“No Women Can Be Properly Elected as a Fellow”: Sexism and British Astronomical Societies

At the 8^th annual meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society, on February 8, 1828, it was announced that the Council had unanimously decided to give a Gold medal – only the third in the society’s albeit short history – to Caroline Herschel (1750-1848).[1] Best known as the sister of famed German astronomer William Herschel, she served as his assistant in observing, telescope making, and the cataloging of celestial objects, and discovered eight comets between 1789-97. Seven years later, that same august association bestowed honorary membership upon Herschel and famed science writer Mary Somerville (1780-1872), and in making the announcement the Council noted that “the time is gone when either feeling or prejudice, by whichever name it may be proper to call it, should be allowed to interfere with the payment of a well-earned tribute of respect.”[2] Despite the RAS Council’s claims of fairmindness, neither Herschel nor Somerville was ever proposed for membership as a Fellow of the Society, nor was any woman for nearly 60 years. In 1862, a third woman was awarded an honorary membership, but not for scientific accomplishments. Anne Sheepshanks, sister of amateur astronomer and collector of scientific equipment Reverend Richard Sheepshanks, donated his priceless collection to the society after his death in 1857, and received the medal for this and other donations.[3]

          Excluding women from the official roles and meetings of scientific societies in Britain was the norm in the 19 century. A notable case is the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS). Founded at a meeting in York in 1831, the 353 charter members were all male (although women were present at the meeting). Although the bylaws used gender-neutral terms such as “persons” and “members”, the implicit intent of the meaning was men-only.[4] For example, upon hearing that some of his colleagues planned to bring their wives to the 1832 meeting in Oxford, President-elect William Buckland voiced his opinion that their presence was appropriate only at private parties, where “I think the more ladies there are, the better.”[5] By 1833, special women’s tickets were issued, which allowed women access to the general meetings but not the sectional meetings where the majority of the scientific papers were read. The tickets became so popular that future president Reverend Thomas Robinson complained to the Assistant Secretary, John Phillips, that many were used merely to “obtain a cheap week’s amusement for the females of the family” and therefore suggested that they be limited to members who hadrenewed their memberships.[6] After further discussions, women were admitted to the 1838 meeting in Newcastle-on-Tynes, and nearly matched the men’s attendance (1100 vs 1300). However, they were prohibited from attending the reading of the papers in the Botany and Zoological section “on account of the nature of some of the papers belonging to the Zoology division.” Not surprisingly, women were barred from the next few meetings, and their numbers controlled for the 1841 meeting at Plymouth.[7] The first woman member is thought to have been Miss Bowlby from Cheltenham, who was admitted in 1853.[8]

          With the doors of the professional societies largely slammed shut in their faces, the astronomically-minded women of Britain had few intellectual avenues open to them. Fortunately, the development of amateur societies, such as the Liverpool Astronomical Society (LAS), founded in 1881, began to fill this void. Pictured as a “halfway resting-place between the amateur public and the Royal Astronomical Society,”[9] at least eight of its 300 members in 1887 were women, including famed astronomy popularist Agnes Clerke (1842-1907).[10] Highly-respected amateur observer Elizabeth Brown (d. 1899), a well-to-due spinster who was one of the only women in Britain to have her own observatory, served as Director of the Solar Section from 1883-1890.

          While women had found a niche in the amateur realm, the professional societies kept the windows tightly barred. In 1886, Elizabeth Isis Pogson (dates unknown), who had served as an unpaid astronomical and meteorological assistant for her father, Norman Robert Pogson, Government Astronomer at the Madras Observatory in India since 1873, was “duly nominated for Fellowship by three Fellows” of the RAS.[11] Before bringing the nomination before the full membership, the Council asked for a ruling by its legal counsel as to whether their charter could admit women. Mr. Ranyard reported back that “unless it could be shown that a woman could not consistently exercise the rights and perform the duties of a Fellow, the Council could be compelled to allow the name of a woman to be suspended for election.”[12] The Council then sought a second opinion, which reported that because female Fellows had not been considered at the time of the founding of the Society, and the Charter only used male pronouns, it must be assumed that women were not meant to be included. In a politically masterful move which removed responsibility from their shoulders, the Council agreed to forward Miss Pogson’s nomination, with the caveat that if she failed to achieve the necessary number of positive votes that it “could be nothing personal, as it would be understood to mean that the question [of women] should first be considered by a General Meeting.”[13] As expected, the nominators withdrew her name to save her the embarrassment.

