Voula Saridakis

Lake Forest College

Abstract

For ‘the present and future happiness of my dear Pupils’”: The Astronomical and Educational Legacy of Margaret Bryan

Former resident of Bath, Jane Austen, wrote in her novel Emma that boarding schools were "where a reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold at a reasonable price, and where girls might be sent to be out of the way, and scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of coming
back prodigies." Yet Austen's contemporary, astronomer and natural philosopher Margaret Bryan, would have vehemently disagreed with such a trite assessment of her own schools. Bryan, whose image (along with her two daughters) appears on the frontispiece of her work A Compendious System of Astronomy (1797), taught astronomy and natural philosophy to girls at her school in Blackheath, London from 1795 to 1806, and opened another school in central London in 1815. Her schools and books gave a general grounding in astronomy and physics to young women interested in the sciences. This presentation is an assessment of the astronomical and educational tradition passed down by Bryan. Despite the difficulties faced by British women pursuing astronomical education and employment throughout the nineteenth century, the increase in the number of women attending astronomy classes, and their growing participation in organizations and expeditions, are a testament to Bryan's legacy.

Biographical Details

Voula Saridakis is Lecturer in the Department of History at Lake Forest College (near the city of Chicago) where she teaches European history, the history of science, and women in modern history. Her Ph.D. thesis (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2001) was entitled Converging Elements in the Development of Late Seventeenth-century Disciplinary Astronomy: Instrumentation, Education, Networks, and the Hevelius-Hooke Controversy. Her paper - Collaborators or Competitors? The Astronomical Correspondence of G-D Cassini and John Flamsteed  - was presented at the 2008 annual History of Science Society meeting in Pittsburgh; and at the 2009 Ninth Biennial History of Astronomy Workshop at the University of Notre Dame she presented Urania’s ‘Progress’: Women’s Shifting Roles in Observational Astronomy from the Late Seventeenth to Early Nineteenth Centuries. Her research interests include early modern astronomy, scientific institutions in the seventeenth century, and the history of women in astronomy. In addition to her current work on Margaret Bryan, she is also working on projects related to the astronomer Johannes Hevelius and his wife Elisabetha.