It wasn't as simple as basic sexism about whether or not women are capable of scientific work and thought. I appreciate the level of detail and nuance Sobel brings to the exposition of the challenges that these women faced in being accepted and recognized. He and his successor, Harlow Shapley, share the distinction of being champions of a more equitable workplace, recognizing and wanting to acknowledge equally the contributions of the women who worked at the Observatory. She spends a lot of time discussing the actions of its director, Edward Pickering. So it’s not surprising, in this way, that Sobel focuses as much on the life of the Harvard Observatory as she does on the lives of the women who worked there. Welcome to the industrial age of science. Gone are the days of lone scientists or small couples working in private labs. Sobel instead focuses on the overall picture, and while that sacrifices some fidelity on the biographical end of things, it provides a much more accurate portrayal of science as it enters the twentieth century. Sure, you could write a whole book about Mina Fleming, Antonia Maury, Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta Swann Leavitt, Cecilia Payne-Gaspochkin … but that’s a lot of books to write, and a lot of overlap. There's a reason for that: there are just too many of them.
Sobel relates details of their lives but in a very cursory way. Subtitle aside, this is not really a book about the lives of these women. I can't help but perceive a double meaning to this book's title: “glass” refers not only to the glass photographic plates over which the women pored but to the idea of a “glass ceiling” that many of these women encountered during their careers. Without their work, however, the Harvard Observatory would not have been able to complete the work it did in cataloguing and uncovering the mysteries of the sky. Those computers and some of the astronomers were women, yet their names are not often mentioned alongside the names of male astronomers. Sobel soberly recounts the efforts of the astronomers and computers whose ideas and labour helped us answer some of the questions I asked above. The Glass Universe is an antidote to that kind of portrayal. Moreover, when we do read those kinds of accounts, they too often fixate on lone geniuses, almost always men, toiling away in obscure labs until their eureka moment. How do we know what they're made of without ever visiting them? How can we possibly know how big, or massive, or far away, or hot they are? The fact we've managed to deduce such knowledge from the surface of this planet is nothing short of astounding in my eyes, yet how often do we really stop think about the processes behind those deductions? That's why I love reading science history. I love learning about science, but you know what I might love even more? Learning how we know what we know about science.
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