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Wednesday, 12 Mar 2025
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Was wondering how he considered his scottish maid better than his staff?! Was it like a joking remark or he knows she has the passion or exp for something like that. Need more context on this please
I imagine this guy coming home after a long day and plopping down in a chair.
“Williamina, did you remem-”
“Yes, sir. It’s on the table next to you.”
“Oh, thank you. And the-”
“It didn’t arrive today so I walked down to the shipping company after getting the groceries. They said it would arrive next week instead.”
“My lord, Williamina, if half my staff was as diligent as you I’d…. hmm”
You can read more about Fleming and over 146 pioneering women who worked at the Harvard College Observatory from the 1880s to the 1960s online at: [platestacks.cfa.harvard.edu/women-at-hco](https://platestacks.cfa.harvard.edu/women-at-hco)
This isn’t a story about how bad his staff was, this is a story about how many talented, brilliant women were held back by society thinking they could only be maids and the like.
Nate DiMeo did an amazing 2014 episode about Pickering on his Memory Palace podcast, I’ve always remembered this story. Highly recommended, about eight minutes long. He is the best storyteller around and is one of my favorite voices to listen to, along with Scott Simon.[Memory Palace podcast](https://thememorypalace.us/episodes/)
Turns out he was right
Wow all this from a lowly Scot. Guess those northern swine can be good for something after all.
/s for whoever needs it
Her distant cousin Ian didn’t do all that bad in his field either..
Modern HR translation: ‘Outsourcing for efficiency.’
It really is an amazing story. I read this book earlier this year about it. An utterly fascinating part of history.
*The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars*
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01CZCW45O
He wasn’t kidding.
Astronomer here! I worked at Harvard a few years and confirmed, it’s a great line but there’s *no evidence he ever said this*. We do know Williamina Fleming was a Scottish immigrant single mom who worked for Pickering, the director, as his maid (Mr Fleming ditched her and her young son). He hired her because being a “computer” was grunt work but he thought she had the right temperament to be patient enough to do it- you basically had to look at allllll the dots and look at which ones changed from one image to another days or months later, thousands of times. Williamina ended up running *all* the women who worked at Harvard as computers for many years, and did interesting things in her life like have a friendship with Andrew Carnegie and his wife.
There’s a great book on all this btw if anyone is interested- *The Glass Universe* by Dava Sobel.
u/repostsleuthbot
Okay, but what about the Scottish maid? What became of her?
There’s a play my college is doing by Lauren Gunderson called “Silent Sky” that is about this staff of women and more specifically about Henrietta Leavitt who made a lot of progress in the field of Astronomy. Williamina is an important character in it; she has a lot of fun dialogue (being Scottish and all)
I guess he was right…..how embarrassing. Lol
Sounds great, I suppose the whole team under her did nothing but watch in amazement and clap
Dam
She looks like Abbie Maley.
r/scotland
She looks just as surprised as everyone else probably was about it.
She a baddie.
Did she later become the actress who played the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz?
You cant put a real mouse in the horsehead nebula.
It would cost too much.
That’s how my cat stares at greebles
Immigrants get it done.
r/madlads
She had those soft skills and was likely better organized than all the head-in-the-clouds academic types. Sometimes it’s best to have a non-expert lead your experts since they won’t bog themselves down with the technical details.
She could indeed do better.
He was totally banging her.
😲
Crazy to think, that at the same time, thousands of people went on the Oregon trail to find better life in the west. East coast they classified stars, and the further west you went, it was literally wild West and people died like flies.