Maria Mitchell Inspires a Generation - October 1st, 1997.
""Do not look at stars as bright spots only - try to take in the vastness of the Universe." October 1st, 1997 was the 150th anniversary of the day Maria Mitchell swept the sky with her telescope and discovered the comet of 1847 (comet Mitchell 1847VI). Honored and recognised internationally for her discovery, Mitchell, who lived from the year 1818 to 1889, became one of the most famous American scientists of her day. Vassar College appointed Mitchell the first woman Professor of Astronomy and she remained the only woman ever elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences until 1943. Mitchell mentored a generation of scientists, and is fondly remembered for her ability to motivate. "We especially need imagination in science," Maria Mitchell said. "Question everything.""
Uppity Women: A Legacy of Liberation (1974) by the Lilith's Rib Collective at Hunter College
From the introduction:
We are a group of women students at Hunter College who are working for the implementation of a Women's Studies Department at Hunter. Given an enrollment that is 73% women and a long background as a women's college, we feel that it is time for us to learn about our HERitage and with this goal in mind we are working both politically and educationally.
We have chosen to name ourselves after Lilith. She was first mentioned in Assyrian myths as a wind spirit and later played a major part in early Hebraic lore. She is mentioned in the Alphabet Ben Sira as the first woman, created simultaneously with Adam. Being thus created, Lilith refused to accept Adam's claim of supremacy and left him, after refusing to lie beneath him during intercourse. She went to live by the Red Sea. We have chosen her as a symbolic starting point to our heritage.
Our motivation to write this book comes out of our own experiences as women. It is an effort to connect with a rich past that has been denied us. Our purpose is to briefly introduce you to some of these women whose lives have been lost to us and who were the Foremothers of our Woman's Culture. We hope that this will encourage you to rediscover Women's history and to participate in the struggle that lies ahead.
In Sisterhood,
The Lilith's Rib Collective
It includes biographies of Susan B. Anthony, Mary McLeod Bethune, Marie Sklodowska Curie, Isadora Duncan, Amelia Earhart, Emma Goldman, the Grimké Sisters, Anne Hutchinson, Mother Jones, Maria Mitchell, Esther Hubart Morris, Emmeline Goulden Pankhurst, Sacajewa, Margaret Higgins Sanger, Gertrude Stein, Lucy Stone, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Ross Tubman, Mercy Otis Warren, and Victoria Woodhill.
The Browne Popular Culture Library (BPCL), founded in 1969, is the most comprehensive archive of its kind in the United States. Our focus and mission is to acquire and preserve research materials on American Popular Culture (post 1876) for curricular and research use. Visit our website at https://www.bgsu.edu/library/pcl.html.
Reed made several discoveries in genetics and dedicated her career toward supporting women scientists. Yet she herself fell into obscurity.
By Rachel May
Rachel May, English professor and author, came upon Elizabeth Wagner Reed’s book about a decade ago, on Reed’s daughter’s website.
Published April 22, 2023Updated April 24, 2023, 10:50 a.m. ET
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
In 1992, the geneticist Elizabeth Wagner Reed self-published “American Women in Science Before the Civil War,” a book highlighting 22 19th-century scientists. One of them was Eunice Newton Foote, who wrote a paper on her remarkable discovery about greenhouse gases, “a phenomenon which is of concern to us even now,” Reed wrote.
Foote was forgotten soon after the paper was read aloud by a male scientist at a conference in 1856 and published the following year. A male scientist was eventually credited with the discovery.
Like Foote, Reed herself fell into obscurity, a victim of the erasure of female scientists that the historian Margaret Rossiter coined the Matilda Effect — named for the sociologist Matilda Joslyn Gage, whose 1870 pamphlet, “Woman as Inventor,” condemned the idea that women did not have the skills to succeed in the field.
Reed, however, made significant contributions to the sciences.
She wrote a landmark study about intellectual disability genetics, helped found a field of population genetics and wrote many more papers on botany, the biology of women and sexism in science.
Reed persisted in her research even when she found herself a widow with a toddler during World War II. By the time of her death, in 1996, in spite of publishing more than 34 scholarly papers, public school curriculums and two books, the record didn’t bend in her favor. It wasn’t until 2020, when the scientist and scholar Marta Velasco Martín published a paper on Reed, that her legacy was resurrected.
Reed was born Elizabeth Wagner on Aug. 27, 1912, in Baguio, in what was then called the Philippine Islands, to Catherine (Cleland) and John Ovid Wagner. John was from Ohio and worked in construction there at the time; Catherine, from Northern Ireland, was working in the Philippines as a nurse.
The family later settled on a farm in Ohio, where Elizabeth grew up picking raspberries “from dawn to dusk,” her son William Reed said in a phone interview.
“She learned how to work really hard,” he added. “I remember her saying how much she loved school, partly because it wasn’t doing farm work.”
At the end of one summer, he said, she used some of her earnings to buy a book about wildflowers in Ohio — “her first purchase was a scientific book.”
She would go on to cultivate wildflowers in her backyard as an adult, volunteer at a wildflower arboretum in Minnesota and write about botany in scientific articles and in educational materials for children. Reed’s daughter, Catherine Reed, told Martín that her mother “loved nature, especially plants, and, wanted to be a scientist from a very early age.”
