Today, a parable of the head and the hands. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
One German astronomer in
seven was a woman during the late 1600s. One in
seven! Those were masculine times. The Protestant
Reformation put women in the home, not in the
academies. Yet the complex mathematical life of
astronomy drew women in. At first that doesn't seem
to make sense.
Those were times of radical scientific change. We
were building the modern scientific method on
experiments. Historian Lhonda Shiebinger explains
how, in Germany, women found an odd door into this
new life of the mind. That door didn't lead into
the academies. It led into the trades. The trade
tradition was strong in Germany. Women could take
up any work that looked like a trade. The new
scientific work had just that look and feel.
University faculties spun theories about the stars,
but they left data-collecting to tradesmen.
Telescopes and sextants were found in private
homes. The observatory was one more cottage
industry. It was usually a family affair, and the
astronomer's wife was often his assistant. Maybe
she worked as a technical artist, making a
permanent record of the night skies. Maybe she
worked as a human computer, grinding through
calculations. But those women also saw the patterns
in their work, for the hands lead right back to the
head.
Take the case of Maria Cunitz. Her father educated
her at home. She studied languages, classics,
science, and the arts. Then she married a physician
and amateur astronomer. Soon she was the primary
astronomer in the family. At thirty she published a
set of astronomical tables. In them she simplified
Kepler's method for calculating the positions of
stars.
It was an important book, and it went through many
editions. In the later ones her husband had to
write a preface saying it was all her own work. It
was so useful that readers assumed he'd written it
for her. She herself felt obliged to tell readers
that her astronomy was accurate despite being the
work of "a person of the female sex" -- her words,
not mine.
Cunitz's troubles didn't end with her death. The
18th century was even less hospitable to women.
Astronomers of the so-called Enlightenment period
couldn't digest her. Forty years after her death,
one complained that "she was so deeply engaged in
astronomical speculation that she neglected her
household."
So the door that'd opened for a while was swinging
shut again. But those clear-headed German women
remind us how well our hands inform our heads. In
the end, not just our technology, but our science
as well, must wed head and hands. It must wed doing
and thinking. It must also wed male and female.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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