Mitchell, Maria, 1818-1889

Maria Mitchell, astronomer, was born on the island of Nantucket in 1818. Through her father, William Mitchell, she became interested in astronomy and assisted him in his observatory. In the late 1830s she was appointed librarian at the Nantucket Athenaeum, using its collection to educate herself while she worked with her father in the evenings. In 1847 she discovered a new comet, named for her, and was subsequently awarded a gold medal by the King of Denmark. A year later she became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston; in 1850 she was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

At the urging of Matthew Vassar, who was eager to add a woman of considerable stature to his first faculty, Maria Mitchell came to Vassar in 1865, where an observatory with a 12-inch telescope was built for her. The materials in the Vassar collection reflect her twenty-three years at Vassar, where she became one of the college's best and most well-known teachers. During this time, she continued her own research and publication. A founder of the Association for the Advancement of Women, she urged that women's ability in the sciences be recognized and that the scientific method be applied to the solution of social problems. In recognition of her breadth of outlook, Maria Mitchell was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1869, and in 1873 was made a vice-president of the American Social Science Association. Retiring from Vassar in 1888, she went to Lynn, Massachusetts, to work in the small observatory she had built there. She died the next year of "brain disease" and was buried in Nantucket.