turning the past into a gold mine to be excavated in the service of some a priori conviction.

As I reread A Midwife's Tale I found myself returning to Robert Bellah's study of individualism and community in contemporary American society. [Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, 1985, University of California Press] Bellah was concerned with the ongoing tension in American society between the competing forces of individualism and community life.  At risk of making an over-generalization, I wonder if  the historical record from the time of Martha Ballard to our own contemporary society documents an increasing emphasis on individual autonomy  at the expense of the values and "habits of the heart" that knit a community together.  Keep this in mind as you read this chapter, especially where Ulrich touches upon the "invisibility" of women's contributions to community life as compared to the more documented public contributions of men.  Why is it that the "unseen acts of women" which created a "collective" consciousness that "bound families together" receives less or no attention while history dutifully records the men mustering on the common, attending town meeting, hearing pleas in court.  Is our contemporary community life impoverished in comparison to Martha's, or just different?  Without Penelope, what would Odysseus
have returned to?
​
  • Note the diary entries between September 3 to September 9.  How does this list of engagements strike you?
  • Ulrich notes that home textile production enhanced the social relationships among women and their families "The production of cloth wove a social web."  
  • Textile production also created an intricate economic community, a web of transactions, bartering, borrowning and returning.  This also included exchanging daughters.  From 1785 to 1800, thirty-nine young women worked and lived in Martha Ballard's household.​
  • Note Ulrich description of Martha as a "gadder" [p.92]. There seemed to be a continual "toing and froing" in Hallowell.
  • Note Ulrich's development of the concept of "separate spheres."  To a large extent women were "invisible" in the documented life of the community which was almost entirely dominated by males and their activities in the political, military, or legal life of the community.  
  • It is difficult to find social distinctions in Martha's relationships with other women, but she is unfailing in her use of  titiles such as Mister, Esquire, Captain, Colonel.
  • "Day by day women negotiated the fragile threads of ordinary need that bound families together."  Your reactions, then and now?
​
Session Four ~ Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, 1793 -1867
Overview of Sarah's Life 
From the Schlesinger Library web site:  https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/resources/4958

Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley was born on July 31, 1793, in Boston, the daughter of Gamaliel Bradford III and Elizabeth Hickling Bradford. She was the oldest of nine children and, as her mother's health was poor, was largely responsible for her siblings' upbringing. Though the family lived in Boston, Sarah spent much time in Duxbury, where her grandfather Bradford lived and where she formed a lifelong friendship with Abba B. Allyn (later married to Convers Francis, brother of Lydia Maria Francis Child). Abba's father, Dr. John Allyn, taught both girls Latin and Greek; another instructor of Sarah's was a Mr. Cummings in Boston, but much of her store of knowledge of the classics, modern languages, philosophy, botany, chemistry and astronomy she acquired on her own.

In 1810-1811 the family lived in Duxbury for a year; in 1813 they moved to Charlestown, where Gamaliel Bradford was warden of Charlestown State Prison. 

When she was 16 Sarah was befriended by Mary Moody Emerson (1774-1863), Ralph Waldo Emerson's aunt and a woman of powerful intellect and religious convictions who strongly influenced her later famous nephew and her young friend Sarah Bradford.

On October 6, 1818, Sarah married Samuel Ripley (1783-1847), son of Ezra Ripley, minister of First Parish in Concord, and Phebe Bliss (Emerson) Ripley. The latter was the widow of William Emerson, Ezra Ripley's predecessor, and Mary Moody Emerson's mother. Samuel, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, became the minister of First Church in Waltham. Here the Ripleys lived for 28 years, raising seven children (one other died in infancy), educating many more in their small boarding-school for boys, and also instructing "rusticated" Harvard students.

In the spring of 1846 the Ripleys retired from what Sarah later (in a letter to her daughter Sophy) described as "that dreary passage of constant labours and homesick boys" to the Old Manse in Concord. Samuel died at Thanksgiving 1847. Sarah survived him by twenty years, during which she saw the death of her son-in-law, George F. Simmons in 1855; his brother Charles Simmons in 1862; of her daughter Ann Dunkin Loring; her granddaughter Lucia Simmons (1855-1860); her sister Martha Bartlett; and her son Ezra, killed in the Civil War in 1863. While her oldest daughter Elizabeth Ripley (called Lizzie or Arly) remained with her and the next, Mary, lived next door with her children, her son Gore moved to Minnesota; Phebe apparently taught school in various places but visited frequently; and Sophy, the youngest, lived in Milton with her husband, James B. Thayer. Ann's son, David Loring (born 1849), lived in Concord and later with the Thayers. Sarah Ripley herself died in Concord on July 26, 1867.
On April 26, 1812, Martha Ballard delivered Mrs. Heath's child.  This was Martha's  last delivery of the 816 in her long career as a midwife. In four week's time Martha's own funeral would take place on May 31st.  When Martha arrived in Hallowell Maine on the banks of the Kennebec River in 1778 she was living on the frontier.  A community of one hundred families, mostly living in log cabins.  Yet this was a busy commercial center, a transition point for trade coming up from the coast feeding the growing population upriver from Hallowell.  It was for this reason that Ephraim Ballard settled there, building a grist and saw mill and serving as a surveyor establishing the legal boundaries of townships and farmsteads.

