‘The auditors of their discourses, the readers of their treatises, were men’: questions of gender and audience in Agnes Clerke’s astronomy publications

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, British and Irish women interested in astronomical work faced limited options, generally restricted to the roles of human computers in observatories or assistants on eclipse expeditions. Agnes Clerke (1842–1907) nonetheless navigated a successful career as a writer of popular-astronomy books, including her most famous work, A Popular History of Astronomy during the Nineteenth Century (1885). Women are notably absent in Clerke’s Popular History , a marked contrast to a 1901 article titled ‘Women in science’ that she published in the Victorian women’s periodical The Gentlewoman . Clerke’s article celebrates women’s contributions to astronomy while articulating obstacles to their participation. Both the presentation of Clerke’s professional achievements in women’s periodicals and her representation of women in astronomy in The Gentlewoman demonstrate that the Victorian women’s periodical provided an outlet for discussion of the gendered barriers that women faced in the field of astronomy, which are absent from Clerk’s mainstream Popular History .