Volcanoes be in Sicily
And South America,
I judge from my geography.
Volcanoes nearer here,
A lava step, at any time,
Am I inclined to climb,
A crater I may contemplate,
Vesuvius at home.
-- Emily Dickinson
Emily has a Venusian crater named after her—one that shows probable volcanic activity, as in her poem. Mead Crater, named after the anthropologist Margaret Mead, is the largest impact crater on Venus, while Alcott is a crater with steep slopes created by flooding lava.
If you didn’t get a place on Earth named after you in the past because you were a woman, today you might get lucky as Emily did. You might become the name of a crater on Venus, like these other crater names:
Alcott, Amelia, Audrey, Austen, Bathsheba, Bodicea, Boleyn, Bradstreet, Bourke-White, Carson, Cleopatra, de Beauvoir, Dickenson, Florence, Godiva, Hansberry, Hellman, Hurston, Howe, Kahlo, Mead, Montessori, Nevelson, Nin, O’Connor, O’Keefe, Ottavia, Patti, Piaf, Rosa Bonheur, Sacajawea, Sappho, Sitwell, Sophia, Sullivan, Tubman, Tsvetayeva, Vanessa, Virginia, Wharton, Wollstonecraft …
Why are all the craters on Venus named after women and why was the planet itself named for one? Because Venus was the brightest planet in the sky, it was named for the mythological Roman goddess of love and beauty. Its association with women continued to affect the language and names scientists used to describe it since.
The mysterious cloud cover over Venus gave science fiction writers from the 19th-century to the 1950s the freedom to imagine a world like ours, especially when early observations showed it similar in size to Earth, with an atmosphere. Since it was closer to the Sun than Earth, Venus was portrayed as warmer, but still habitable.
Olaf Stapledon’s 1930 science fiction novel Last and First Men describes Venus as being largely ocean and having violent tropical storms. C. S. Lewis's 1943 Perelandra and Isaac Asimov's 1954 Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus imagined a swampy, Cambrian-like Venus covered by a planet-wide ocean filled with alien aquatic life.
After the successful 1962 Mariner 2 exploration of Venus revealed its temperature (800 degrees F) and atmosphere to be too hot and toxic to support human life, early science fiction depicting the planet as habitable became obsolete.
In 1991 after the Magellan spacecraft mission mapped the surface of the planet, scientists associated with it asked the public to propose names of notable women or female first names for the Venusian craters, to be approved by the International Astronomical Union. Though the female nouns used for the planet’s craters show our more respectful, enlightened view of women now, the adjectives describing the planet have a more sexist history.
When early male astronomers began to discuss Venus in detail, they needed a new adjective. Based on Latin grammar, the correct adjectival form of the English word would be Venerean.
However, because of this word’s unfortunate resemblance to the word venereal (as in venereal diseases), it was not used. Using the term “Venusian” was also problematic—it was clumsy to say, with too many syllables, so a more respectable, “cleaner,” and less awkward version was needed.
One suggestion was to use the Greek name for Venus; but the adjectival form of Aphrodite was “aphrodisial,” which was too close to “aphrodisiac,” again implying earthly passions distracting from the pure rational male science of astronomy. So the search continued for other words to use when referring to the planet that would not have these sullying, unsavory female connotations.
A compromise was found in the old adjective Cytherian, which means pertaining to Cythera, a small island now part of Greece, known in Greek as Kythira.
In Greek mythology, the goddess Aphrodite was born from the sea, emerging on a seashell at the island of Cythera, and so the goddess was sometimes known as Cytherea. Because of this similarity to the myth of Venus, the word became an adjective meaning “pertaining to the planet Venus,” and was widely used in older scientific literature.
The term has since fallen out of use. Venusian is the word most often used now, along with Venerean, by the less squeamish scientists of our time. Cytherean is now mostly found in older scientific papers, though today some scientists continue to use it as the more classic, elegant term. The word Cytherean as an adjective referring to Venus was also sometimes found in early literature, erotica and science fantasy.
Though today we’re not as prudish as those 19th-century astronomers, the word Venerean still has negative associations. So maybe it’s time to revive the lovely Greek-derived words Cytherean and Aphrodisian to describe the planet, even though we now know Venus is only lovely from afar.
Both the naming of the craters on Venus and the adjectives used to describe the planet reflect the changes in society’s attitudes towards women and their importance and how we project those onto our descriptions of the universe.