Such narrow interpretations of society charters sufficed to prevent women from being elected to a number of professional scientific societies into the 20^th century.  For example, the Physiological Society and Chemical Society admitted female members in 1915 and 1920. However, this discrimination was not universal in the scientific sphere. The Zoological Society of London and Royal Entomological Society admitted women from their inceptions (1829 and 1833), and the Botanical Society of London and Horticultural Society admitted women in the 1830s.[14] Opportunities were better for women astronomers across the Atlantic, as women were included in the American Astronomical Society from its first meeting in 1899. Membership was open to “Any person deemed capable of preparing an acceptable paper” on an astronomical topic who was nominated by two or more members.[15]

While the LAS had successfully provided opportunities for women in astronomy in the 1880s, by 1890 the society succumbed to financial and administrative difficulties. At the insistence of Elizabeth Brown, Edward Walter Maunder of the Royal Observatory (Greenwich), and others founded a new amateur society, the British Astronomical Association (BAA). A Provisional Committee was set up in 1890, which included four women – Brown, Clerke, astronomy writer Agnes Giberne (1845-1939) and Margaret Huggins (1848-1915), who had conducted seminal research on astronomical spectroscopy and photography with her husband William. The Constitution of the BAA stated that “Ladies shall be eligible for election as Members of the Association, and no expression herein-after used shall be held to debar them from exercising any right or privilege of the Association, or from filling any office to which they may be elected.”[16] Women filled positions of authority from the beginning, with Brown becoming the Director of the Solar Section and Clerke and Huggins elected to Council seats.

During the same year, the first paid observatory positions were made available to British women, when Sir William Christie, Astronomer Royal, created the position of “supernumerary” computers. These low-paying, temporary positions involving work with photographic plates, tedious calculations, and, remarkably, night work taking photographs with a telescope, were made available to women, and four were hired.[17] Two of these, Alice Everett (1865-1949) and Annie Scott Dill Russell (1868-1947), became known in astronomical circles for the quality of their work. Everett worked on the Carte du Ciel, an international photographic project whose goal was to photograph the entire sky and catalogue all stars above magnitude 11. Everett exposed, developed and printed photographic plates and made necessary measurements, and her work was included by name in the final report, the Astrographic Catalog 1900.0, Greenwich Section, Volume 1, in 1904.[18] Russell worked on sunspot observations with Maunder, the head of the Photographic and Spectroscopic Department, and through this association both women became involved with the BAA shortly after its formation.

In February 1892, seven prospective Fellows were duly nominated by members of the Royal Astronomical Society, including three women: Elizabeth Brown, Alice Everett (nominated by A.M.W. Downing of the Nautical Almanac Office) and Annie Russell (nominated by Maunder). This time the nominators were given the same admonition by the Council as in the case of Pogson, but they did not withdraw the nominations, which were brought before the entire membership at the April meeting. After some discussion, including remarks to the effect that admitting women would require the Society to acquire “a piano and a fiddle” so that there could be “dancing through most of the papers,” the women failed to receive the necessary ¾ vote.[19] Interestingly, Brown was elected a Fellow of the more liberal Royal Meteorological Society the next year.[20] The Council of the RAS decided that as a consolation prize they would authorize the President to be able to issue special cards which would allow selected women to utilize the library and attend meetings (on a year-to-year basis), unless 1/3 of the Council disapproved of a candidate.[21] Records show that at the very least Brown and Russell received and accepted the “honor”.

Thus in the late 1890s British women astronomers chafed under the male control of their field, limiting their participation to local and regional amateur associations such as the Ulster Astronomical Society and Leeds Astronomical Society. The latter’s first female member Florence Taylor’s 1897 lecture on Mary Somerville was published in the society’s journal, and concluded with the frustrated comment “THE EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN”, but her words apparent failed to move the hearts of some of her male colleagues, even in the amateur ranks. For example, in his history of Welsh astronomy to 1922, the Reverend Silas Evans omitted the contributions of women in toto, despite the fact that approximately 20% of the members of the Astronomical Society of Wales in the early 20th century were women.[22]

Nowhere was this discrimination more blatant and persistent than in the prestigious Royal Society of London, founded in 1660. Women were omitted from its original charter and statutes as well as its meetings as a matter of practice, with few exceptions. For example, prolific writer Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and sister of Society founding member John Lucas, visited the society in 1667.[23] In 1900 the Council received a letter from Marian Farquharson, author of A Pocket Guide to British Ferns (1881), which included a clipping from the November 1899 Women’s Agricultural Times which reported on a resolution adopted by the Lady Warwick Agricultural Association for Women. The resolution stated that “it is desirable and important that duly qualified women should have the advantage of full fellowship in scientific and other Learned Societies, e.g. the Royal, the Linnean, and the Royal Microscopical.”[24] Farquharson no doubt took the exclusion personally, because although she had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society in 1885, it was decided by the membership that women were not allowed to attend meetings.[25] Although the Linnean Society of London and Royal Microscopical Society finally opened up full participation to women in 1905 and 1909, the Royal Society remained fully entrenched in its exclusion, except at special social events.

