Uncle Jesse and the seven "early career" ladies of the night
Abstract
Jesse Leonard Greenstein (1909–2002) was apparently a very hard sell when it came to women in astronomy. Early in his autobiography, he wrote of "Miss Payne, a person of wide culture and astronomical knowledge. The obvious discrimination against her as a woman scientist, worthy of normal academic recognition, exacerbated the stressful life she led. She was unhappy, emotional, in a rivalry with Menzel and Plaskett." She (a.k.a. Cecilia Helena Payne, later Gaposchkin) is the only woman with an explicit mention in that memoir, and Greenstein's impression of her left him uncertain whether women belonged in astronomy. In addition, some of us remember him as saying there was no use in educating women through to a Ph.D. because they only get married and quit.
Additional Information
© 2019 American Association of Physics Teachers. (Received 31 July 2019; accepted 31 July 2019) The authors remain, of course, deeply grateful, though this side idolatry, to our advisors, who were undertaking tasks new to them. They were Peter Goldreich, Guido Munch, Maarten Schmidt, the late Halton C. (Chip) Arp, Armin Deutsch, Jesse Greenstein, Robert P. Kraft, J. Beverly Oke, Eugene Shoemaker, and Harold Zirin (who attempted to make up for the loss of SWK to geosciences by coaching VT through the second round of the qualifying exam that she had failed the first time). An extra "thank you" goes to Munch, whose oral history with the American Institute of Physics provided the names of the three University of Chicago women astronomy Ph.D. degrees who did get married and, at least by JLG's standards, dropped out.Attached Files
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- CaltechAUTHORS:20190918-100141595
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2019-09-18Created from EPrint's datestamp field
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2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field
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