“A Woman ‘in the snow among the Clocks and instruments’”: How Adrienne Rich Reimagined the Lives of Women Astronomers

Authors

• Ashley Q. Lear, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical UniversityFollow
• Kayla D. Taylor, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical UniversityFollow

Submitting Campus

Daytona Beach

Student Status

Graduate

Class Project

Daytona Beach: Graduate Student Works

Advisor Name

Dr. Ashley Lear

Abstract/Description

In 1968, Adrienne Rich, the renowned feminist, poet, and author of Diving Into the Wreck and Of Woman Born, celebrated the career of Caroline Herschel and other women in the scientific community by writing “Planetarium.” The dedication reads, “Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750-1848) astronomer, sister of William; and others.” At the time, Rich was struggling with her own experiences as a mother and wife to a fellow academic. Like many career women in the 1960s, her identities were often in competition with one another for her time and attention, and the additional obstacles that came with being a trail blazer in her field made her somewhat isolated and, at time, embittered. Caroline Herschel’s life seemed to exemplify Rich’s struggles in more ways than one. As Herschel’s biographer writes, “Her days were spent supervising workmen, dealing with visitors, and calculating data … Her nights, meanwhile, were spent on the writing room roof with her own very small telescope” (36). The very act of optical or radio astronomy served as a metaphor for her and other women scientists’ experiences as they struggled to tune out the noise of obligations, expectations, and invisible labor, to locate the signal representing individual purpose and discovery. Their professional methodology thus connects these women more closely than their historical periods. As Judith Bennett notes in History Matters, “historians of women have also had to try to fit the rhythms of women’s history into the traditional periodizations of the profession” (68). Using the poem “Planetarium,” alongside the scientific process involved in astronomical discovery, this presentation will explore the ways in which Rich’s poem reimagines astronomers like Caroline Herschel, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, and Vera Rubin, and creates from their lives a new narrative for women in pursuit of their own vocations.

Document Type

Presentation without Video

Publication/Presentation Date

4-22-2022

Sponsorship/Conference/Institution

Post-Scriptum Interdisciplinary Research Journal on Text and Media Conference

Location

Virtual

Scholarly Commons Citation

Lear, A., & Taylor, K. D. (2022, April 22). “A woman ‘in the snow among the Clocks and instruments’”: How Adrienne Rich reimagined the lives of women astronomers [PowerPoint slides]. Post-Scriptum Interdisciplinary Research Journal on Text and Media Conference, Virtual.