Miss Mitchell’s Students: Margaretta Palmer

Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • November 12, 2019

Standing under the canopy of the stars, you can scarcely do a petty deed or think a wicked thought.


Maria Mitchell’s influence reached far and wide and remained strong through many generations of not just her own students but the students of her students.  Her immediate galaxy was of course the women who took her astronomy and mathematics classes at Vassar College.  She instilled in her students a lifelong love of learning and the knowledge that as women, they had the power, strength, and knowledge to be the future of women scientists and educators in the world.  Some would go on to great accomplishments and some would go on to quietly influence other young learners of the world – spreading Maria’s legacy farther afield.


Over the next few blogs, I would like to share with you some of Maria Mitchell’s students.


The third is:


Margaretta Palmer, 1862-1924

A classmate of Antonia Maury’s, Palmer graduated in 1887 and served as Maria Mitchell’s assistant for that first year after graduation.  She had taken several of Maria’s astronomy classes.  In 1889, she was hired by the Yale Observatory to serve as an assistant– mirroring the program her classmate, Maury, was doing at Harvard.  She was among the first group of woman admitted to Yale for graduate school, receiving her Ph.D. in 1894 in mathematics – the first woman to earn a PH.D. in mathematics and the first of seven women to earn Ph.D.’s from Yale.  Her    thesis – a recalculation of her professor Maria Mitchell’s comet of 1847 – was a perfect match for this astronomer and mathematician and likely a nod to her Vassar mentor.  Her focus was in computational astronomy which led her to calculate the orbits of many comets that were previously discovered including several by English astronomer Caroline Herschel who was forced, due to her sex, to give much of the credit for her astronomical work to her astronomer brother, William Herschel.  Palmer worked at Yale for her entire career – weathering many tensions and internal fighting – but was able to publish several articles of her own, as well as numerous other publications that she co-authored.


JNLF

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April 1878. The conference of Woman’s Congress officers met in Washington. Because we had one member in Washington we were invited to meet in that place. I went on at a great expense of time, money and strength . . . . We were in session at least nine hours. I think that more than half of that was used by Mrs. Spencer and Mrs. Sayles. The only motion which I carried through was to pay the Secretary $200 . . . In 1878, that was a long train(s) ride to Washington, DC from Poughkeepsie, NY and Vassar College. If Maria seems perturbed, I am sure she was. As president of the Association for the Advancement of Women, and thus the Congress, she had to be at the meeting. But it appears she did not get much say in the nine hour meeting. This was also a long trip to take when she had another, even longer trip coming up in July of 1878. In that month, she would travel with students and her sister, Phebe, out west to Colorado to view the eclipse and that train and wagon ride I am sure was weighing on her mind – not just the physical trip but making her way for an important eclipse viewing event. JNLF
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