Harvard University

This guide to Harvard traces Williamina Fleming, who arrived in Boston in 1878 pregnant and abandoned by her husband and took work as a maid in the house of Edward Pickering, director of the Harvard College Observatory. It follows the offhand grumble that got her a part-time job cataloguing the observatory's glass photographic plates, and how she taught herself to read starlight for what it revealed about a star's makeup. You'll hear how Pickering built an entire underpaid team of women around her, later known as the Harvard Computers, paid a fraction of what the men on campus earned. Listen for how many plates and stars Fleming worked through in a lifetime spent staring at faint smudges of light.