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How a Victorian Astronomer Fought the Gender Pay Gap, and Won

That time a brilliant female scientist called bullshit on 'lady privileges.'

On this day in 1818, astronomer and women's rights pioneer Maria Mitchell was born in Nantucket, Massachusetts. She spent the next seven decades establishing herself as a forward-thinking paragon of intelligence and morality.

Interest in Mitchell's life and work has been going through a bit of a revival over the last few years, thanks to several recent biographies and a 2013 Google Doodle honoring her 195th birthday. Given that she was a committed abolitionist and suffragette—in addition to being the first professional female astronomer in American history—it's no surprise that she has captured the 21st century imagination.

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To that point, one of the most interesting fights Mitchell took up during her life was over an issue that remains incredibly relevant: equal pay for equal work. Given that the gender wage gap still is a pervasive problem in STEM fields, it's worth revisiting the utterly badass way in which Mitchell approached some 145 years ago.

The story begins with Mitchell being instated as the first professor of astronomy (of either gender) at Vassar College in 1865. She agreed to an annual salary of $800 which included rent, fuel, and lights, and went about instructing her female pupils and conducting research out of the Vassar College Observatory.

A 1877 photo of Mitchell (left) and pupil Mary Whitney. Image: Eva March Tappan

But five years later, Mitchell discovered that her male colleagues at Vassar were paid $2,500 yearly, over three times her earnings. Even the most cursory reading of Mitchell's biography reveals a woman who was passionately dedicated to equality, so she wasted no time allying with Vassar medical professor Alida Avery, who was also vastly underpaid compared to the male medical faculty, and presenting a case for their equal payment by the college.

The two women lodged their complaint in a letter to Vassar's executive committee in May 1870, noting that male professors with much less experience had been hired at the $2,500 rate, while Mitchell and Avery had lectured at Vassar for years at a fraction of that salary.

The executive committee replied to the complaint by claiming that Mitchell and Avery received "lady privileges"—that was the actual phrasing—in the form of free furnished room and board. "The Professors whose compensation is regarded as unequal receive nominally $2,500, but of this they are required to pay back to the College $400 or $450 per annum for house rent," argued the committee.

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In other words, the Vassar executive board seemed to think that Mitchell and Avery, two women exceedingly well-versed in mathematics, would be satisfied with the answer that male professors actually netted only about $2,100 when rent was factored into the equation. They made no reference at all to the fact that this still left a pay gap of well over $1,000 for the female professors.

It is genuinely baffling that this was considered an appropriate response to the original complaint, and indeed, Mitchell and Avery rejected it outright.

"We ask that our salaries may not only be the same in amount, as those of the other professors, but may be paid in the same way, leaving questions of domestic arrangements for separate and independent consideration," Mitchell wrote in a letter to the committee in May 1871.

For her and Avery, the solution was simple: If Vassar wanted to deduct rent from their salaries instead of bundling it into their pay as an ambiguously defined "lady privilege," so be it. All they requested was the same contract as the men.

1873 photo of Alida Avery. Image: Vassar College

The committee stalled on the issue, voting to defer the problem to the future board meetings for several months. Finally, in October 1871, they accepted Mitchell and Avery's terms, and agreed to give them the same deal as their male faculty.

But the win was only temporary, because the committee then proceeded to do something so incomprehensibly stupid and inflammatory that it remains cringe-worthy a century and a half later. They issued a revised contract to Mitchell and Avery, stating that they had determined "the value of board, and necessary furnished rooms with light and heat therefore and with ordinary attendance at $16 per week for each of the lady professors."

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Yes, $16 weekly—as in $832 yearly, twice what the male professors owed for rent. The committee's counter offer was the institutional equivalent of throwing gasoline on a fire, and it prompted a quick and severe reaction from Mitchell.

"I wish respectfully to ask for the items of the charge of $16 a week for 'house furnished apartments etc.' made on November 1st—in the hope of receiving expenses, which seem to me very great," she responded in November 1871.

Photo of Mitchell at her desk. Image: Julia Ward Howe

"There are three rooms at the Observatory," she explained, "but the committee are mistaken in supposing that it has ever been furnished by them. I asked some year since for furniture, and the request was declined. A lounge, whose cost was $15 is the only article of furniture purchased for me. No other table or bed has ever been supplied for my care."

"I have made these statements, because I supposed the charge of $16 a week is mainly for furnished rooms," she concluded. "It is plain that it cannot be for table-board, as I have learned as of Nov. 1st. period the rate is $7.50 per week for the table board of guests."

In response, the Vassar committee dug itself into an even deeper hole. Not only did they refuse to honor Mitchell and Avery's request for an itemized list of expenses accounting for the high weekly figure, they instead pointed out that this rent should be easy to pay "especially when we take into view the liberal increase made at the same time to the salaries of these Professors."

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In essence, the committee had the nerve to say: Hey, we just gave you two a raise. You can afford a 200 percent rent hike.

Outraged, Mitchell and Avery announced that they would be quitting Vassar over the dispute. We are "fighting for all women," Mitchell wrote in her December 1871 resignation letter, "for it was more the general than the special injustice that reached us."

The committee was shocked at this reaction, and considered to be very rash. Nonetheless, they agreed to lower the weekly rent to $10 to keep Mitchell and Avery at the college. This was still much more than what the men paid, but Mitchell grudgingly agreed to it.

Avery, however, took the deal in the short term, but immediately started looking for other options. She left Vassar two years later to become Colorado's Superintendent of Hygiene, a position for which she negotiated an annual salary of $10,000.

Mitchell, meanwhile, stayed at Vassar until 1888, a year before she died. The salary dispute awakened in her an enduring passion for women's rights, inspiring her to found the American Association for the Advancement of Women in 1872. She advocated on behalf of working women until she died, and inspired countless female students to pursue careers in science.

Excerpt from Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals (1896). Image: Maria Mitchell/Harvard University Library

In the decades that have elapsed since Mitchell's fight for pay equality, the gender pay gap in STEM fields has been exposed countless times, and it remains a major handicap for aspiring women scientists.

But her dispute with Vassar is a timely reminder that these salary disparities can be overcome with persistence, reasoned argument, and confidence in one's own abilities.

As Mitchell wrote in a 1874 diary entry: "Until women throw off reverence for authority, they will not develop. When they do this, when they come to truth through their own investigations, when doubts lead them to discovery, the truth they get will be theirs, and their minds will go on unfettered."

That's a fantastic lesson to remember on this incredible woman's 197th birthday. As frustrating as her arguments with Vassar must have been, Mitchell used them to set an example for women that remains just as relevant today as it was in 1872.