In 1933, Reed earned her bachelor’s degree at Ohio State University, where she also earned a master’s in 1934 and a Ph.D. in plant physiology in 1936. She put herself through school with a scholarship and by washing dishes and working in the cafeteria. In 1939 and 1940, she published her first two papers, one about the effects of insecticides on bean plants and the other about how various types of dusts affect the rate of water loss in yellow coleus plants by night and day.
In 1940, she married a fellow scientist, James Otis Beasley, and had a son, John, with him just after James left to fight in World War II in 1942. When her husband was killed in the war the next year, she supported herself and her son by teaching at five different universities. “The first part of her life,” William Reed said, “was sheer determination.”
She began working with the geneticist Sheldon C. Reed, whom she married in 1946, and together they helped found the field of Drosophila population genetics, which uses fruit flies as a simple and economical method of studying genetics in a laboratory while offering important insights into similar species.
Soon after, the couple moved to Minnesota, where Sheldon was hired as the director of the Dight Institute of Human Genetics at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Elizabeth was denied a job at the university, which cited rules against nepotism.
The Reeds went on to write a book about intellectual disabilities that analyzed data from 80,000 people and their families; the study, they said, was “one of the largest genetic investigations so far completed.”
They found that disabilities could be caused by genetic or environmental factors and could therefore be heritable. They also proposed — to controversy that still exists today — that such disabilities were preventable through education of the general public and voluntary sterilization or birth control of potential parents with low I.Q.s.
Though Elizabeth’s name was listed first as author, a letter of acknowledgment calling the couple’s work “truly magnificent” referred to them as “Dr. and Mrs. Reed.”
Reed was quite aware that her husband was receiving more credit, her son William said, but she never let it embitter her. In 1950, however, she published a paper on sexism in the sciences based on her study of 70 women working in the field. It found that marriage and childbirth decreased their productivity and sometimes even dissuaded them from continuing their careers. It led her to mentor women in the field through the advocacy group Graduate Women in Science.
“She was a scientist before it was popular for women to become scientists,” Nancy Segal, a psychologist at California State University known for her study of twins, said in an interview, “and she was a great role model for so many of us women postdocs at the time.”
In writing “American Women in Science Before the Civil War,”Reed corresponded with archivists and scoured card catalogs, journals and proceedings of associations and societies. In addition to recognizing Eunice Foote’s work almost two decades before other scientists did, the book included biographies of, among others, the astronomer Maria Mitchell; Ellen Smith Tupper, who was known as the “Queen Bee of Iowa” for her study of that insect; and the entomologist Mary Townsend.
Reed wrote that it was a testimony to the strengths of these women that they pursued science despite the fact that they were “often denied entry to colleges and unable to attain professional status.”
Reed also supported teaching children about science so that they would have the tools to solve what she called the “current crises of exploding populations and deteriorating environments.” She published papers about teaching proper scientific methods in schools and created curriculums with the University of Minnesota.
“Classrooms always house some living organisms,” she wrote, tongue-in-cheek, in the Journal of the Minnesota Academy of Science in 1969. “In many, unfortunately, all are of a single species, Homo sapiens. The population consists of many immature species (children) and a few adults, usually female (teachers). This makes for a certain homogeneity, but it can be alleviated by introduction of other living species, animal or plant.”
The fact that Reed was, like so many of her predecessors, lost to history is indicative of the pervasive sexism of her era. But women today continue to face hurdles in entering scientific fields. A report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this year found that “the underrepresentation of women in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields continues to persist,” with women making up only 28 percent of the STEM work force.
Like Reed, her daughter, Catherine, was a scientist, having earned a Ph.D. in ecology, but she ultimately became so disillusioned that she held a ceremonial burning of her degree and instead turned to artwork and championing her mother’s legacy. She published her mother’s book on American women in science on her website in about 2010. She died in 2021 at 73.
Elizabeth Wagner Reed died at 83 on July 14, 1996, most likely of cancer. She recognized her symptoms, but, knowing what the treatments would be like and, to her mind, the probable outcome, she never sought a diagnosis. (Sheldon Reed died in 2003.)
William Reed said there was no joy like taking a walk with his mother, who could describe every plant and animal they passed. She and Sheldon were avid bird-watchers (and occasional polka dancers), and the family spent many vacations at Lake Itasca, Minn., relaxing under old-growth Norway Pines.
Reed’s favorite flower was the showy lady’s slipper, the state flower of Minnesota, an orchid notoriously difficult to cultivate, like the careers of many of the women she wrote about. Its Latin name is Cypripedium reginae, with reginae meaning queen.
Milkweed is not a weed. It’s the food and home of several insects, most importantly the Monarch Butterfly and also this little friend, the Red Milkweed Beetle.
The beetle is part of the Long-horned Beetle family. And that my friends, will be the extent of the depths of my insect prowess.
I have spoken of the importance of native plants and milkweed before and the once hundreds of monarchs we would see on Vestal Street – now only in the tens – as in literally I see ten a season – if that. Well, the milkweed beetle is also an individual that we would see loads of along Vestal Street where it would stand out splendidly on the milkweed leaves. Their population has dwindled as well, sadly. So, I was quite happy to see this ONE beetle not too long ago and quickly took its portrait.
They stand out quite a bit on the dull green of the milkweed leaf but they are interesting beetles and I encourage to learn more about them – for example – why they tend to be not so tasty to their enemies and the fact that they make noise!
So, here’s my case – leave the milkweed alone! It’s not a weed – it’s a happy home and breakfast/lunch/snack/dinner for a whole host of individuals. Moreover, the flowers are pretty and have a wonderful scent too!
