Williamina Fleming: Premature death and posthumous honors
Williamina Fleming’s gravestone in Mount Auburn Cemetary in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Image by the authors.
Early in May, 1911, Fleming was feeling “not so well as usual” and entered a hospital to rest.1 It turned out that her extreme fatigue was due to a severe case of pneumonia which proved to be fatal. She passed away on May 21, 1911. In the Sixty-Sixth Annual Report of the Director of the Astronomical Observatory of Harvard College, which was published following Fleming’s death, Pickering wrote of the observatory’s “severe loss”:2
Mrs. Fleming’s record as a discoverer of new stars, of stars of the fifth type, and of other objects having peculiar spectra, was unequalled. Her gifts as an administrative officer, especially in the preparation of the Annals, although seriously interfering with her scientific work, were of the greatest value to the Observatory.
On Monday morning, May 22, 1911, the Boston Herald featured the passing of Fleming on its front page with the headline “Leading woman of science dies in a hospital.” Of Fleming and her work a subheadline stated that “In 20 years of work at the little brick building on Observatory Hill in North Cambridge … she made more discoveries than all other astronomers had made in 200 years.”3
Writing on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society in its February, 1912 issue of the Monthly Notices, its editor Herbert H. Turner paid the following tribute to Fleming:4
As an astronomer Mrs. Fleming was somewhat exceptional in being a woman; and in putting her work alongside that of others, it would be unjust not to remember that she left her heavy daily labours at the observatory to undertake on her return home those household cares of which a man usually expects to be relieved. She was fully equal to the double task, as those who have had the good fortune to be her guests can testify; and it is perhaps worthy of record, as indicating how lightly the double burden sat on her, that she yielded to none in her enjoyment of a football match, especially a match between Harvard and Yale.
On May 10, 1907, Fleming submitted to the Massachusetts District Court her petition for naturalization requesting “to be admitted a citizen of the United States” which was signed and witnessed by Pickering and the Harvard astronomy professor Solon Bailey. On the document, Fleming listed her occupation as “astronomer.”5
For the final word on the preferred nomenclature for Fleming’s occupation, we may look to her gravestone in the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which reads, simply: Williamina Paton Fleming, Astronomer.
In 1970, the International Astronomical Union named a lunar crater6 and in 1991 Asteroid 57477 after her.
References
- Annie J. Cannon, “Williamina Paton Fleming,” Astrophysical Journal 34, 1911, 314–316, doi:10.1086/141894.
- Edward C. Pickering, Sixty-Sixth Annual Report of the Director of The Astronomical Observatory of Harvard College for the Year Ending September 30, 1911, Harvard University, 1912.
- “Leading Woman in Science Dies in a Hospital,” Boston Herald, May 22, 1911, pp. 1, 8.
- Herbert H. Turner, “Report of the Council to the Ninety-Second Annual General Meeting: Mrs. Fleming,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 72, 1912, 261–264, doi:10.1093/mnras/72.4.261.
- Massachusetts Naturalization Records – originals, 1906–1929, for Williamina Fleming, 1900, ancestry.com.
- https://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/Feature/1979.
- https://minorplanetcenter.net/db_search/show_object?object_id=5747.
Cite this resource
Bretislav Friedrich and Maria McEachern, “Williamina Fleming,” Women in the History of Quantum Physics collection, American Institute of Physics, 2026, https://www.aip.org/history/williamina-fleming.