In support of women’s history research, Wolbach Library’s Curator of Women’s History created a bibliography covering major secondary and scholarly works written about women in astronomy, as well as a bibliography listing memoirs written by women in astronomy. The bibliographies are living documents to be updated and maintained by Wolbach Librarians.
Bibliographies prepared by Emily A. Margolis, April 2023
Secondary Sources
Bergland, Renée L. Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics. New York, NY: Penguin Random House, 2008.
Grier, David Alan. When Computers Were Human. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Mack, Pamela E. “Strategies and Compromises: Women in Astronomy at Harvard College Observatory, 1870–1920.” Journal for the History of Astronomy 21, no. 1 (February 1990): 65–76.
Mitton, Jaqueline and Simon Mitton. Vera Rubin: A Life. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2021.
Moore, Donovan. What Stars are Made of: The Life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020.
Hoffleit, Dorrit. Women in the History of Variable Star Astronomy. Cambridge, MA: AAVSO, 1993.
Hoskin, Michael. “Caroline Herschel as Observer.” Journal for the History of Astronomy 36, no. 4 (2005): 373-406. (available here)
Johnson, George. Miss Leavitt's Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005.
Lafortune, Keith R. “Women at the Harvard College Observatory, 1877-1919: ‘Women's Work,’ the ‘New’ Sociality of Astronomy, and Scientific Labor.” MA Thesis. University of Notre Dame, 2001.
Mack, Pamela E. “Strategies and Compromises: Women in Astronomy at Harvard College Observatory, 1870–1920.” Journal for the History of Astronomy 21, no. 1 (February 1990): 65–76.
Rossiter, Margaret W. Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940-1972. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Rossiter, Margaret W. Women Scientists in America: Forging a New World since 1972. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.
Rossiter, Margaret W. Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.
Roy, Jean-Rene. “Adelaide Ames (1900–32) and the Shapley-Ames Catalog of Galaxies.” Antiquarian Astronomer 16 (June 2022): 70-78.
Scoles, Sarah. Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. New York, NY: Pegasus Books, 2017.
Simkin, Susan. "Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy" in The American Astronomical Society’s First Century, edited by David H. DeVorkin. College Park, MD: American Institute of Physics, 1999.
Sobel, Dava. The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory took the Measure of the Stars. New York: Viking Books, 2016.
Winterburn, Emily. “Caroline Herschel: Agency and Self-Presentation.” Notes Rec.69 (2015): 69–83.
Yeager, Ashley Jean. Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Beyond: The Life of Astronomer Vera Rubin. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2021.
Zrull, Lindsay Smith. “Women in Glass: Women at the Harvard Observatory during the Era of Astronomical Glass Plate Photography, 1875–1975.” Journal for the History of Astronomy 52, no. 2 (2021): 115–146.
Autobiographies & Memoirs
Elkins-Tanton, Lindy. A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman: A Memoir. New York, NY: William Morrow, 2022.
Hoffleit, Dorrit. Misfortunes as Blessings in Disguise: The Story of My Life. Cambridge, MA: American Association of Variable Star Observers, 2002.
Johnson, Sarah Stewart. The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World. Penguin Random House, 2021.
Payne-Gaposchkin, Cecilia. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: An Autobiography and Other Recollections. Edited by Katherine Haramundanis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Prescod-Weinstein, Chanda. The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred. New York, NY: Bold Type Books, 2021.
Trimble, Virginia and David A. Weintraub (eds). The Sky is for Everyone: Women Astronomers in Their Own Words. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022.
Includes autobiographical essays from: Neta A. Bahcall, Beatriz Barbuy, Ann Merchant Boesgaard, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Catherine Cesarsky, Poonam Chandra, Xuefei Chen, Cathie Clarke, Judith Gamora Cohen, France Anne Córdova, Anne Pyne Cowley, Bożena Czerny, Wendy L. Freedman, Yilen Gómez Maqueo Chew, Gabriela González, Saeko S. Hayashi, Martha P. Haynes, Roberta M. Humphreys, Vicky Kalogera, Gillian Knapp, Shazrene S. Mohamed, Carole Mundell, Priyamvada Natarajan, Dara J. Norman, Hiranya Peiris, Judith Lynn Pipher, Dina Prialnik, Anneila I. Sargent, Sara Seager, Gražina Tautvaišienė, Silvia Torres-Peimbert, Virginia Trimble, Meg Urry, Ewine F. van Dishoeck, Patricia Ann Whitelock, Sidney Wolff, and Rosemary F. G. Wyse.