Chasing the Stars: Women Astronomers at the University of Wisconsin

Eds Note: We are delighted to offer an excerpt from Chasing the Stars: How the Astronomers of Observatory Hill Transformed Our Understanding of the Universe by James Lattis and Kelly Tyrrell, published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2024.

Women in Astronomy

Women’s participation in astronomy has always been constrained by the social conventions and norms of wider society, many of which limited women’s access to education itself. 

Initially, women were considered by many male astronomers to be unsuited for the “physical hardships” of long nighttime hours at the telescope, not to mention academic life more generally. But norms and conventions shifted rapidly in the United States after the Civil War, and female students were becoming more common on college campuses by the time Washburn Observatory came along. 

Despite critics who argued that rigorous study would adversely affect a woman’s health or that women would distract men from their studies, female students across the nation grew in number, and the University of Wisconsin was among the more progressive in bringing women to campus. John Bascom was important in this as university president because he believed in equal access to higher education and academics for women. 

Edward Holden was also very supportive of women who were interested in astronomy and employed several students not only for computation but for significant work with the observatory’s new instruments. Among the most notable are Alice Sanborn and Alice Lamb, who published their work under their own names in the Publications of the Washburn Observatory between 1883 and 1886. 

Edith Flather worked as a computer, or coder,
at Washburn Observatory in the 1950s and ’60s. 

Computation was a highly skilled activity. Women’s skills were equal to men’s, Joel Stebbins remarked, except “usually the women are neater and just as accurate.” However, before roughly the middle of the twentieth century, women who sought astronomical careers beyond computing were, with rare exceptions, limited to the handful of positions at small observatories at women’s colleges, where they succeeded as practicing astronomers in defiance of biases. As happened with Lamb, social forces pressed many young potential astronomers, as Stebbins put it, to be “converted into matrimony,” rather than pursuing careers in science. 

After Holden’s tenure, there seem to have been very few women employed at Washburn Observatory outside of the traditional roles of clerical help and computation. Before the 1960s, it was rare for the University of Wisconsin to award graduate degrees in astronomy at all. However, of the three graduate degrees awarded in astronomy in the first half of the twentieth century, one was a master of arts awarded in 1932 to Alletta Esther Beddoe. 

While little remains about her in the historical record, Beddoe’s hometown is listed in the university’s 1932 commencement booklet as Springdale, Arkansas, and she received her bachelor’s degree in 1930 from Carleton College, in Minnesota. Stebbins writes that Beddoe was working at Washburn during the summer of 1930, and he recommended her for an out-of-state tuition remission scholarship. Admissions forms from both 1930 and 1931 show her enrolled in a master’s program, but, though the booklet lists her degree as astronomy, it does not mention her thesis title, and the nature of her work at Washburn remains obscure. 

Betty Louise Webster looks through the
 eyepiece of the Washburn refractor. 

It wasn’t until the fall of 1966 that Washburn Observatory employed its first female PhD astronomer on staff. Betty Louise Webster (1941–1990) came to Wisconsin from Australia for her postdoctoral research, specifically because it was the best place to advance her research in photoelectric photometry of planetary nebulae, a specialty of the university’s Donald Osterbrock. An article in the Capital Times in 1967 shows how far views about women in observational astronomy had come: “Astronomy presents no special handicaps for women, least of all observations with the big telescopes, as Miss Webster sees things.” 

Women began to account for a significant portion of advanced researchers in astronomy in the early 1960s, and Wisconsin was part of that trend—about one in four graduate students were women. The first woman to earn a doctorate in astronomy at the University of Wisconsin was Natalie Satunas in 1964. Next, in 1967, came Susan Simkin (1940–2021), who became the first woman tenured in the Astronomy Department at Michigan State University, and Laura “Pat” Bautz (1940–2014), who spent much of her career at the National Science Foundation. There, Bautz eventually held the position of director of the Division of Astronomical Science, and she also served Wisconsin as a member of the Astronomy Department’s Board of Visitors. 

Faculty appointments of women in astronomy began to pick up beginning with astronomer Linda Sparke, a specialist in the dynamics of galaxies, who became a University of Wisconsin professor in 1989. Three decades later, roughly half of all PhDs awarded in astronomy at UW–Madison and elsewhere go to women. Their potential was overlooked for far too long. 

Female grad students in the UW Astronomy Department, May 1963.
Back to front: Susan Simkin, Laura Bautz, Bernadette Londak, and Natalie Satunas.

Reprinted with permission by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press © 2024. All rights reserved. Chasing the Stars is available for purchase from the Wisconsin Historical Society online store at https://shop.wisconsinhistory.org/chasing-the-stars. It can also be found at booksellers near you.

All photos are courtesy of the Department of Astronomy, University of Wisconsin–Madison, reprinted with permission.