The AIP history team recently launched a new kind of resource on our website that we call history guides. Serving as repositories of historical knowledge, the guides build on our existing web exhibits and teaching guides, but with a design that allows us to more easily update, expand, and interconnect the guides as a unified collection.

History guides are also a focal point for collaboration. The first guide we posted, on Lucy Mensing, was developed by Michel Janssen and Gernot Münster as part of an ongoing partnership with the Women in the History of Quantum Physics working group. The partnership’s next guide, developed by Bretislav Friedrich and Maria McEachern, will be on Williamina Fleming. Fleming was a key member of the staff of “women computers” at the Harvard College Observatory and discoverer of the “Pickering series” of spectral lines, which served as a proving ground for Niels Bohr’s quantized atomic model.

As we produce guides, there will also be spin-off material that we will route to the Weekly Edition. In this case, for Women’s History Month we wanted to dig a little deeper into The Observatory Pinafore, a satire written at the observatory in the late 1870s and performed twice, in 1929 and 1930. Based on Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta HMS Pinafore, its humor revolved around the observatory’s stratified culture, and it provides a window into how the work of the observatory—and women’s place there—changed over the half-century between its composition and performance.

The writing of the Pinafore

Although the authorship of The Observatory Pinafore is not decisively resolved, ever since the script was rediscovered in 1921, it has been generally agreed it was written by Winslow Upton. Upton was an assistant at the observatory from 1877 to 1879, appears as a character in the Pinafore, and was known for his devotion to music. He later became an astronomy professor at Brown University and died in 1914.

Following the performances of 1929-30, the Pinafore became an observatory legend. In 1994, the script was digitally re-transcribed by Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell and remains available on his personal website. Historians have also paid considerable attention to the Pinafore, including, most recently, Andrew Fiss, who published a chapter on it in 2023: “‘For computing is our duty’: Algorithmic workers, servants, and women at the Harvard Observatory.”

Fiss stresses that the Pinafore was written early on in Edward Pickering’s transformative directorship of the observatory, which lasted from 1877 to 1919. At that time, astronomical labor was already stratified into observational work using telescopes, photometers, meridian circles, and other such instruments; and computational work, which involved the translation of observations into data. However, while women were barred from nighttime observations, they did not yet dominate daytime computation. Moreover, Pickering had not yet instituted his ambitious program in astronomical photography, which would multiply the value of that daytime work.

The plot and humor of The Observatory Pinafore were driven by the complicated relationships between labor and social status, much as in Gilbert and Sullivan’s original Pinafore, which had only just premiered but quickly gained fame on both sides of the Atlantic. However, whereas the original also explored typically Victorian tensions between love and social expectations, gender relations were not as central to The Observatory Pinafore. Notably, the main character Josephine was transformed into Joseph McCormack, a talented circle reader being courted by a private observatory with more comfortable conditions in Providence, Rhode Island.

As Fiss explains, Harvard College Observatory’s leaders had to secure their own funds, meaning conditions were never luxurious, and they needed to be creative to secure affordable labor. Computational work and other routine tasks fell to a mixed-gender group of assistants, astronomers’ family members, and servants. The last category included Williamina Fleming, whom Pickering hired as a household servant not long after he became director and shortly after she immigrated from Scotland with her husband, who then abandoned her after she became pregnant.

The Observatory Pinafore spotlights the frustrations of observatory laborers, but it also captures the observatory’s family-like culture that revolved around Pickering, who resided on site. In addition, it examines the relationship between an emerging profession of astronomy and the place of wealthy amateurs within it. It is certainly what cultural historians call a “rich text,” and its sensitive examination of observatory life was able in some ways to foreshadow what was to come.

Changes at the observatory

When The Observatory Pinafore was written, Pickering was leveraging photometry—measuring the brightness of stars—in an effort to bring Harvard to the vanguard of astronomy. An instrument called “Photometer P” prominently appears in the Pinafore, and Gilbert and Sullivan’s rousing song “He is an Englishman!” is transformed into the lyric “It is a photometer!”

In the 1880s, Pickering started using photography to capture stars’ light spectra, which were recorded on an ever-growing collection of glass plates that were measured and analyzed by the observatory’s staff of computers, now almost exclusively women. Women, most notably Fleming, also took on responsibility for preparing the publications that the observatory rapidly churned out under Pickering’s leadership.

