But learning about the lives of these scientific women does not provide understanding of what their lives felt like. Often, women who contributed to science are left out of history or parts of their identity have been erased. To rectify this gap in the traditional historical narrative, historical fiction and romance writers depict vivid and realistic stories of the lives that rarely make history books. In her interview, Olivia Waite shares how she researches and writes historical romance and the importance of this genre to showcase LGBTQ+ identities.
ALLISON: Well, I must admit I was reading it in my own personal time. It was recommended to me by some friends. And as I was reading it, I realized it had great relevance to our collection because it imagines a world in which women of the 18th and early 19th century are doing science and what that would be like for them. It also imagines sort of like what it would take to publish their works, to get credit, what their lives were like. Which is not information that is in the history books.
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JUSTIN: The book we're looking at is The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite. It's a small paperback, and on the cover is a picture of two women dressed in period clothes in a passionate embrace. It's not the kind of book you might imagine could live in this collection.
ALLISON: If we do have the records of female scientists, they are not leaving us with sort of their own perspective of how hard it was to work at that time. And I thought that fiction can actually do a great job of filling in the lines of history, especially for people that are not as well-documented. And it reminded me of some books that we have in our rare book collection.
JUSTIN: The Lady's Guide is loosely based on the lives of two women scientists, whose biographies and letters and work live in our collection. Mary Somerville and Caroline Herschel. Fortunately, they both have a lot written about them, including their own accounts.
MAURA: But it's hard to know what their lives were really like, so we've turned to this novel that provides a kind of realistic example of what it could have felt like to be a woman scientist in the 19th century. And that is the beauty of historical fiction.
ALLISON: We know it's not history, we cannot claim that this is true, but it could be true, and it sort of shows us what it might have been like for some of the names of scientists that we lost and didn't get any credit, but if we have, you know, two that we know of, what are the many dozens or hundreds who just disappeared? And what their lives might have been like?
MAURA: Likewise, in Initial Conditions, we'll provide the context in which physical discoveries happen. We'll dive into the history behind the science of people, places, and events that have been overlooked and largely forgotten.
MAURA: Justin, this episode today is a little bit different than our episodes in the past. So our initial conditions for today are a little bit tricky. But we're still going to do them because they're fun. So the initial conditions for today's episode, one is inspiring women in science history. Two, which is kind of a less positive note, is the erasure of LGBTQ+ figures in history. And three, I'm not actually sure what I want the third initial condition to be. Justin, what do you think?
JUSTIN: Well, you've been telling me about this episode for a while, Maura, and it sounds to me like maybe our third initial condition could be, how about, moments of resistance to male-dominated science in the 18th century? So we're talking in the 1700s.
MAURA: Yeah, and I'm glad you cleared that up, because I still get the 1700s vs the 17th century incorrect. Yeah, sounds good. Okay so as we know, a goal of this podcast is to showcase stories of physics that have traditionally been left out of the historical narrative. The difficulty is that because they've been left out of the historical narrative, it's hard to resurrect them.
MAURA: But they did exist, and telling the history of science would be incomplete without including them. One way to rectify the lack of representation is through historical fiction. Writers can create characters that would have lived vibrant and full lives and contributed to science in a realistic way.
MAURA: (laughs) The fifth dimension, love. It might be easy to reflect on the past and past scientific figures, only in the terms of the science they produced. But romance is about love, obviously, and it humanizes these figures. Through historical romance, readers can live in the past and learn not just the facts of history, but what history feels like.
MAURA: Today, we'll talk about two important women scientists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and interview Olivia Waite, the author who brings their era to life in The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics, published in 2019. Lady's Guide is the love story of two women in the Regency era during the second decade of the 19th century.
JUSTIN: And for all you Kubrick heads out there, Barry Lyndon takes place in the era just before the Regency era. Also during the reign of King George III. As I understand it, the main character, Lucy Muchelney, is loosely based on a combination of Caroline Herschel, one of the most famous astronomers of her time, and Mary Somerville, one of the most important science writers.
MAURA: Before we talk with the author, Olivia Waite, let's talk a little bit about who these women were. And just to emphasize the importance of these women, they were inducted as honorary members of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1835. That's over 80 years before the Royal Astronomical Society officially accepted women members, which is I guess a commentary both on them and on the Royal Astronomical Society.
JUSTIN: Women have always participated in science, often working behind the scenes or alongside their male partners and relatives, receiving little acknowledgment. So for both women to have been celebrated in this context is an outstanding achievement.
MAURA: Okay, if you were to ask young Caroline Herschel if she thought she would grow up to be one of the most important astronomers of her time, she probably would have politely blushed and denied it. And then she would probably write very humbly in her diary about how all she cared about was helping her family. And she might have even mocked you for being a gossip.
MAURA: Caroline Herschel was the first woman on record to discover a comet. In fact, she held the record for number of comets discovered by a woman for almost a century. But potentially, her most important contribution is her revision to the Flamsteed Star Catalogue, which was basically the standard celestial catalogue at the time. And through carefully reorganizing it, she found some stars had been double-counted in the original catalogue, and others not at all. Her edition was huge and widely celebrated.
MAURA: Well, she was born in 1750 to a poor family in Hannover, Prussia. Which although today would be in Germany, it had strong ties to England. And she describes her ascent to fame as kind of a Cinderella story. And that's potentially because later in her life, the Brothers Grimm were very popular, but also likely because it's a story that enables female achievement in a very passive and what would have been seen as "feminine" way. So it enables her to succeed but kind of as a woman. But you get the sense, though, because Caroline kept journals, that she had a lot of agency, and she was very bright and knew how to get the recognition for her achievements when many women didn't. But she did have a rocky start. She was a very sickly child. She had small pox at age six, which permanently scarred her, and she got typhoid at age ten, which permanently stunted her growth. As a full-grown adult, she only reached 4'3".
MAURA: (laughs) Maybe not that tall, but yeah, that's very short. Like many children of her time and in her area, Caroline received an elementary education. And in her free time, she took additional courses in domestic skills like sewing and cooking. And she was very devoted to her family. She always put them first. And everything she did was for the betterment of her family. She actually came into astronomy, not because of her own passions or desires for learning, but because her brother William required an assistant. William Herschel, and another brother Alexander, had moved to London to establish careers as musicians. But William was enamored with astronomy and he led Caroline and Alexander to join his telescope-making business.
MAURA: Caroline was his dutiful assistant as he methodically observed the night sky for celestial objects like nebulae, comets, double stars, and star clusters. He would call out their positions and she would record them. During the day, they would calculate orbits and she would study astronomy to better herself as an assistant. It wasn't clear that she really even liked astronomy or math, but quickly picked up the skills and eventually grew to like it. She observed on her own when time permitted, and discovered her first comet in 1786. The first discovered by a woman. She went on to find seven more, six of which she had priority to. And over the next ten years, her fame grew and most in astronomy really respected her talents as an astronomer.
MAURA: Exactly. And she found this comet. Not wanting to be beaten to the discovery, as she had in the past, she didn't want to rely on letters to announce her discovery. So instead, she got on a horse-- in the middle of the night, got on a horse, and rode 30 miles to Greenwich Observatory to announce the discovery herself to her friend Nevil Maskelyne, who was the Royal Astronomer. And this was an incredible feat, because she rarely left her own home, didn't go more than a mile or two away, and there she is, middle of the night, this 4' tall woman riding to assert her dominance in discovering this comet. 152ee80cbc
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