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The Women of the Moon: Tales of Science, Love, Sorrow, and Courage
Philosophers and poets in times past tried to figure out why the stainless moon "smoothly polished, like a diamond" in Dante's words, had stains. The agreed solution was that, like a mirror, it reflected the imperfect Earth. Today we smile, but it was a clever way to understand the Moon in a manner that was consistent with the beliefs of their age. The Moon is no longer the "in" thing. We see it as often as the Sun and give it little thought ED we've become indifferent. However, the Moon does reflect more than just sunlight. The Moon, or more precisely the nomenclature of lunar craters, still holds up a mirror to an important aspect of human history. Of the 1586 craters that have been named honoring philosophers and scientists, only 28 honor a woman. These 28 women of the Moon present us with an opportunity to meditate on this gap, but perhaps more significantly, they offer us an opportunity to talk about their lives, mostly unknown today.
332 pages, Hardcover
First published July 4, 2019
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July 16, 2019
Twenty-eight...
Since the 16th century, with the development of the first telescopes, scientists have been naming craters on the moon after other scientists and philosophers. When this book was first published in 2014, there were 1586 named craters, of which 28 were named for women. Twenty-eight. Over five centuries. In this book, the authors (both scientists and, ironically, both men) tell us who these women were and what they did to achieve such an honour (did I mention there are only 28 of them?), and through their stories show how hard it has been over the centuries for women to break into a field for which most men (and, yes, many women too) felt they were unsuited, intellectually and emotionally. They also show that happily things have improved, in some parts of the world at least, though the battle for access to and recognition in the field of science is by no means won.
When I looked at the index of names, I was appalled that even out of this tiny number of women, I had only heard of a handful of them. (Mind you, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have heard of most of the 1558 men either. It occurred to me that, since this book runs to 290 pages, if a similar book was to be written about The Men of the Moon, it would come in at approximately 16,000 pages. Whew! I’m glad I wasn’t reading that one!)
The entries are in chronological order, starting with the mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria in the 4th century and ending with Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to go into space, and the only one who’s still alive. Hypatia is an outlier – most of the women are from what we think of as the modern era, from the eighteenth century on. The cumulative effect is to give a broad outline of the history of women in science and education generally, from the days when they weren’t allowed into universities and couldn’t get paid positions even after they had self-educated themselves, through to now, when at last women are being actively encouraged to enter scientific careers.
As well as gender, there is also a major geographical disparity in the namings. While I’m proud that three of the women were Scots, by birth at least, and there are other Europeans and Russians, the majority are either American or carried out much of their work in America. There are obvious reasons for this in the past, both in that, hard though it was for women to participate in science in those regions, it was still easier than in much of the world, and, of course, Americans and Europeans controlled the naming conventions for most of the period. Hopefully, now that the science community values international co-operation more and as more of the world allows women to participate fully in science, this will be reflected in future namings.
The authors give each woman an individual chapter, and these vary in length depending on the extent of the woman’s scientific contribution and/or on how much is known of her personal circumstances. They write extremely well, explaining the science parts with enough simplicity and clarity for a non-scientist to grasp at least the relevance and importance of it, and recounting the life stories of these remarkable women with warmth and admiration, not just for their work but for the obstacles they had to overcome to be taken seriously in this male dominated field. Not all of them were practical scientists, indeed; some were communicators, who took academic science papers and turned them into books and lectures that could be understood by and inspire the layperson (think Neil deGrasse Tyson or Brian Cox – tragically I can’t think of a modern woman who’s at the forefront in that role...?), while others “bought” their craters by providing much-needed funding for scientific projects or institutions.
Several of the women worked with their husbands or in partnership with male scientists, and the authors point out that, in many cases, the men would win prestigious prizes while the women barely got a mention even when the woman was clearly the more brilliant of the two. But they also tell of some of the men who did recognise the worth of women in the scientific world, though often in the tedious jobs men didn’t want to do, or because women could be paid considerably less, if at all. Nonetheless, intentionally or otherwise, these men provided a narrow gateway that some women were able to push wide open by their own efforts.
The convention is that craters are only named for people after their deaths (Tereshkova is an exception). This has the effect that amongst the most recent women are those astronauts who died in the Challenger and Columbia disasters. These chapters are sensitively handled, never veering into the sensationalist or the mawkish. Of course, I knew these stories already in their broad outlines, but I found learning about the individual women – their enthusiasm, their courage, their dreams – a moving and fitting way to bring the book to its conclusion.
An excellent book that I heartily recommend to all, but think would be especially great to give as a gift to a teenage girl who’s interested in a career in science – she’ll find it inspirational, I’m certain. Alternatively, the next time you meet someone who says science isn’t really a suitable career for a woman, you could use it to bash him over the head with... ah! Now I wish I had that 16,000-page men’s book after all.
NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Oxford University Press.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
Since the 16th century, with the development of the first telescopes, scientists have been naming craters on the moon after other scientists and philosophers. When this book was first published in 2014, there were 1586 named craters, of which 28 were named for women. Twenty-eight. Over five centuries. In this book, the authors (both scientists and, ironically, both men) tell us who these women were and what they did to achieve such an honour (did I mention there are only 28 of them?), and through their stories show how hard it has been over the centuries for women to break into a field for which most men (and, yes, many women too) felt they were unsuited, intellectually and emotionally. They also show that happily things have improved, in some parts of the world at least, though the battle for access to and recognition in the field of science is by no means won.
When I looked at the index of names, I was appalled that even out of this tiny number of women, I had only heard of a handful of them. (Mind you, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have heard of most of the 1558 men either. It occurred to me that, since this book runs to 290 pages, if a similar book was to be written about The Men of the Moon, it would come in at approximately 16,000 pages. Whew! I’m glad I wasn’t reading that one!)
The entries are in chronological order, starting with the mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria in the 4th century and ending with Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to go into space, and the only one who’s still alive. Hypatia is an outlier – most of the women are from what we think of as the modern era, from the eighteenth century on. The cumulative effect is to give a broad outline of the history of women in science and education generally, from the days when they weren’t allowed into universities and couldn’t get paid positions even after they had self-educated themselves, through to now, when at last women are being actively encouraged to enter scientific careers.
As well as gender, there is also a major geographical disparity in the namings. While I’m proud that three of the women were Scots, by birth at least, and there are other Europeans and Russians, the majority are either American or carried out much of their work in America. There are obvious reasons for this in the past, both in that, hard though it was for women to participate in science in those regions, it was still easier than in much of the world, and, of course, Americans and Europeans controlled the naming conventions for most of the period. Hopefully, now that the science community values international co-operation more and as more of the world allows women to participate fully in science, this will be reflected in future namings.
The authors give each woman an individual chapter, and these vary in length depending on the extent of the woman’s scientific contribution and/or on how much is known of her personal circumstances. They write extremely well, explaining the science parts with enough simplicity and clarity for a non-scientist to grasp at least the relevance and importance of it, and recounting the life stories of these remarkable women with warmth and admiration, not just for their work but for the obstacles they had to overcome to be taken seriously in this male dominated field. Not all of them were practical scientists, indeed; some were communicators, who took academic science papers and turned them into books and lectures that could be understood by and inspire the layperson (think Neil deGrasse Tyson or Brian Cox – tragically I can’t think of a modern woman who’s at the forefront in that role...?), while others “bought” their craters by providing much-needed funding for scientific projects or institutions.
Several of the women worked with their husbands or in partnership with male scientists, and the authors point out that, in many cases, the men would win prestigious prizes while the women barely got a mention even when the woman was clearly the more brilliant of the two. But they also tell of some of the men who did recognise the worth of women in the scientific world, though often in the tedious jobs men didn’t want to do, or because women could be paid considerably less, if at all. Nonetheless, intentionally or otherwise, these men provided a narrow gateway that some women were able to push wide open by their own efforts.
The convention is that craters are only named for people after their deaths (Tereshkova is an exception). This has the effect that amongst the most recent women are those astronauts who died in the Challenger and Columbia disasters. These chapters are sensitively handled, never veering into the sensationalist or the mawkish. Of course, I knew these stories already in their broad outlines, but I found learning about the individual women – their enthusiasm, their courage, their dreams – a moving and fitting way to bring the book to its conclusion.
An excellent book that I heartily recommend to all, but think would be especially great to give as a gift to a teenage girl who’s interested in a career in science – she’ll find it inspirational, I’m certain. Alternatively, the next time you meet someone who says science isn’t really a suitable career for a woman, you could use it to bash him over the head with... ah! Now I wish I had that 16,000-page men’s book after all.
NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Oxford University Press.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
July 6, 2019
At the time this book was written, there were 1,586 craters on the Moon that had been named after scientists and philosophers - but only 28 of these were women. The idea, then, was to use this linking theme to provide short biographies of each of the 28 women, along with a picture of their crater. Like all high concept books, there's a danger that the idea might be stronger than the actual content - after all, by biography number 28, the reader might be feeling a little dazed - but I'm really glad I gave it a try.