In 1809 sixteen year old Sarah Alden Bradford  began a lifetime correspondence and relationship with thirty-eight year old Mary Moody Emerson, aunt to Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Two generations, two wars, two distinctly different social and cultural milieus separate Martha and Sarah.  Much had changed, but for Sarah there was also much that remained the same in her "sphere" as a married woman.

Sarah's family's roots are  found in the rural, but well established, seacoast town of Duxbury, Massachusetts.  Her full name hints at the place her family held in the local community; Alden, a direct lineal descendant of John Alden and Priscilla Mullen, Bradford, a great, great, great, great granddaughter of William Bradford, first governor of Plymouth colony.  Her father Gamaliel volunteered for the Continental Army at age thirteen seeing service at Saratoga and Valley Forge.  In the aftermath of the war he choose work as a seaman rather than attend  Harvard and within several years was the owner of the brig Jerusha engaging in the lucrative trade of the post-war years.  For Sarah, the eldest of Gamaliel and Elizabeth Hickling's eight children, life began on Cow Lane, Boston, and continued three years later in a modest house at 4 South Street, now lost under the South East Expressway near what is today the Leather District. ​
Punctuated by the recurring visits of her sea captain father, Sarah's earliest years reflected the needs of a growing family of four children which her mother managed together with Sarah's help.  It is during this earliest period that we begin to see the beginnings of Sarah's intellectual bent and curiosity.   Gamaliel placed Sarah  at Jacob Adams Cummings co-educational school, a most unusual school for that time.  It was Cummings who encouraged Sarah to study Latin, also unusual for the period.  Sarah would later remark to her brother Daniel that Cummings had "done more than any other one man towards exciting a taste for literature among the present race of ladies in Boston." [SAR to DNB Feb. 29, 1820]   This exposure was complimented by the family's friendship with Judge John Davies who gave Sarah free run of his considerable library and natural history collection beginning a life long interest in science and botany.  All of this was punctuated with frequent visits to her grandfather in Duxbury where she formed her closest life long friendship Abba [Abigail] Allyn and  studied under her minister father, Dr. John Allyn who shared Cummings' progressive attitude towards the education of women.  Add to all of this a close attachment to the religious community of the First Parish in Boston, then led by the liberal minister William Emerson who was at the forefront of the transformative changes that would bring Unitarianism to Boston.  

What enfolds Sarah during her youth and adolescence is an extended intellectual community where learning, reflection and thoughtful questioning  is valued and encouraged.  Allowing for the considerable change over two generations, this is likely the most salient distinction between the familial and societal contexts of Martha's and Sarah's lives.  Martha's frontier experience did not provide the cultural resources nor the supportive encouragement that Sarah enjoyed.  Reading Martha's diary closely it is clear that she made the most of the resources she had, as evidenced by her attendance at autopsies, her practice of herbalism and social medicine.  But her midwifery was more concerned with practical results than theory.  In Laurel Ulrich's words,  "Martha was an 'empiric'".  [ MWT p. 53]  She had no doubt that Dr. Page's use of opium to relieve the labor pains of her patient of Hannah Sewall was inappropriate and only delayed the inevitable delivery, knowledge based on her considerable practice.

There are points of congruence in these two lives as well.  Both were married; for either period it would have been unusual for them not to be.  When Sarah's mother died in 1817, it was her father's wish that she marry, and although she noted wistfully in later years the opportunities lost, she was a  dutiful daughter and married Rev. Samuel Ripley of Waltham.  Both were mothers, Martha gave birth to nine children, Sarah to eight. The majority of their lives were spent in the domestic sphere  raising children, engaged in  the entire gamut of domestic work needed to nurture and sustain a family and household.  
Picture
The Samuel Ripley House in Waltham circa 1893
Despite their busy lives, both had occupations separate and apart from their households: Martha, her midwifery, and by examination of her accounts  it was run as a business separate and apart from that of her husband, Ephraim, and Sarah her teaching, preparing students in Latin, Greek and mathematics for entrance into Harvard.  In addition Sarah aided Samuel in running his boarding school often consisting of fifteen or more boys, all needing feeding, supervision as well as instruction.  In all of this Martha and Sarah were more alike than different.  

Martha’s and Sarah’s lives were embedded in a patriarchal domestic environment.  Their inquisitiveness and curiosity were constrained by the conventions and  norms established by a male dominated culture. They could only find expression through acceptable outlets.  While Martha may have been invited to observe autopsies it would never have occurred to the local male medical establishment to encourage her to go beyond the practice of midwifery, a traditional and acceptable female role, into the practice of general medicine and surgery.  For her part Sarah was an accomplished linguist with command of five languages, a naturalist with a lifelong interest in botany, and an astute reader of contemporary literature ranging from David Hume and Charles Darwin to George Sand.  Indeed, Edward Everett President of Harvard, remarked that Sarah could have held any professor’s chair at the college.  He did not need to add that as a practical matter this would never happen because of Sarah’s gender. Fair Harvard would have to wait until 1919 for Alice Hamilton to become its first female associate professor.  And even then it was stipulated that she would not have privileges at the Harvard Faculty Club, could not process at Harvard’s commencements, and was denied free faculty tickets at sporting events.  How fine the gristmill of male privilege grinds!

