"WOMEN'S HERSTORY MONTH - A DEEPER AND LONGER VISION"

 “WOMEN’S HERSTORY MONTH - A DEEPER AND LONGER VISION”

In the middle of February, Caroline and I made a long weekend trip to see Susan in Baltimore.  She was directing a play in Bethesda, and we wanted to see it.  We rented an Airbnb in Silver Spring to use as a base for the play. The first thing that we noticed was that there was snow everywhere (except the roads), and the roads had been cleared by plowing the snow and placing it in what became tall, grey piles of snow/ice.  I saw more snow on the ground there than I have in the last three winters in the ATL – one of the main reasons that we continue to live in the South.

Besides having a great visit with Susan, our main purpose for the trip was to experience the performance of the play that she was directing.  It was entitled “Silent Sky,” written by Susan’s former classmate at Decatur High, Lauren Gunderson.  Lauren is a well-known playwright, known for centering her plays on the stories of strong women. Often she is the most produced playwright of the year in the USA, and this play did not disappoint.  The play centered on early women astronomers in the USA, centering on a “computer” known as Henrietta Leavitt.  If you are familiar with the movie “Hidden Figures” (and if you are not, go find it immediately), you will recall that people who did long and tedious math work were often called “computers.”  They are tasked with difficult mathematical work, and many times women were the ones doing this work, with only pencil and paper (and later, adding machines).

Henrietta Leavitt was born in Massachusetts in 1868, and early on demonstrated a high level of both mathematical ability and mathematical insights.  Her minister father encouraged her pursuits, and she graduated from Radcliffe College ( because Harvard did not accept women at that time.)  After graduation she found a job at the Harvard College Observatory, and her job was to do math work related to the distances of the stars from Earth and from other stars.  She quickly demonstrated a profound ability to see deeper and further into methods of how to measure the distances between stars.  “Silent Sky” is a play about her struggles as an aspiring astronomer in the midst of the patriarchal demand that she be only a computer, who would just do the calculations requested and demanded by the male astronomers.  “Don’t try to give us your insights, because you don’t have any,” was the usual refrain.

But, she did have extraordinary insights, and though I understand very few of them, the play depicted her stubborn persistence to a commitment to truth and to the capabilities of women in science, especially in astronomy.  Her discovery of how to effectively measure vast astronomical distances led to a shift in the understanding of the scale and nature of the universe.  This work led her to discover the relation between brightness and the positions of the stars.  She worked with Cepheid variables (no, I don’t know what those are – go look it up), and her insight helped her to develop the first standard way to measure the distance between stars and especially between galaxies.  This came to be known as Leavitt’s Law, and it paved the way for our current understanding of an expanding universe.  This is far beyond my understanding, but I do appreciate my granddaughter Zoe’s philosophical (and theological) question on this.  “If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?”  But, at the time, her thinking was revolutionary – she posited that there were many galaxies beyond the Milky Way, and most male astronomers scoffed at her thinking.

Leavitt tragically died of stomach cancer in 1921 at age 53, a great loss to her own self and to the scientific community.  Edwin Hubble would come along a few years later and use Leavitt’s Law to begin his own calculations, leading to an acceptance of Leavitt’s insight that there are galaxies beyond the Milky Way and that the universe is expanding.  Since he was a man, his theories were accepted in the astronomy community, but he always gave Leavitt the credit that she was due, suggesting that she should have won a Nobel Prize for her work.   He remembered her and gave thanks for her, but our patriarchal mindset wiped out her memory and her work.  Kudos to Lauren Gunderson and others who have revived her memory and made it come alive.

And, of course, this is what Women’s Herstory Month is about – captured by the demonic power of patriarchy and sexism, we cannot even imagine a person like Henrietta Leavitt.  Women’s Herstory Month gives us the opportunity to recover some of the remarkable human beings who have led us and deepened our lives, and in many cases, saved us.  Let us remember them and savor them in this Women’s Herstory Month.