April/May 1983 RAIN Page 15 workshop and observatory were home to a number of dedicated astronomers including the assistant engraver, Johann Heinrich Muller. After Maria’s marriage to Muller, he became an astronomy professor at Altorf and Maria continued to use her engraving skills to depict comets, sunspots, eclipses, and the mountains of the moon observations that overthrew once and for all the perfect and immutable heavens” of Aristotle. Maria Muller died young, never achieving the renown ot her contemporary, Maria Winckelmann Kirch. Bom near Leipzig in 1670, Maria Margaret Winckelmann’s early training came from Christoph Arnold, the astronomical peasant.” In 1692 she married Gottfried Kirch, an astronomer who had studied with Hevelius in Danzig. Settling in Berlin, Kirch directed his wife’s studies as he had those of his three sisters. Even after his appointnient as Royal Astronomer in 1700, the Kirch women continued to support themselves by producing calendars, almanacs and other books of observations and computations. In 1702 Maria Kirch discovered a comet. It was not named for her and she never received recognition for the discovery. Thus her observations on the aurora borealis (1707) and her writings on the conjunction of the sun with Saturn and Venus (1709) and on the approaching conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in 1712 (including the obligatory astrological predictions) became her most lasting contributions to astronomy. Meanwhile, in Paris in the 1680s, Jeanne Dumee set out to prove that women "are not incapable of study, if they wish to make the effort, because between the brain of a woman and that of a man there is no difference. At the age of seventeen, having sent her husband off to war, Dum6e was free to devote herself to astronomy. Her treatise, Entretiens sur I’opinion de Copernic touchant la mobility de la terre, demonstrated how the observations of Venus and the satellites of Jupiter proved the motion of the earth and the validity of the Copemican and Galilean theories. Her unpublished manuscript has survived in the National Library of Paris. In 1757, astronomers were expecting the return of Halley’s comet. J6r6me Lalande, director of the Paris Observatory, approached the mathematician Alexis Clairaut for help in predicting the comet’s return by solving its orbit. Clairaut, who had previously collaborated with Emilie du Chatelet requested the assistance of Mme. Lepaute. Finally, on November 14, 1758, they reported the dates for the return of the comet to the Academy of Sciences. It was the first time in history that scientists had predicted a perturbed comet’s return to perihelion (the point of its orbit closest to the sun). And they were just in time. Halley’s comet was first sighted on December 25th and it reached perihelion on March 13th —• within the dates set by the team of astronomers. It was another triumph for Newtonian science. In his Comets, Clairaut gave Lepaute full credit for her work but he later retracted it. Today, Clairaut alone is usually credited with the prediction. Mme. Lepaute also published a number of astronomical memoirs including one based on all the observations made of the 1761 transit of Venus. A crater on the moon was named in Lepaute’s honor. Women helped to put the astronomy of the Scientific Revolution on a firm foundation. Although today their names are unknown and their contributions forgotten, these women marked the beginnings of a trend. Unfortunately it was a trend embodying the attitude that women with their mathematical abilities, infinite patience, and lack of opportunities for more creative scientific endeavor — were perfectly suited to the tedium of astronomical observation and calculation. This tradition of women astronomers was to culminate early in the twentieth century with the women of the Harvard College Observatory.tx] Margaret Alic is writing a book on the history of women in science. ACCESS: SCIENCE The Death of Nature; Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution Carolyn Merchant Harper & Row Publishers 10 E. 53rd St. New York, NY 10022 $7.95, 1981, 348 pp. The Death ofNature chronicles the philosophical transformation of Western cultures from viewing the earth and nature as a being with spirit and soul to be lived with and treated with respect to an inanimate object to be conquered and used. This scholarly book uses writings and case studies prior to 1700 to illustrate this transformation. Most Western cultures up to the end of the Middle Ages viewed the world as a nurturing, female being—the proverbial Mother Earth. Early medieval society had rules restricting that the rate people took from the land must equal the rate that nature and humans could replenish the land—the ideal sustainable agrarian society. Early ventures at mining came with moral and religious qualms about raping and pillaging the spirit of the Earth. Toward the end of the Middle Ages increasing population pressure, increasing urbanization, and increasing dependence on a monetai^ capitalist economy caused existing societies to overuse and abuse the ecological system. The philosophical school of thought that viewed the universe as a series of discrete, inanimate particles governed by scientific laws of cause and effect was developed to support this abuse. Nature became something to be dominated and controlled instead of respected and lived with. The role of women was changed by the increased urbanization and population pressures.This role change was supported by the new philosophy. Women as an embodiment of nature became a target for domination instead of cooperation. Bourgeois women living in urban environments were forced into the role of passive dependent rather than active partner. While some of the concepts in this book pose interesting points of view, there are two fatal flaws in the material. First the book was written as a history of changing attitudes about natiue. The material presented on the changing role of women seems to have been retroactively grafted to the text. The observations about women tend to be fleeting and discontinuous. Second, the causal relationship which Merchant seeks to establish does not seem to be completely accurate. The changes which she implies could easily be effects of a single cause, i.e. the rise of a monetary economy. Merchant’s academic work provides avenues to approaching the scientific revolution’s effect on ecology. As to women’s connection with the scheme of things, we must look elsewhere. -GailKats Gail Katz, a regular contributor to RAIN, is a mechanical and electrical engineer.
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