Sources

Precious little has been written about Sarah Ripley.  Only one modern biography exists, Joan Goodwin’s The Remarkable Mrs. Ripley.  While I enjoyed the immense amount of biographical detail Goodwin provides others have found it “mired in detail” lacking analysis of Sarah’s place in the context of 19th century women’s history.  [See Kirkus Review: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/joan-w-goodwin-2/the-remarkable-mrs-ripley-the-life-of-sarah-ald/]. ​
For the above  reason we will work directly from Sarah’s letters, all of which can be found at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe.  If you are interested in seeing the entire collection they can be accessed here:  https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/resources/4958.

For our purposes I have excerpted Sarah’s letters and accompanying
editorial narrative from  Sarah Butler Wister and Agnes Irwin, Worthy Women of Our First Century, 1877. Where appropriate I have provided explanatory material in footnotes or brackets within the text. 


Download the reading here.

Things to ponder as you read

Sarah’s letters fall conveniently into three stages of life:  youth-adolescence, middle years as wife and mother, and retirement.  As you read consider the extent to which Sarah’s intellectual interests bloom, are subsumed and then revived.  To what extent did she lose or not lose her own emotional/intellectual autonomy and agency?

Joan Goodman in her introduction to The Remarkable Mrs Ripley  suggests that Sarah would make a good case study for Carol Gilligan’s theory, articulated in A Different Voice, that women’s moral judgements reflect an “ethics of care” centered on relational responsibilities unlike male concern with rules based justice.  What evidence in Sarah’s letters support or do not support this observation?

Sarah, with few exceptions, does not concern herself with the larger issues of her day.  Nor does she have any interest in writing for a larger audience.  Reactions?
Session Five ~ Sarah Walbridge Way, 1827-1909
​
Sarah Walbridge Way, ca. 1860
Photo taken by Ira E. Summer, Northfield, Minnesota.  
​Courtesy Choate Farm Collection
Sarah Walbridge Way's story begins with her maternal grandparents, David and Olive Brown, and a decision reminiscent of one made by Ephraim and Martha Ballard.  In 1801 David and Olive left their home in Charlestown Massachusetts and migrated to the small hill town of Peacham Vermont in the Northeast Kingdom. The post Revolutionary era was a time of mass migration.  It is estimated that as much as 25 percent of the settled population of the older coastal regions moved westward. Many from Massachusetts migrated to western Pennsylvania and New York and others as in the case of the Browns, to Vermont.

In 1802 Olive Brown gave birth to her fourth child and second daughter, Roxana.  Roxana in turn would raise nine children  by two husbands and two stepsons as well.  Like Martha Ballard and Sarah Ripley her daily life embodied the domestic concerns and tasks of  women.  What stands out in Roxana's life is her intense determination that all of her children would receive as much education as possible.  All of them attended the local district school, all but two attended Peacham Academy, eight would teach at the district school, and two would graduate from college.  As a result, when five of her children joined a second mass migration westward in the 1840s they produced a trove of letters back and forth with their mother as well as their own day books and journals.
Roxana Brown Walbridge Watts, circa 1850.  
Notice that she has chosen to pose with a stack of books to her right.
None of this would be in the public domain if it were not for a fortuitous set of circumstances that brought together Lynn Bonfield, an archivist at Radcliffe's Schlesinger Library, with Mary Morrison, a great-granddaughter of Roxana.  Lynn's discovery at the California Historical Society of a journal by one of Roxana's daughters led to, in her words, "...a story of opportune discoveries and coincidences amounting at times almost to miracle...." [RC xiii]  This is a classic story of serendipity at work. At several of Lynn's lectures, various descendants of Roxana stepped forward and offered their own collections of letters between Roxana and her children.  The need for further research eventually brought Lynn to Peacham, Vemont where Mary Morrison had also recently established a summer residence, bringing with her more family diaries and letters.  A chance sharing of names at a party led to their coming together, and as they say, the rest is history.
Picture
The fruit of Lynn Bromfield's and Mary Morrison's collaboration is Roxana's Children:  The Biography of a Nineteenth Century Vermont Family available directly from the University of Massachusetts Press Amherst  in paper for $25.95.  If you are interested in a copy for yourself follow this link.

Other sources include:​
Amazon​, where there are some used hardback copies available.
Google, where an ebook download is available for $11.57
There are also copies available through the Minute Man Library Network.





Reading Assignment
​We will be reading an excerpt, Sarah Walbridge Way,,, From a Factory in Lowell to a Minnesota Log Cabin. Subject to the provisions of Academic Fair Use, you may download a copy of the reading at this link.

