In women’s history, we are continually digging up their achievements, which when first presented to the world, were presented by men, by the men who stole the credit for their achievements, because we all know that since the beginning of time, women have been the weaker sex which means weaker in both mind and body.
The patriarchy is still alive and well and storm trooping throughout our history texts.
But this is changing. And we are very happy to present the story of Cecilia Payne, astrophysicist.
Cecilia was born in Buckinghamshire, England. At the age of four, her father, “a London barrister, historian and musician who had been an Oxford fellow,” [Ref] died, and she and her two siblings were raised by her mother alone.
As did most families in those days, her mother focused on her brother’s education, and moved the family to London in order to do so. Cecilia’s teachers thought she’d be a musician one day, but she was aiming higher. She wanted to go to Cambridge. Her mother refused to spend good money on her education, so Cecilia won a scholarship.
There she initially studied botany, physics, and chemistry, but she dropped the botany after a year at Cambridge. What truly grabbed her and buffeted her around was a lecture she attended by Arthur Eddington about his 1919 expedition to the West Coast of Africa where he observed and photographed the stars near a solar eclipse to test Einstein’s theories.
“The result was a complete transformation of my world picture. […] My world had been so shaken that I experienced something very like a nervous breakdown.”
Cambridge didn’t grant degrees to women until 1948, so Payne quickly realized that her future was not to be in England and she started looking for grants that would help her finish her education in the US.
Harlow Shapley, the Director of the Harvard College Observatory took a liking to her and persuaded her to write a doctoral dissertation, thus becoming the first person (not just first woman) to earn a PhD from Radcliffe College of Harvard University.
It was her dissertation that concluded that hydrogen was the most abundant element in the Universe, which went against the prevailing theories of the patriarchy. Astronomer Otto Struve described her work as “the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy.” [Ref]
It was one of her detractors, astronomer Henry Norris Russell who, in 1929 briefly mentioned Payne’s work when publishing his findings, and he was credited with the conclusion she had reached.
Today, we know the composition of the universe and all about variable stars because of Payne’s work. She was the first woman to earn a full professorship at Harvard, shattering the glass ceiling and inspiring generations of woman to study science and astronomy.
