Williamina Fleming: Early life and introduction to Edward Pickering

Williamina Paton Stevens was born in Dundee, Scotland, on May 15, 1857 to Mary Walker and Robert Stevens. She was one of several surviving children in her family at a time when child mortality accounted for nearly half of all deaths in Scotland.¹ Her father, a craftsman, was an early enthusiast of the recently discovered daguerreotype imaging. Williamina thus already as a child became familiar with this early photographic technique and its utility for recording images. She became a teaching apprentice (pupil-teacher) at the age of fourteen and would continue in this occupation for five more years. In 1877, she married James Orr Fleming, a widower.

In 1878, the Flemings followed other members of Williamina’s family in leaving Scotland with the hope of starting a better life in the United States.² Within a year, Williamina found herself pregnant and abandoned by her husband. Left to fend for herself and her unborn child, she found employment in the household of the director of the Harvard College Observatory, Edward Charles Pickering, where she was hired to provide household help along with copying assistance. Pickering and his wife, Lizzie Sparks Pickering, may have been impressed with her intelligence and facility with numbers in managing household accounts. Eventually, and quite possibly at the urging of Lizzie Pickering, Fleming began to work part-time at the observatory as a copyist and computer.

Williamina—or Mina, as she was known to family, friends, and colleagues—returned home to Scotland to be with her family for the birth of her son, whom she named Edward Charles Pickering Fleming in gratitude for Pickering’s kindness. She would leave him in care of her mother, returning to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1881. The boy joined Fleming in Cambridge when he was eight, accompanied by a female caretaker. He graduated from MIT in 1901, with a degree in mining engineering, and was naturalized as a US citizen in 1904. He died in California in 1962

References

1. Michael Anderson and Corinne Roughly, “Causes of death.” In Scotland’s Populations from the 1850s to Today, edited by Michael Anderson, Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 348–373, doi:10.1093/oso/9780198805830.001.0001.
2. Massachusetts Naturalization Records – originals, 1906–1929, for Williamina Fleming, 1900, ancestry.com.

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.