Background
Picture
Taken from Roxana's Children, p. 2
 Sarah Walbridge Way, circa 1849.  It was about this time that Sarah
left the Lowell mills and married John Way in October, 1849.
Sarah Walbridge, Roxana's third child, is representative of many of the changes that came to women's lives as a result of industrialization and the resulting changes in mobility that were sweeping the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century.  Unlike Martha Ballard's daughters who learned their skills at home or in the homes of nearby neighbors, Sarah was engaged in factory work outside of the home, first in the small mills located in Peacham, and then later in the mills of  what was the first planned industrial city in the United States, Lowell Massachusetts.  Despite the fact that these employment opportunities did not represent careers in our sense of the word, but were seen as temporary in nature, they nonetheless conferred a taste for independence, control, and community that were new in the lives of these young women.  The extent to which this carried over into their later lives is difficult to determine and probably quite variable, but that it marked an inflection point in the evolving consciousness of the women  themselves and in the larger society as well is quite clear.  In 1836 the mill owners in Lowell might well have  wondered at the degree of independence their boarding house experiment had brought about when upwards of 1200 young women went on strike protesting the lowering of wages.  As they marched in protest the were heard to  sing the following:
​
"Oh! isn’t it a pity, such a pretty girl as I-
Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die? 
Oh ! I cannot be a slave,
I will not be a slave,
For I’m so fond of liberty 
That I cannot be a slave."
Lowell, Massachusetts in 1839
Once home in the summer of 1849 Sarah would become engaged and married that fall to John Way.  It is at this point that Sarah's life intersects with another inflection point in the development of nineteenth century America, the gold rush of 1849.  By January of 1850 Sarah was alone as John and a group of seventeen other local Vermonters began their trip to the gold fields of California.  Sarah would give birth to her first daughter, Martha, in May while John was seeking his fortune.  Returning in 1850 John had enough treasure to purchase a farm in Hardwick Vermont, twenty-five miles northwest of Peacham.  In an earlier time this would have been the end of  our story, a lifetime not un-different from that of her mother, Roxana.  But the 1850's was another phase of the mass migrations which characterized American life in the nineteenth century.  Manifest Destiny was the cry, and many heeded its call as lands won in the recent Mexican American war opened up to settlement.  A parallel movement occurred in the north-central trans-Mississippi region as the conclusion of treaties with native Americans opened up  Minnesota Territory to settlement as well.  It was to Minnesota that John would move Sarah and Martha in April 1855 to a homestead of 160 acres and a log cabin.  In Roxana's words "I think it is rather a hard case for one to go from a cold Country to colder one and and have to suffer all the privations of beginning new faring [sic] hard and being homesick into the bargain...."  One can only wonder if there were wistful memories of her Lowell boarding house days on Sarah's part.  We will never know.
Gotten Log Cabin, built 1850s, Wisconsin
​
 Session Six ~ Harriet Ann Jacobs, 1813 - 1897
Harriet Anne Jacobs
In 1849, the same year that Sarah Wallbridge  left the Lowell Mills and married John Way, thirty-six year old fugitive slave Harriet Anne Jacobs moved to Rochester New York.   She had obtained employment in an abolitionist bookstore above the offices of Frederick Douglas's newspaper, The North Star.  It was here that Harriet met and became a confidant of the abolitionist and feminist  Amy Post who encouraged her to write and publish the story of her childhood and escape to freedom.  In 1861writing under the  pseudonym Linda Brent,  Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was published in Boston and in London.  Initially well received, especially in England, the outbreak of the Civil War and all that followed overshadowed its publication.  Long thought by the academic community to be a fictional account written by Lydia Maria Child,  It was not be until the late twentieth century that Incidents would be rediscovered and accepted as an authentic autobiography as a result of the archival work of professor Jean Fagan Yellin of Pace University.  At her urging Harvard University Press published Yellin's edition of Incidents  in 1987.

Background  taken from the  New Bedford Historical Society
"Although millions of African American women were held in bondage over the 250 years that slavery was legal in the United States, Harriet Jacobs (1813-97) is the only one known to have left papers testifying to her life.  Harriet Jacobs is now known as the author of Incident in the Life of A Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861), the most important slave narrative written by an African-American woman. Jacobs is also important because of the role she played as a relief worker among Black Civil War refugees in Alexandria, Virginia and Savannah, Georgia. Throughout most of the twentieth century, Jacob’s autobiography was thought to be a novel by a white writer, and her relief work was unknown. With the 1987 publication of an annotated edition of her book, however, Jacobs became established as the author of the most comprehensive antebellum autobiography by an African American woman.  Her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, holds a central place in the canon of American literature as the most important slave narrative by an African American woman...." Continued here

Our Reading
You may download a pdf copy of Incidents here.

Copies of Incidents are readably available from many sources including the following:
Amazon:  Dove Thrift Edition paperback, $5.00
Amazon: Kindle Edition $0.99
​Google Books:  $0.99
​iBooks: $0.99
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Ideas for Class Discussion

The following is taken from Georgetown University, The Heath Anthology of American Literature Syllabus Builder.  

