Daughters of Selene
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Daughters of Selene Daniel R. Altschuler and Fernando J. Ballesteros: The women of the moon: tales of science, love, sorrow, and courage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, 299 pp, £20.00, US$26.95 HB Naomi Pasachoff1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
In 1993, I was invited to write a biography of Marie Curie for Oxford Portraits in Science, a series for young adults. Ever since I have been reading and writing about women scientists. In addition to my own books and articles, I have also written reviews of books devoted to the lives and work of women researchers. In 2017 in Metascience, for example, I reviewed Dava Sobel’s The Glass Universe, about the women “computers” hired by director William Pickering of the Harvard Observatory, together with Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures, which shone a light on the hitherto unknown female African-American researchers in the early years of NASA, who made important contributions to America’s space initiatives. Until now, however, I had not encountered a book written by men who have undertaken to raise the profile of women in science. Fittingly, the authors—two astronomers based in Spanish-speaking countries— chose Dava Sobel to write a short, unnumbered, single-page Foreword. She calls their book “a tender paean to the 28 women commemorated in officially named craters on the Moon” that “illuminate[s] the lives of heroines both familiar and obscure.” As the authors indicate in their “Pretext,” of the 1382 lunar craters named by the International Astronomical Union, only 28 were named for women. (In a “Note added in proof” at the end, they bring these figures up to date: In the years since 2014, 11 new craters were named, with three of those honoring women.) The authors mourn this “negative view of women, a painful disregard for our own mothers” (3). They also prepare the reader for what lies ahead by categorizing the 28 women into four groups: researchers, sponsors of science, science communicators, and space travelers. I have already written elsewhere about half of these 28 women. Below, I will share what I have discovered about five of the remaining 14, including two researchers, one popularizer, one sponsor of science, and one space traveler. Let me begin, * Naomi Pasachoff [email protected] 1
Williams College, Williamstown, MA 01267, USA
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however, with an explanation of this review’s title and some things I learned from the book’s introductory material. In Greek mythology, Selene is the goddess of the Moon, a fact I learned as an undergraduate when reading English dramatist John Lyly’s 1591 play, Endymion: The Man in the Moon. Selene herself is mentioned three times in Women of the Moon, as are selenography and selenology, terms derived from the Moon goddess’s name, just as geology and geography are derivations of Gaia, the name of the Earth goddess. Faculty and students at my institution can admire Hevelius’s 1647 Selenographia at the Chapin Rare Book Library. (While reading Women of the Moon, I delighted in discover
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