In the mid-19^th century, the Royal Society introduced conversaziones, events where guests invited by the President would be entertained by scientific displays appropriate to a social audience. In 1876 these events were opened up to women, and at an 1899 event Hertha Marks Ayrton (1854-1923), a well-known expert on the electric arc, demonstrated her research.[26] A graduate of Girton College, Hertha married physicist William Ayrton in 1885 after attending his classes at the Finsbury Technical College and became interested in his research. Prior to her 1899 presentation for the RS she had published 12 articles for the Electrician, had presented an invited paper to the Institution of Electrical Engineers (the first paper presented by a woman) and became that society’s first woman member. In 1899 she also presided over the Physical Science section of the International Congress of Women in London and soon after presented a paper at the International Electrical Congress in Paris. In 1901 her paper “The Mechanism of the Electric Arc” was read before the Royal Society by Fellow John Perry and her ground-breaking book, The Electric Arc, appeared the following year.[27] In 1902 she was duly nominated for Fellowship in the Royal Society, but the Council sought advice from their legal representation because of the use of the male pronouns in their statutes. Their attorneys ruled that “we are of opinion that married women are not eligible as Fellows of the Royal Society. Whether the Charters admit of the election of unmarried women appears to us to be very doubtful…. We think that no woman can be properly elected as a Fellow, even if the Charters admit of such election, without some alteration in the Statutes.”[28] The ineligibility of married women conveniently negated Ayrton’s nomination without further discussion, and was in keeping with British common law which held that a woman’s person was covered by her husband or father, therefore making membership on her own right impossible.

Ayrton’s scientific work was still valued by the Society, under its own terms, and she became the first woman to read her own paper to the society in 1904. In 1906 she was awarded the society’s Hughes medal for her research on the electric arc and sand dunes (the first and only female Hughes medalist to this day), and she continued to have papers read before the Society for her (and published in their journals). Among her most notable work was the invention of a portable manual fan used by soldiers in World War I to keep poisonous gas out of the trenches.[29]

The year after Ayrton’s failed nomination to the Royal Society, the Royal Astronomical Society considered two more famous women for Fellowship, spectroscopist Margaret Huggins and science writer Agnes Clerke. It was decided that Honorary Membership was more appropriate, including library and meeting privileges. Possibly more troubling than the fact that women were still considered second-class citizens by the Society was the fact that Huggins’s own collaborator, co-author and husband apparently supported the discrimination, as he did not “look with favor” upon the possibility of opening up membership in the premiere scientific societies to women.[30]

The status quo remained unchallenged for over a decade, until the December 1914 meeting. Here four nominations for Fellowship were made, including Mary A. Blagg (proposed by past president H.H. Turner) and Mrs. Fiammetta Wilson (proposed by respected physician Dr. J.R. Leeson).[31] Blagg (1858-1944), the daughter of a lawyer, had no formal training in astronomy but became interested in the subject in middle age after attending a series of lectures by J.A. Hardcastle. She assisted him in his research on selenography (the naming and mapping of lunar features), and under the auspices of an international committee (of which H.H. Turner was a member) created a cross-referenced list of lunar features, published in 1913 by the International Association of Academies.[32]  In 1920 she was elected to the Lunar Commission (with Turner as its president) of the new International Astronomical Union and with Karl Müller, an amateur astronomer from Vienna, produced the definitive work on lunar nomenclature, Named Lunar Formations, in 1935, with Blagg as first author. At the time of her nomination to the RAS, Blagg  and H.H. Turner had published the first of ten eventual papers from a project to reduce and publish the variable star observations of Joseph Baxendell, and Turner had read her paper on an alternative to Bode’s rule for planetary distances to the Society.[33]