​Harriet Ann Jacobs (1813-1897)
​Contributing Editor: Jean Fagan Yellin
​
Classroom Issues and StrategiesPrimary problems that arise in teaching Jacobs include:
1. The question of authorship: Could a woman who had been held in slavery have written such a literary book?
2. The question of her expressions of conflict about her sexual experiences.
3. The question of veracity: How could she have stayed hidden all those years?
  • To address these questions, point to Jacobs's life: She learned to read at six years. She spent her seven years in hiding sewing and reading (doubtless reading the Bible, but also reading some newspapers, according to her account). And in 1849, at Rochester, she spent ten months working in the Anti-Slavery Reading Room, reading her way through the abolitionists' library.
  • Discuss sexual roles assigned white women and black women in nineteenth-century America: free white women were told that they must adhere to the "cult of domesticity" and were rewarded for piety, purity, domesticity, and obedience. Black slave women were (like male slaves) denied literacy and the possibility of reading the Bible; as Jacobs points out, in North Carolina after the Nat Turner rebellion, slaves were forbidden to meet together in their own churches. Their only chance at "piety" was to attend the church of their masters. They were denied "purity"--if by "purity" is meant sex only within marriage--because they were denied legal marriage. The "Notes" to the standard edition of Incidents read: "The entire system worked against the protection of slave women from sexual assault and violence, as Jacobs asserts. The rape of a slave was not a crime but a trespass upon her master's property" (fn 2, p. 265). Denied marriage to a man who might own a home and denied the right to hold property and own her own home, the female slave was, of course, denied "domesticity." Her "obedience," however, was insisted upon: not obedience to her father, husband, or brother, but obedience to her owner. Slave women were excluded from patriarchal definitions of true womanhood; the white patriarchy instead formally defined them as producers and as reproducers of a new generation of slaves, and, informally, as sexual objects. Jacobs is writing her narrative within a society that insists that white women conform to one set of sexual practices and that black women conform to a completely contradictory set. Her awareness of this contradiction enables her to present a powerful critique; but it does not exclude her from being sensitive to a sexual ideology that condemns her.
  • Concerning the accuracy of this autobiography, refer to the exhaustive identification of people, places, and events in the standard edition. Concerning the period in hiding, point out that the date of Jacobs's escape has been documented by her master's "wanted" ad of June, 1835, and the date of her Philadelphia arrival has been documented by June, 1842 correspondence; both are reproduced in the standard edition. Discuss the history of Anne Frank--and of others who hid for long periods to avoid persecution (e.g., men "dodging" the draft during World War II and the Vietnam War, etc.).

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, and Personal Issues
  • Themes: The struggle for freedom; the centrality of the family and the attempt to achieve security for the family; the individual and communal efforts to achieve these goals; the relationships among women (among generations of black women; between black slave women and slaveholding white women, between black slave women and non-slave-holding white women); the problem of white racism; the problem of the institution of chattel slavery; the issue of woman's appropriate response to chattel slavery and to tyranny: Should she passively accept victimization? Should she fight against it? How should she struggle--within the "domestic sphere" (where the patriarchy assigned women) or within both the domestic and the "public sphere" (which the patriarchy assigned to men)? How can a woman tell her story if she is not a "heroine" who has lived a "blameless" life? How can a woman create her own identity? What about the limits of literary genre? What about the limits imposed on women's discussion of their sexual experiences?
  • Historical Issues: These involve both the antebellum struggle against white racism and against slavery, and the struggle against sexism. Jacobs's story raises questions about the institution of chattel slavery; patriarchal control of free women in the antebellum period; the struggle against slavery (black abolitionists, white abolitionists, within the white community, within the free black community, within the slave community); the historic struggle against white racism (in the antebellum North); the historic effort of the anti-slavery feminists, among the Garrisonian abolitionists, who attempted to enter the public sphere and to debate issues of racism and slavery (women like Sarah and Angelina Grimké, like Amy Post, who suggested to Jacobs that she write her life story, and like Lydia Maria Child, who edited it); the Nat Turner revolt; the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law; the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin; the firing on Fort Sumter.
  • Personal Issues: The narrator constructs a self who narrates the book. This narrator expresses conflict over some of her history, especially her sexual history (see above). She is rejected by her grandmother, then later accepted (but perhaps not fully); near the end of her book, she wins her daughter's full acceptance. All of this speaks to the importance of intergenerational connections among the women in this book. Near the conclusion, the narrator expresses her deep distress at having her freedom bought by her employer, a woman who is her friend: she feels that she has been robbed of her "victory," that in being purchased she has violated the purity of her freedom struggle. Writing the book, she gains that victory by asserting control over her own life.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions
  • Incidents appears to be influenced by (1) the novel of seduction and (2) the slave narrative. It presents a powerful, original transformation of the conventions of both of these genres. What is new here is that--in contrast to the type of the seduction novel--the female protagonist asserts her responsibility for her sexual behavior, instead of presenting herself as a powerless victim. This is a new kind of "fallen woman," who problematizes the whole concept of "fallen womanhood." In contrast to the type of the slave narrative, Incidents presents not a single male figure struggling for his freedom against an entire repressive society, but a female figure struggling for freedom for her children and herself with the aid of both her family and of much of a black community united in opposition to the white slavocracy. Even from within that slavocracy, some women assert their sisterhood to help. The language in Incidents suggests both the seduction novel and the slave narrative. The passages concerning Brent's sexual history are written in elevated language and are full of evasions and silences; the passages concerning her struggle for freedom are written in simpler English and are direct and to the point--or they are hortatory, in the style of Garrisonian abolitionism.
  • Original AudienceI have touched on this above, in discussing history. Jacobs's Linda Brent writes that she is trying to move the women of the North to act against slavery: these, I take it, were free white women who were not (yet) committed to abolitionism and who were not (yet) engaged in debate in the "public sphere." In class, we talk about the ways in which Jacobs's Linda Brent addresses her audience in Chapter 10, and the ways in which, as a writer reflecting on her long-ago girlhood, she makes mature judgments about her life.
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Dr. James Norcom Sr.
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Mary Horniblow Nucom
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Session Seven ~ Charity  Bryant, 1777-1851 & Sylvia Drake, 1784-1868
Silhouette of Sylvia Drake and Charity Bryant, c. 1805 - 1815.
Entwined in braided human hair.
The Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History
“If I were permitted to draw aside the veil of private life, I would briefly give you the singular, and to me most interesting history of two maiden ladies who dwell in this valley. I would tell you how, in their youthful days, they took each other as companions for life, and how this union, no less sacred to them than the tie of marriage, has subsisted, in uninterrupted harmony for more than forty years. . . but I have already said more than they will forgive me.”
                                                                                           William Cullen Bryant, Charity’s nephew, 1843

