When some people hear the name Vera Rubin, they might think of Rubin's pioneering work on galaxy rotation rates, or her data that provided evidence for dark matter. For others, a new facility in Chile comes to mind, recently named the National Science Foundation Vera C. Rubin Observatory, the first large observatory in the world to be named after a woman. And for still others, Rubin's legacy is for her support of other women in science. When writing Vera Rubin: A Life, Jacqueline Mitton and Simon Mitton were the first people to have access to Rubin's papers and correspondence, now preserved in the US Library of Congress. This gave them unique and in-depth insight into her character and her fascinating life as she dealt with discrimination and combined family life with an outstanding career…
Read more from Janice Audet » | | Henrietta Szold is certainly a familiar name to members of Hadassah and to most Israelis, but she deserves even wider recognition as one of the most influential women in the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Baltimore in 1860, one of eight daughters of immigrant Jews from Hungary, Szold from a young age sought to alleviate the social ills she saw around her. As Dvora Hacohen shows in To Repair a Broken World, she aimed especially to better the lives of women and children.
As an intelligent, ambitious teenager, Szold desperately wanted to attend university, but Johns Hopkins University did not accept women and her parents could not afford to send her away to college. It was a bitter disappointment and her first significant encounter with the exclusion of women, although she would face similar discrimination throughout her life…
Read more from Kathleen McDermott » | | In early twentieth-century England there were few female scientists, let alone astronomers. Often the lone woman in her courses and the observatory, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin faced constant skepticism from her peers and a lack of recognition for her work. And still, clear-eyed and determined, she went on to pen what fellow astronomer Otto Struve would call "the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy." In it, she proposed a theory that was eventually proven true: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin revealed the atomic composition of stars. Now, for any astronomer it was difficult to posit a revolutionary theory, but for a woman in science it was almost impossible. As Donovan Moore reveals in What Stars Are Made Of: The Life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, a notable male colleague dismissed her work, stating that her conclusions were wrong. But Payne-Gaposchkin was not deterred by her critics, and eventually, she was duly recognized for correctly theorizing what stars are made of.…
Read more from Janice Audet » | | Asked to name one of the most powerful ruling women of the early modern era, many people might point to Queen Elizabeth I of England. Few would likely name her near contemporary Queen Njinga, ruler of Ndongo, a large territory in central Africa. But they should. Born in 1582, descendant of a royal line reaching back to the founding of the kingdom of Ndongo, Njinga learned statecraft at her father's court. After her brother assumed the throne, she served as his envoy to the Portuguese, who were conducting relentless wars of conquest in the region for land and slaves. Njinga proved more adept than her brother in both diplomacy and strategy. Upon his death, she became the real defender of Ndongo's independence.
In Njinga of Angola: Africa's Warrior Queen, Linda Heywood recounts the dramatic twists and turns in the life of this fascinating and complex woman.…
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