Fiammetta Worthington Wilson (1864-1920) became interested in astronomy after her marriage to S.A. Wilson, through a series of lectures by Alfred Fowler at the Imperial College of Science and Technology. She became a member of the BAA in 1910 and quickly established herself as a driving force within the Meteor Section, teaming up with famed observer W.F. Denning on coordinated observing sessions. Between 1910 and 1920 she observed more than 10,000 meteors and recorded paths for most of them.[34]

Unlike the case of previous nominations of women, it was decided that the climate was right to tackle the issue of female Fellows in general, and therefore the nominations appear to have been tabled in favor of deciding that thorny issue first. At the February 1915 Annual General meeting a motion proposed by the Council was approved by the Fellowship by a vote of 59 to 3 with the following wording:

That this Meeting approves of the admission of women as Fellows and Associates of the Society, and requests the Council to take all necessary steps to render their election possible.

The published minutes of the meeting announced that the Council had drafted the appropriate petition to the King for a Supplemental Charter which would explicitly allow the election of women.[35] It was announced in November that the charter had been received, and at that meeting Blagg, Wilson and three other women were nominated for Fellowship: A. Grace Cook (d. 1958), Wilson’s collaborator in meteor observing for the BAA, and who later served as Wilson’s co-Director of the Meteor Section in 1916-1919; Ella K. Church, about which not much is known except that she was a Council member of the BAA from 1919-24; and Irene E. Toye Warner (later Staples), who had written at least 20 articles on observations and the history of astronomy, and in 1914, began writing a series of articles on various cultural examples of black magic for Occult Review.[36] Although all five were duly elected at the January meeting,[37] an additional interpretation of the bylaws was officially reported by the Council at the next monthly meeting that “words denoting the masculine gender only shall include the feminine gender also.”[38]

          By November 1916 eleven women had been elected Fellows of the RAS, the last of these being Annie Russell Maunder, who had married her boss in 1895 after duly resigning from the Royal Observatory two months previously. During the ensuing years between her failed and successful elections to the RAS she had enjoyed a successful career in solar research, and served as the editor for the journal of the BAA from 1894-1896 (and would later return to this role from 1917-1930). Unfortunately her fellow Greenwich computer, Alice Everett, would never be elected to the RAS. After completing five years at the Royal Observatory, she found similar work in Potsdam and Vassar College, but was unable to find astronomical work after 1899 and turned her attention to the study of optical systems.[39] Elizabeth Isis Pogson (now Kent) was finally elected to the RAS in April 1920.[40] By 1930 there were 42 women elected to the RAS, but true equality still eluded them. They were not elected to the Council or as officers, and were excluded from the elite RAS Club and therefore social interactions with visiting astronomers of note.[41]

          The final holdout, the Royal Society, did not succumb without a fight. The 1919 Sex (Disqualification) Removal Act prohibited private societies and universities from using antiquated language in their charters to bar women, but not all societies rush to embrace the fairer sex. Caroline Haslett of the Women’s Engineering Society wrote a letter to the Royal Society Council in 1922 specifically inquiring if women were eligible for membership under the 1919 Act. Nearly three years later she received her reply, that women were indeed eligible under the present charter “provided, of course, that their scientific attainments were of the requisite standing.” Internal Council communication interestingly explains that “The exclusion of women henceforth rests with the Fellows themselves, who can reject women on voting for the election of Fellows from among the candidates.”[42] As no women candidates were nominated, the issue was never tested.

          The final straw was an April 1943 article in the Daily Worker by geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, commenting on the latest election of an Indian Fellow by the Royal Society. He noted that the Society “has no colour bar; it cannot exclude women indefinitely.”[43] Within the next few months, two acceptable women candidates were found, through urgent conversations between several Fellows, X-ray crystallographer Kathleen Londsdale and microbiologist Marjory Stephenson. The women’s nominations were received by the Society with twelve and eighteen signatures respectively, and a six month long postal vote was arranged by the Council so that the entire membership could vote as to whether the following could be added to the Statutes in preparation for a membership vote: “Nothing-herein contained shall render women ineligible” and “In the foregoing statutes and in any standing orders of the Council and in any Rules and Regulations adopted by the Royal Society… words importing the male gender shall include the female unless the context requires a contrary construction.” When the vote concluded in June 1944, 336 Fellows had voted for the motion and 37 against it.[44] Both women were duly elected on March 22, 1945, but the Royal Society still remains largely a Fellowship of “fellows.”

          In conclusion, as we ponder this year’s history-making inroads in making the presidential election process more inclusive, let us also never forget not only the power of one vote, but the power of one nomination.