If women in general have been marginalized in our historical record, then even more so have the lives and contributions of lesbian and transgendered women, especially those who formed enduring relationships and considered themselves married.  The existence and success of same sex marriages presented a potent threat to the normative values of American nineteenth century society just as they do today.  Sylvia and Charity both worked diligently at gaining acceptance in their immediate families and the larger Weybridge Vermont community.  In this they were largely successful as is witnessed by the headstone erected in the Weybridge cemetery in their memory.
Their struggle provides a historical lens through which to view the current ongoing struggle  extending and protecting the political and societal equality of those whose gender identification fall outside of the norms of straight society.  Their story acts as a historical corrective to oft repeated arguments that today's demands fall outside of the established traditions of our society.  The Drake and Byrant families and the Town of Weybridge would beg to differ.

Some Background

The Improbable, 200-Year-Old Story of One of America’s First Same-Sex ‘Marriages’, Sarah Kaplan, The Washington Post, March 20, 2015.  www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/03/20/the-improbable-story-of-one-of-americas-first-same-sex-marriages-from-over-200-years-ago/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.e182ae89a594

Charity and Sylvia: The Remarkable Story of How Two Women Married Each Other in Early America, BrainPickings, Maria Popova. www.brainpickings.org/2014/08/13/charity-and-sylvia-marriage/

Our Reading
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Rachel Hope Cleves (born 1975) is an American-Canadian historian, best known for her 2014 book Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America. The book, a study of historical documents concerning the same-sex relationship of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake in the 19th century, was a shortlisted Lambda Literary Award nominee for LGBT Studies at the 27th Lambda Literary Awards.
Born in New York City in 1975, Cleves studied at Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, and has been a professor at the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia since 2009. She is a specialist in early American history, with research areas including gender and sexuality, the American relationship with the French Revolution, and the War of 1812.[
She has also published the book The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery (2009), as well as articles in journals such as Early American Studies, Reviews in American History and the Journal of American History. From Wikipedia.
Amazon.com   Available in hardback, paper and Kindle editions: https://www.amazon.com/Charity-Sylvia-Same-Sex-Marriage-America/dp/019062731X
​Apple iBooks $11.99  itunes.apple.com/us/book/charity-and-sylvia/id873882662?mt=11
Minuteman Library System, ebook, find.minlib.net/iii/encore/search/C__S9780199335435;jsessionid=3FE56E7E023AE70865491AA0E9D3FA6B?lang=eng

We will be reading an excerpt, Chapter 12, from Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America. Subject to the provisions of Academic Fair Use, you may download a copy of the reading from this link.
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Session Eight ~ Rachel Bella Calof, 1876 - 1952
Rachel Bella Kahn circa 1894

​"I had traveled a long and often torturous way from the little shtetl in Russia where I was born..  It wasn't an
​easy road by any means, but if you love the living of life you must know the journey was well worth it."
At the age of four, Rachel Bella Kahn's mother died.  A few short years later her father abandoned his children and Rachel spent the next twelve or so years being passed around from one relative to another finally ending up as a hired maid in her paternal Aunt's house in Bita Tserkva, Ukraine.  A poor relation with no dowry, her prospects looked slim, that is, until an entirely fortuitous decision on the part of a nearby Jewish family changed her life entirely. Chaya Bloome, a tenant of Rachel's Great Uncle, had recently arranged a marriage between her brother Abraham, who had emigrated to the United States, and a young woman named Rachael Chevitz.  Passage had been booked and travel plans made when the Chevitz family had second thoughts about sending their young daughter to the United States.  It was at this point that the Great Uncle introduced Chaya Bloome to Rachel Bella.  Pictures and letters were exchanged with Abraham and on June 9, 1894 eighteen year old Rachel Bella Kahn stood in the arrivals room at Ellis Island scanning the crowd beyond the barrier for the face of her husband-to-be.

​I recognized him at once from the photograph which he had sent me.  Nervously I said to the girl sitting next to me, "There comes my beloved."  everyone around heard me and they all laughed with happiness for me.  I wasted no time.  Basket in had, I headed for the gate.  The name Rachel Chavetz was called out and I tried to get through, but I was prevented until my friend approached and, recognizing me from the picture which had been provided him, claimed me and led me into the promised land.