After a tweely titled 'Pretext', the book gives us a solid introduction to where the Moon came from, its craters and a brief history of lunar astronomy. This is written with a light touch and works at just the right level of detail. We then get onto our 28 mini-biographies. Inevitably, some of the individuals well-known. So we get names like Marie Curie, Caroline Herschel, Mary Somerville, Annie Cannon, Henrietta Leavitt, Lise Meitner and Emmy Noether - along with the four female astronauts who died in the shuttle disasters. But what's most interesting is the less familiar women.
Certainly for me, names such as Nicole-Reine de la Briere Lepaute, Anne Sheepshanks, Catherine Bruce, Mary Blagg and others were totally unknown. I was particularly fascinated by Blagg who did her astronomical work not at some great observatory, but in Cheadle in Cheshire. The range of figures was impressive - from the classical Hypatia (and rather bizarrely St Catherine, who the authors suggest might be the same person) to the Harvard calculators, from scientific benefactors to Nobel Prize winners. I'll be honest, by the end I was flagging a little and skipped some of the subjects I already knew well, but the rest were excellent.
There were a few small issues. It's disappointing that an Oxford University Press book should be written in US English, use American domestic units of measurement and refer to 'Cambridge, England' to distinguish it from the 'real' Cambridge in Massachusetts. Sometimes I felt that the history didn't provide the kind of explanation of uncertainty I'd expect from good science writing - for instance, we were told as if it were fact that the Library at Alexandra held almost a million volumes, but as far as I'm aware, the catalogue is lost and current best estimates range from 40,000 to 400,000 books. There were also some editing issues. The word 'Earth', referring to the planet, for example, was inconsistently capitalised. More significantly, this was a translation and doesn't seem to have been properly edited in English as, for example, Maskelyne is given the job title 'royal astronomer' rather than 'astronomer royal' and Herschel is said to have moved nearer 'Windsor palace' rather than 'Windsor Castle'.
Apparently in the five years since the book was first written, another three women have had craters named after them. The authors mention a hope to update the book - but I think any more biographies would be in danger of turning Women of the Moon into a reference volume - I'd much rather it stayed as it is, a readable and enjoyable title.
After a tweely titled 'Pretext', the book gives us a solid introduction to where the Moon came from, its craters and a brief history of lunar astronomy. This is written with a light touch and works at just the right level of detail. We then get onto our 28 mini-biographies. Inevitably, some of the individuals well-known. So we get names like Marie Curie, Caroline Herschel, Mary Somerville, Annie Cannon, Henrietta Leavitt, Lise Meitner and Emmy Noether - along with the four female astronauts who died in the shuttle disasters. But what's most interesting is the less familiar women.
Certainly for me, names such as Nicole-Reine de la Briere Lepaute, Anne Sheepshanks, Catherine Bruce, Mary Blagg and others were totally unknown. I was particularly fascinated by Blagg who did her astronomical work not at some great observatory, but in Cheadle in Cheshire. The range of figures was impressive - from the classical Hypatia (and rather bizarrely St Catherine, who the authors suggest might be the same person) to the Harvard calculators, from scientific benefactors to Nobel Prize winners. I'll be honest, by the end I was flagging a little and skipped some of the subjects I already knew well, but the rest were excellent.
There were a few small issues. It's disappointing that an Oxford University Press book should be written in US English, use American domestic units of measurement and refer to 'Cambridge, England' to distinguish it from the 'real' Cambridge in Massachusetts. Sometimes I felt that the history didn't provide the kind of explanation of uncertainty I'd expect from good science writing - for instance, we were told as if it were fact that the Library at Alexandra held almost a million volumes, but as far as I'm aware, the catalogue is lost and current best estimates range from 40,000 to 400,000 books. There were also some editing issues. The word 'Earth', referring to the planet, for example, was inconsistently capitalised. More significantly, this was a translation and doesn't seem to have been properly edited in English as, for example, Maskelyne is given the job title 'royal astronomer' rather than 'astronomer royal' and Herschel is said to have moved nearer 'Windsor palace' rather than 'Windsor Castle'.
Apparently in the five years since the book was first written, another three women have had craters named after them. The authors mention a hope to update the book - but I think any more biographies would be in danger of turning Women of the Moon into a reference volume - I'd much rather it stayed as it is, a readable and enjoyable title.
September 6, 2022
*4.5, There is no better combo than an interesting, unique premise and solid execution
December 13, 2024
The individual biographies are kept short and interesting yet are long enough to give the reader a good overview of the life of each of the 28 women of the moon. Some of these women are well known, a lot of them unfortunately are not.
The more scientific parts regarding the achievements of some of the women are explained in a way that someone who's not familiar with e.g. stellar classification, Noether's theorem, Cori cycle, etc, is still able to understand them and their significance.
The authors, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, comments are quite entertaining too. All in all an excellent book.
