When people mentioned astronomers while I was growing up in the 1950s they seldom mentioned women (with the possible exceptions of Maria Mitchell or Caroline Hershel). In recent years that has changed, as more women became involved in the sciences and at least some major barriers have broken down. However, there was one name especially among the relatively few 20th Century professional women astronomers that did occasionally come up, at least among other astronomers. That is of course the name of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was indeed a brilliant astronomer who was also the first woman to be tenured in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and also the first woman department chair in the FAS at Harvard. Her Ph.D. dissertation (1925) was heralded by several noted astronomers as the best one ever written on astronomy. In it she announced the discovery that the major constituent of the universe was Hydrogen, followed by Helium. She also realized that the color of a star and its temperature could be correlated. These findings are now fundamental to modern astrophysical understanding, yet few textbooks actually mention her in relationship to these discoveries, while Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Einstein, and other male astronomers and physicists are usually mentioned along with their basic discoveries.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was born Cecilia Helena Payne in Wendover, England, and moved to the United States in 1923 at the behest of Harlow Shapley, then director of the Harvard University Observatory, but as she was a woman the Physics Department refused to award her the Ph.D. In order to work around this problem, Shapley virtually created the Department of Astronomy. Her Ph.D. was actually awarded by Radcliff, now a part of Harvard.
Her work was recognized as groundbreaking and she went from one achievement to another, crowning them all by becoming the first woman to chair a department at Harvard in 1956; at the same time she was awarded a full professorship. Ironically during her early time as a lecturer at Harvard her courses were not even listed in the catalog and she was paid from "equipment" funds. Her later recognition was very well deserved, if a bit late.
She obtained US citizenship in 1931 and in 1934 she married Sergei Gaposchkin, a fellow astronomer and expatriate from Russia. She met him in Germany in 1933 and with her help he managed to find a position at Harvard Observatory. They had three children.
I have a very slight connection to Professor Payne-Gaposchkin, having been an amateur astronomer at various times in my life, especially when life was getting me down (sometimes the night sky was a relief from some serious worry!) During one of these periods I purchased a copy of her book "Stars and Clusters" (1979) and was very impressed with her knowledge and how she managed to impart that to the reader. Later I got to know a local professional astronomer and his wife and discovered that they had known Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin very well. It is indeed a small world, especially in science!
References:
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. http://www.bookrags.com/...
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: Astronomer and Pioneer.http://www.uuworld.org/...
Portrait of a Pioneer. http://harvardmagazine.com/...