​Not an unusual story.  One repeated hundreds of thousands of times at the end of the nineteenth century.  By 1924 over two million Eastern European Jews had emigrated to the United States, most settling along the East Coast in the urban ghettos of Philadelphia, New Jersey, New York and Connecticut.  But this was not to be Rachel's story.  Within two weeks Rachel and Abraham would be on a train to Devil's Lake, Ramsey County, North Dakota where they would join Abraham's parents, two brothers and their wives and children to  take up residence on a communal homestead acquired through the Federal Homesteading Act of 1862.
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Hester Street, NYC, 1898
Calof Homestead circa 1905

The Calof compound was not an anomaly in Ramsey County, but part of a larger effort to establish permanent Jewish agricultural settlements in the agricultural heartland of the United States.  Often the result of urban Jewish philanthropist's  utopian romantic notions of the liberating freedom endowed by land ownership and agricultural labor, over 40 Jewish farm families had established themselves in the County by 1894.  Most lacked agricultural experience and few had the financial resources needed to carry them over while they established a functioning farm within the five years required by the Homestead Act.  Urban congregational support in the form of loans and supplies often sustained their efforts, but when withdrawn failure usually quickly followed.  Unlike the vast majority of Jewish settlers in the County, Abraham and Rachel's efforts were largely successful and they would remain at Devil's Lake until 1917 when they moved to St. Paul, Minnesota.  That year there were about 10 Jewish families remaining.  In 1965, a survey of rural households in North Dakota showed only three with any Jewish ancestry.  Today, only the Sons of Jacob Cemetery in Devil's Lake remains to remind us of this particular chapter in American History.

Our Reading

​We will be reading an excerpt from Rachel Calof's Story.  In 1936, while living in St. Paul Minnesota, Rachel decided to put pen to paper to memorialize for her family the story of her childhood, emigration to the United States, and years of homesteading in North Dakota. Written in Yiddish, it would sit in a trunk in her daughter, Elizabeth Breitbord's home until 1980 when Elizabeth enlisted the aid of her brother Jacob and friend Molly Shaw to translate the memoir.  

Paperback edition is available directly from Indiana University Press, $15.00:  http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=20945

Subject to the provisions of Academic Fair Use, you may download a copy of the reading from this link.
Our excerpt opens in the late fall of 1896, two years after Rachel's arrival at the Calof compound.  She has transitioned from a shocked an appalled first estimate of her new surroundings and family, "As we climbed down from the wagon I looked again at this assembled group and my heart sank still lower....As we entered (her mother-in-law's shack) my heart turned to ice at what greeted  my eyes", to a grudging acceptance of her condition coupled with a fierce determination to make a success out of her new life.  She had endured sharing a small 9 x14 foot shack with her in-laws until her floor-less and roofless shack could be made ready.  This was followed by a communal decision that her husband would spend the next three months apart from her while employed on an adjacent homestead earning money to  purchase the supplies they needed to survive the winter, and lastly the birth of her first daughter, Minnie.  When our excerpt opens Rachel is pregnant with her second child and dreading the prospect of spending a second winter closeted with  her in-laws who would  join them in order to conserve fuel.

As you read, keep in mind the following observation made by Elizabeth Jameson in her essay "Rachel Bella Calof's Life as Collective History" which is part of the Indiana University edition of Rachel's memoir.

​Locating Rachel Bella Calof in historical context is not a simple matter of putting her in a particular place and time, much as we might slide a missing piece into a jigsaw puzzle of an old frontier landscape.   She doesn't fit the West of popular history or collective imagination.  Nor, for that matter, does she slip easily into familiar pictures of Jewish immigrants, or of the women of turn-of-the-century America.  Women, immigrants, and the West evoke a series of unconnected images. [p. 136]


All of us carry around a considerable amount of cultural baggage when it comes to our imagery of the West, immigration, and women's experience in both contexts.  In the popular mind our imagery of Western settlement reflects at best the highly romanticized literature of our childhood, Laurel Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie comes to mind, or at worst the various television series that popularized a Gunsmoke western motif.   Both of these iconic representations would be unrecognizable to Rachel Calof.  We need to take Rachel on her own terms, her life is her own, it was her lived experience, our popular conventions notwithstanding.

Related Sources on the Web
Rachel's Journey to American, Leslie Bellis-Vaughn & David J. Robinson, 2014. 
http://sojnorthdakota.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Rachels-Journey-to-America.pdf
​I found this website quite enjoyable.  The authors have brought together a huge collection of photographs and documents with commentary to trace  Rachel's emigration and experience in North Dakota.

Abraham Calof, by Elizabeth Breitbord. http://sojnorthdakota.org/abraham-calof/
A brief reminiscence by Rachel's daughter, Elizabeth.

Rachel Calof, A Memoir with Music.  rachelcalof.com/index#home
Kate Fuglei and her husband, writer Ken LaZebnik, have spent several years adapting Calof’s memoir into a one-woman show which has toured the country for several years.  The show is directed by Ellen S. Pressman, and features original music and lyrics by Leslie Steinweiss, which Fuglei said expresses Calof’s “internal life.” The website includes a 5 minute video of excerpts from the play.

Some Images to Accompany your Reading
Hover your cursor over an image to start or pause the slide show.


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Session Nine ~ Henrietta Swan Leavitt, 1868 - 1921
​The article below is from: Heroes of Space: Henrietta Swan Leavitt by Gemma Lavender, 19 October 2018, All About Space, https://www.spaceanswers.com/about/

​When discussing the history of astronomy there are a number of famous names that instantly spring to mind: Hubble, Herschel, Galileo and so on. All are of course deserving of the praise they are given for their contributions to astronomy, but there are many other names that go unrecognised, often being underappreciated for their own contributions. Perhaps there is none more so, at least with regards her impact on astronomy, than Henrietta Swan Leavitt. Where others in her time debated over our true place in the universe, her calculations paved the way to some of the most important discoveries of the 20th century, which answered that very question.

