2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
importance of improved sanitation within domestic spaces for the success of
any municipal or national projects to combat the spread of disease. This paper
will begin by examining how prevailing scientific theories of disease causation
and transmission (most notably the theory that foul odors, or miasmas, were a
source of epidemics) established a link between domestic hygiene and public
health. It will move on to analyze the lessons on domestic and personal hygiene
in domestic science textbooks, with an eye to how domestic hygiene was
described both as the most appropriate science for women to study, and as an
essential component in the triumph of science over disease. The paper will
conclude with a commentary on the republican fascination with science in the
late nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on how the complementary
roles of domestic hygiene and public health revised the relationship between
home and nation within republican political ideology.
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Keith␣ R. Lafortune University of Notre Dame
Pickering’s Harem and the New Sociology of Astronomy, 1877-1919
Between 1877 and 1919, Harvard College Observatory director Edward Pickering
hired more than forty women as “inexpensive assistants” for his research in
astrophysics and photographic astronomy. Both fields were young and
unestablished at the beginning of this period. The same can be said of Pickering’s
assistants, the group often called “Pickering’s Harem.” Some came from the
growing ranks of college-educated women. They were all among the first
generations of women entering American science. The place of Pickering’s Harem
in the history of astronomy remains open for debate. Margaret Rossiter’s concept
of “women’s work” stands as the most widely accepted interpretation of the Harem’s
experience. “Women’s work,” as Rossiter and other historians have applied it to
women entering American science around the turn of the twentieth century, is
three-fold: women were hired for “special skills” that fit traditional feminine
stereotypes, their work was primarily non-observational, and they did not contribute
to the body of scientific theory. This paper is, in part, an appraisal of the applicability
of Rossiter’s convention to the experience of Pickering’s Harem. It is also a
suggestion for a new approach. I argue that the women of Harvard are best
understood within the context of a changing methodology and sociology of
astronomy. New research traditions that arose in the wake of astronomy’s
incorporation of photography and spectral analysis helped to transform astronomical
observation from an event to a process. At the same time, astronomy developed
from a science of individuals towards one of research teams. Within this context,
the Harvard College Observatory during Pickering’s directorship may be compared
to other institutions pursuing a team-based approach to research. Two examples
considered are J. C. Kapteyn’s Astronomical Laboratory and the Lowell
Observatory during the search for Pluto. All three institutions pursued unestablished
lines of research with an unestablished group of researchers.
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