Maria Mitchell (1818-1889), astronomer
Information courtesy of National Park Service - Women Who Made History Section
Maria Mitchell, astronomer, professor and the first woman elected to both the Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, was born on Nantucket in 1818. The childhood home of Maria Mitchell defines Mitchell’s origins and the development of her independence in the unique atmosphere of a 19th-century whaling town, where for most of the year, the men were at sea. Her early interest in science and the stars came from her father who, besides being a bank officer, rated chronometers for use by the Nantucket whaling fleet in celestial navigation. When Mitchell was 12, she assisted her father in recording the time of an eclipse, and at the age of 17, she created her own school for girls, training them in science and mathematics. In 1838, she became the librarian at the Nantucket Athenaeum, where she gained exposure to great literary and scientific personages. She spent her evenings in an observatory her father had built on the roof of the Pacific Bank, his employer’s firm. When, on October 1, 1847, Mitchell telescopically sighted a comet using her father’s two-inch telescope in the rooftop observatory, she became the first person to record a comet sighting in America. Her quiet life on Nantucket immediately changed. She received international fame, she was elected to prestigious academic organizations and she became the first woman to see the Vatican observatory. 
In 1860, she and her father moved to Lynn, New York, where Matthew Vassar asked her to become a professor at his new college for women. Today, the Nantucket Maria Mitchell Association preserves the Maria Mitchell house as a museum that contains many of Mitchell family heirlooms. A domed observatory and a library and research center for young scientists was added to the house after her death.
The Maria Mitchell House, a National Historic Landmark, is located at One Vestal St. on Nantucket Island, MA. The property is open to the public 10am-4pm Tue-Sat, June 15-Sept. 1. For more information, call 508-228-2896, or click here.
The nine brick and stone buildings of the Elmira College Old Campus represent an important milestone in the history of women’s struggle for equality. Before the rise of female-centered institutions such as Elmira and Vassar, seminaries were the standard-and only-access women had to higher education. Lack of resources and an emphasis on male educational facilities weakened the quality of a seminarian education, with esteemed facilities such as Mt. Holyoke still below the standards of men’s schools.
Evolving out of the Elmira Female Seminary, the Elmira Female College was granted its charter in April 1855 and became the first educational institution in the United States to have admission and degree requirements for women that were equal to those of men’s colleges. Clarissa Thurston was one of New York’s leading advocates of higher education for women and her Elmira Female Seminary was an important precursor to Elmira College. Elmira College-the word “female” was removed from the school’s name in 1856 after being deemed vulgar-occupies the site of the seminary and was a manifestation of the reformist zeal begun by Thurston and accepted by the citizens of Elmira. The College also houses Mark Twain’s personal study, designed to resemble a Mississippi steamboat’s pilot house and moved to the campus in 1952. Twain produced several of his most famous works here, including the Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Life on the Mississippi. 
Eudora Welty was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Welty lived in this house from 1925 until her death in 2001, and wrote all of her major works here, including the short stories that initially brought her critical acclaim and such award-winning novels as Delta Wedding, The Optimist’s Daughter and Losing Battles. The property includes a Tudor Revival-style house constructed by her father in 1925, a garage and the surrounding grounds and garden. The garden was created by Eudora’s mother, Chestina Welty, an avid amateur horticulturist who passed her love for flowers and ornamental plants onto her daughter. 
Born in Jackson in 1909, Welty was influenced as a child by her parents’ love for books and learning. After graduating from Jackson’s Central High School in 1925, she spent two years at Mississippi State College for Women, in Columbus and the continued her undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, from which she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1929. Welty was encourage by her father to pursue a career in advertising, and she began graduate studies in 1930 at the Columbia University School of Business in New York City, but quickly lost interest. She returned to Jackson the following year, and worked for a radio station and wrote society stories for the Memphis Commercial Appeal. In 1936 she became a Junior Publicity Agent for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a job that stimulated her interest in writing fiction as she traveled around Mississippi, writing newspaper articles, conducting interviews and taking photographs. Inspired by her firsthand exposure to everyday life in the Depression-era South, Welty turned her energies to writing fiction. In 1936 she published her first short story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman,†in the literary magazine Manuscript. The next five years marked the formative period in Welty’s development as a writer. Six of her stories were accepted by the Southern Review between 1937 and 1939, and her first book, a collection of stories entitled A Curtain of Green , was published in 1941 with critical acclaim. The stories in the book demonstrated Welty’s talent for earnest expressions of emotion, subtle recreations of regional speech and thought patterns, tragic portraits of blighted lives and droll descriptions of eccentric behavior. With the success enjoyed by A Curtain of Green, Welty began a decade-long period of extraordinary productivity that established her as a major figure in American literature.
The Mount, designed by Edith Wharton in 1902, documents the wide ranging talents of one of the finest American novelists of the 20th century. In 1897, Edith Wharton, the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, co-authored The Decoration of Houses, with Boston architect Ogden Codman, Jr. Now considered one of the seminal works of professional interior design, this book clearly presents Wharton’s strong views about good taste and moderation. These views were successfully translated into her own new home, The Mount. During an era of flamboyant house decoration, Wharton designed an airy, informal mansion with many design elements drawn from the houses of continental Europe. Wharton also collaborated with her niece Beatrix Farrand, an acclaimed landscape architect, to design the gardens and landscaping of The Mount. 
One of America’s great writers, Wharton wrote her first major work, The House of Mirth (1905), “a novel of manners†that described the tensions between New York’s “old†19th-century elite society and the emerging economic power of industrialists and financiers while at The Mount. The cold Massachusetts’ winters spent there inspired Wharton’s 1911 Ethan Frome. After Wharton and her husband sold The Mount in 1911, Wharton refused to visit the house as “a stranger.†She continued to write in her new home in Europe and in 1921 was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence. In 1923, Wharton became the first woman to receive an honorary degree of doctorate of letters from Yale University. The Mount survived as the Foxhollow School for Girls until the 1970s and was later purchased and saved from neglect by Edith Wharton Restoration, Inc. through a grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. 
The school, typical of educational designs of the period with its use of Tudor Revival style, served as the productive center for much of Muldoon’s work as she provided leadership for the community, teachers, and students. Muldoon encouraged the school system to take an active role in the community and her energy made the school one of Waverly’s foremost civic institutions. She was instrumental in the campaign for teacher’s benefits, establishing a state Teachers Retirement Fund, as well as the Mary Muldoon Teacher Assistance Fund, designed to supplement the pensions of retired teachers who are in need. Muldoon defined the progressive spirit of her era, introducing industrial and domestic sciences into the school’s curriculum while shifting away from classical programs oriented toward the needs of only a small number of students. Her emphasis on industrial education was designed to meet the employment needs of many, and was coupled with an emphasis on the value of individual citizenship. Muldoon also authored respected works on instructional methods and the incorporation of values in the classroom. Mary Muldoon’s lasting legacy reflects her importance to both her community and profession and is a tribute to her positive impact on a generation of Waverly’s children.