Leavitt was born on 4 July 1868 in Lancaster, Massachusetts. She was the daughter of a congregational minister and in her youth attended Oberlin College and the Society for Collegiate Instruction of Women (later Radcliffe College), the latter of which she graduated from with a bachelor’s degree in 1892. In the last year of college she had taken a course in astronomy and took to the subject with great enthusiasm. It was around this time that she sadly suffered a serious illness that left her severely deaf, but her love for astronomy remained.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries, however, were not an enjoyable time for female astronomers. Women were not allowed to operate telescopes and often instead found themselves performing somewhat mundane tasks for supposedly more-important men. So it came to pass that in 1893 Leavitt began working at the Harvard College Observatory under American astronomer Edward Pickering. She was part of a group known as the Harvard Computers, or Pickering’s Harem, a group of skilled women employed by Pickering for a pittance of about 30 cents an hour to sift through mountains of astronomical data.

Pickering's Harem, 1918.  Henrietta Leavitt is the sixth from the left.

​Each woman was given a different set of data to catalogue and analyse. Leavitt was assigned to study variable stars, those whose luminosity varied over time but whose exact workings were poorly understood. In her studies she found thousands of variable stars in the Magellanic Clouds and she noticed a pattern, namely that the brighter a variable star was, the longer its period of variability. She published her results in 1908 in the Annals of the Astronomical Observatory of Harvard College.

The type of stars she focused on were so-called Cepheid variables, a class of very luminous variable stars. She was the first to notice this strong correlation between their luminosity and their period of pulsation. Using the assumption that these stars were all at a similar distance from Earth in the Magellanic Cloud, she calculated the period-luminosity relationship of the stars.

The Large Magellanic Cloud NASA

​This discovery had huge connotations for astronomy as a whole. The period-luminosity relationship enabled Cepheids to be used as standard candles, or in other words distance markers. They were incredibly useful for working out the distances to objects that were too far to be calculated by other methods. In the 1920s astronomer Edwin Hubble detected Leavitt’s Cepheid variables in Andromeda and was able to conclude that it was another galaxy rather than a part of the Milky Way, placing us in just one of hundreds of billions of galaxies. Similarly, astronomer Harlow Shapley used Cepheid variables to deduce that our Sun was not at the centre of the galaxy, but rather in the outer regions. Leavitt’s discovery turned astronomy on its head and for the first time enabled astronomers to begin working out just where we fit into the universe.

Leavitt, however, went largely unrecognised for her work and in 1921 she died after losing a battle with cancer. In 1924 a Swedish mathematician, Gösta Mittag-Leffler, attempted to nominate Leavitt for a Nobel Prize, only to discover she had died three years earlier. Nonetheless the influence of her work remains plain to see and it is thanks to her dogged determination that we now have a much greater understanding of the universe than ever before. Perhaps now, when discussing important names that have significantly contributed to astronomy, Henrietta Leavitt should be one of the first on the list.
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Leavitt at work at the Harvard Observatory
The Matthew and Matilda effects: the phenomenon of under-recognition in science, by Diana Grajales Abellán. October 2016. Lund University. https://moodle.med.lu.se/pluginfile.php/65697/mod_resource/content/1/The%20Matthew%20and%20Matilda%20effects%20-%20Diana%20Grajales%20Abellan.pdf

Modern science is built based on cooperation, trust, competence and fairness between collaborative projects that involve a group of researchers (graduate students, PhDs, post-docs, senior researchers...). Furthermore, it is often seen that the research group extends the network to different collaborations and relationships with other colleagues. This cooperative way of building knowledge facilitates the trustworthiness of society in research (1). However, science is not completely objective, and it can be affected by psychological and social factors that determine the scientific paradigm of the moment, as Thomas Kuhn proposed in 1962 (2). Two good examples of these social factors that compromise scientific objectivity are the Matthew and Matilda effects. In short, the Matthew effect describes that contributions made by “high standing” scientists are the most visible ones, while contributions from less-known scientists are unnoticed. On the other hand, the Matilda effect explains that the work made by women scientists is sometimes seen as work of lower-quality compared to similar work made by their male peers. In this assignment, I will try to review both effects and explain some characteristics examples of both phenomenon.
​Continue here. . .
Silent Sky by Lauren Gunderson
"Lauren Gunderson is an award-winning playwright living in San Francisco.  She studied at Emory University and NYU’s Tisch School where she was a Reynolds Fellow in Social Entrepreneurship. Her work has been produced and developed at companies across the US.... Based on the true story and science of early 20th century female “computers” at Harvard Observatory. Astonishing discoveries await Henrietta Leavitt as she maps distant stars in galaxies beyond our own. But this brilliant, headstrong pioneer must struggle for recognition in the man’s world of turn-of-the-century astronomy. In this exquisite blend of science, history, family ties, and fragile love, a passionate young woman must map her own passage through a society determined to keep a woman in her place. Finalist for the Jane Chambers Award 2013." http://silentskyplay.tumblr.com

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​Colleyville Texas Heritage High School's production of Silent Sky by Lauren Gunderson . Performance date October 26, 2018. This video includes introduction by director Jacquie Devino. Produced and performed by the 2018 CHHS Production 1 theatre students. Each role is performed by different actors in each scene. Costume elements are used to create continuity between scenes and identify characters.

Our Reading
Our reading this week is an excerpt from Miss Leavitt's Stars, by George Johnson.

Subject to the provisions of Academic Fair Use, you may download a copy of the reading from this link.
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