The speed and scale of the observatory’s photographic work was enabled by private donations, especially from Anna Draper, the widow of Henry Draper, who died in 1882 at the age of 45. While Henry had been a physiologist by profession, he and Anna were independently wealthy and worked together as amateur astronomers, making important strides in astrophotography and spectroscopy. After Henry’s death, Pickering persuaded Anna that Harvard’s observatory could carry on their project as the “Henry Draper Memorial.”

The effort was fabulously successful, leading not only to numerous discoveries of new stars, including novas and variables, but also new classifications of stars, and, ultimately, theories about those classifications. These advances stemmed from women’s daytime analytical labor, and, as time passed, some of them did gain credit and even fame from their discoveries. However, they never enjoyed equal status, with lower pay and fewer professional opportunities, and usually they only received mentions in scientific articles published by Pickering and other men rather than authorship in their own right.

The roles that women played in the observatory’s advances have now been documented by generations of historians. These historians include, but are not limited to, Pamela Mack, who wrote about the women astronomers as early as her 1977 bachelor’s thesis at Harvard, and Dava Sobel, who brought them to wide audiences in her 2016 book The Glass Universe. Staff members at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and its (now-closed) Wolbach Library have likewise done essential work on the history.

It is thanks to historians’ work that we now have a sophisticated understanding of how women both thrived and struggled in the observatory’s unusual environment. Antonia Maury, who was the Drapers’ niece and studied under Maria Mitchell at Vassar College, clashed with Pickering over credit for her work and left the observatory, therafter maintaining an intermittent relationship with it and never finding a full-fledged position in astronomy. Meanwhile, Fleming moved from being a domestic servant to supervising the women computers, and in 1899 she gained the title of curator of astronomical photographs, making her the first woman that Harvard had ever listed as holding a university office.

Other women, notably Henrietta Leavitt and Annie Cannon, also made critical contributions to astronomy while working as computers. And by the 1920s, under Harlow Shapley’s directorship, it had become possible, though not easy, for women to follow a career track somewhat resembling those available to men. In 1925, Cecilia Payne (later Payne-Gaposchkin) became the first woman to earn a doctorate for research conducted at the observatory, making a landmark argument that stars are composed mainly of hydrogen and helium. She remained at Harvard in different positions and ultimately became one of the first women to receive a tenured faculty position there, and she was the first woman to chair a department.

Performing the Pinafore

When the staff members of the observatory decided to stage The Observatory Pinafore at the year-end 1929 meeting of the American Astronomical Society at Harvard, the role women now played at the observatory transformed its satire. Cecilia Payne took on the part of Joseph McCormack—now back to Josephine—and it was more than plausible that the departure of a crucial woman staff member could deal a serious blow to the observatory’s work. The chorus of computers in the production were now all women, and their complaints about their labor became women’s complaints.

Several oral histories in AIP’s collection touch on the Pinafore performance, which was staged at Shapley’s residence, all emphasizing how it exemplified the family-like atmosphere that he maintained. Astronomer Bart Bok was pulled into the performance almost immediately on his arrival at the observatory. He told David DeVorkin, “Shapley was always a great man for having parties … and that was one of the greatest ones we ever had. We all dressed up. I played a Professor Waldo from Brown University. I had to wear a tall stovepipe hat and everything. Oh, it was lots of fun.”

In her own interview with DeVorkin, Helen Sawyer Hogg similarly recalled, “In the 1920s, Harvard was really a remarkably happy family with the Shapley parties. … We all had a wonderful time at rehearsals, and Peter Millman had a fine singing voice, as did Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, and the chorus wasn’t too bad, so it was just lots of fun.” Hogg received her doctorate in 1930 and later credited Shapley for his strong support for her career in astronomy.

Still, interviewed by Owen Gingerich, Hogg said she didn’t receive enough acknowledgement for her role in putting the Pinafore production together, much as she hadn’t for her work on Shapley’s 1930 book Star Clusters: “Oh, I was the producer. We were mentioning Star Clusters. This was another thing for which Dr. Shapley quietly took most of the credit, and I did an awful lot of the work, because I had had theatricals at Lowell High School with a very fine teacher, and I had had two or three years of the high school theatricals and got used to everything about them.”

Shapley, speaking years earlier to AIP’s Charles Weiner, inadvertently underscored her point about women’s ongoing struggles to see their accomplishments fully appreciated, cultural as well as scientific: “We happened to have some very competent musicians on the staff, and we had some fairly good voices. I was naturally the director and the producer, but I had very good cooperation in the music and in the drama part of it. … Of course it was a tour de force, the whole thing, but it was fun, and it tied the observatory together as nothing else has ever done.”

William Thomas
American Institute of Physics
wthomas@aip.org

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