15 - ‘One true mistress’

Summary

None of you know how hard we worked here just our two unaided selves.

– Margaret Lindsay Huggins

In April 1892, three ‘lady candidates’ failed to receive sufficient votes to be elected to fellowship in the all-male RAS. Before the ballots were cast, the chair urged each Fellow to vote as he saw fit, with the caveat that admitting women as full members might violate the Society's Charter. One Fellow threatened to ‘protest against the legality of the election in case the women should be elected’. Another cautioned that a vote for women was a vote for introducing a ‘social element’ into the RAS's normally ‘dull meetings’. It would require ‘a piano and a fiddle’, and laying down a ‘parquet flooring’ so all could ‘dance through most of the papers’.

But change was afoot in the Society at the dawn of the twentieth century. On 8 May 1903, the RAS Council elected Margaret Huggins and her friend, historian of astronomy Agnes Clerke, as Honorary Members. Only three other women had received such an honour: Caroline Lucretia Herschel (1750–1848) and Mary Somerville (1780–1872) in 1835, and Anne Sheepshanks (1789–1876) in 1862. Over the next eleven years two more women, both Americans, joined their ranks: Scottish-born Williamina Paton Stevens Fleming (1857–1911) in May 1906 and Annie Jump Cannon (1863–1941) in March 1914. The RAS finally amended its Charter to include women in February 1915. That November, five women were among the nine individuals nominated for election. In January 1916, all were elected.