The more scientific parts regarding the achievements of some of the women are explained in a way that someone who's not familiar with e.g. stellar classification, Noether's theorem, Cori cycle, etc, is still able to understand them and their significance.
The authors, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, comments are quite entertaining too. All in all an excellent book.
November 15, 2019
‘The Women of the Moon: Tales of Science, Love, Sorrow, and Courage’ by Daniel R. Altschuler and Fernando J. Ballesteros was originally published in Spanish in 2017 and published in English by the Oxford University Press in 2019.
The shocking information presented by the authors of this book is that at the time of its publication of the 1586 craters on the moon named for scientists and philosophers - only 28 of these were named for women.
‘The Women of the Moon’ opens with a section on understanding the Moon followed by one on Lunar Nomenclature. The remainder of the book is dedicated to short biographies of these 28 women in chronological order beginning with Hypatia of Alexandria. I admit to only recognising a few names and so this proved quite an educational journey.
As expected from the OUP, this is a scholarly work though it was still quite accessible. I felt it was more suited to dipping into rather than reading from cover to cover. The authors state that future editions will contain extra chapters to reflect names of women who have been since added to the list.
I did have some issues with the size of the print. Even though the font was sharp its size in the print edition was very tiny and resulted in some eye strain.
A book that I would have loved to read when I was discovering my love of science and that I am certain would prove an inspirational gift for young women to increase their appreciation of women who have worked in these fields.
The shocking information presented by the authors of this book is that at the time of its publication of the 1586 craters on the moon named for scientists and philosophers - only 28 of these were named for women.
‘The Women of the Moon’ opens with a section on understanding the Moon followed by one on Lunar Nomenclature. The remainder of the book is dedicated to short biographies of these 28 women in chronological order beginning with Hypatia of Alexandria. I admit to only recognising a few names and so this proved quite an educational journey.
As expected from the OUP, this is a scholarly work though it was still quite accessible. I felt it was more suited to dipping into rather than reading from cover to cover. The authors state that future editions will contain extra chapters to reflect names of women who have been since added to the list.
I did have some issues with the size of the print. Even though the font was sharp its size in the print edition was very tiny and resulted in some eye strain.
A book that I would have loved to read when I was discovering my love of science and that I am certain would prove an inspirational gift for young women to increase their appreciation of women who have worked in these fields.
November 13, 2020
The stories of the women who have craters on the moon named after them were fascinating, and I had never heard of most of them, only Madame Curie and the women astr0nauts. History of the study of the moon was also very interesting. Some of the science was beyond my pay grade.
July 6, 2023
I loved this book so much I have gone back to reread it and take notes this time before I return it to the library. One day I think I will get my own copy too as I enjoyed it so much. I am not a science person so I did struggle a little bit with some of the explanations about space and mathematics, but the authors do a great job of explaining them nonetheless! Before reading this book, I had only heard of one of these women (Marie Curie), so it was amazing to hear all of these women’s stories and their brilliant (and underrated!) contributions to science and discovery. I hope this book reaches educators around the world so the next generation can grow up knowing about these women firsthand alongside the famous male scientists. 👏🏻
September 8, 2019
This was 100% a title pick for me, and it's a great title. Somehow I thought it was fictional short stories based on the title, but it's actually nonfiction mini-biographies. I loved the concept, but I thought the biographies were extremely dry and that made them feel too long although there is no doubt the women deserved them.
September 5, 2021
I absolutely LOVED this. I love reading about space, but I love reading about women scientists combined with space even more. Even though I am not surprised that there are only 28 craters named after women, it's good to know more about these awesome and interesting women. I am going to find a more detailed book about my favourite of the 28 asap: Hypatia of Alexandria.
March 22, 2023
Read this to find out more about Nicole-Reine Lepaute nee' Etable so I could do a better job doing presentations on 'Women in Science' for the Girl Scouts. First of all, thank you Ball State University for lending this book through Inter-Library loan. It was a very easy book to read, running from about 17 to 22 years old reading level.
November 7, 2022
I especially enjoyed reading about the 4 women of the moon that lost their lives on board the Challenger and Columbia space shuttles. They are my American heroes.
December 6, 2019
Educational, insightful, and entertaining. I enjoyed learning about the 28 women honored with lunar craters and wondering, as do the authors, why there aren't more. . . (cough, cough, Joliot-Curie)
November 24, 2021
PopSugar 2021: A book that has fewer than 1,000 reviews on Amazon or Goodreads
June 13, 2021
Well written stories of a variety of women. Many were mathematicians or astronomers, but not all. Interesting to see the dynamics of father-daughter and husband-wife. Cheered for the supporters and the women who pursued their interests.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews