sweet auburn | winter 2025-2026 else, or some of the men to do my work, in order to have him find out what he is getting for $ 1,500 a year from me compared with $ 2,500 from some of the other assistants. Does he ever think that I have a home to keep and a family to take care of, as well as the men? But I suppose a woman has no claim to such comforts. And this is considered an enlightened age!” 20
Fleming fell ill between March 22 and 31, 1900, while writing the diary. 21 She blamed the combination of Observatory work and the housework that consumed her days off, which she did“ not wonder that at-last I had to give up.” 22
This same diary reveals that Fleming was a skilled photographer herself. Included with her writing are two photographic prints of the interior of her house on Upland Road. These are accompanied by two cyanotype prints, one of the Observatory and the other a portrait of a man.
We know from other archival materials that Fleming and other women computers were actively involved in photography. An illuminating artifact in the Harvard collections is a notebook labeled,“ Accounts of the Share-Holders of the Camera” from April 1892 to December 1896. 23 Fleming, with eight other women astronomical computers, bought a camera to share for $ 29, a sum equivalent to a week’ s salary for Fleming. The group kept track of the number of negatives that each of them used and their costs. Fleming is recorded as having purchased 180 negatives for her use in one year. 24 Astronomer Annie Jump Cannon, too, was an accomplished photographer. Before she began working at the Observatory, Cannon traveled across Europe to photograph historic sites in Spain and Italy connected to Christopher Columbus, which the Blair Camera Company published as an advertisement souvenir booklet for the Chicago World’ s Fair. 25
In 1910, the last year of Fleming’ s life, she participated in the Fourth Conference of the International Union for Cooperation in Solar Research, held at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California. The conference directly followed the Astronomical and Astrophysical Society of America meeting, at which many of her female colleagues presented their research. Aboard a privately chartered train rolling back and forth across the expanse of the United States, many of the greatest minds in astronomy discussed stellar spectra and their classification, building consensus on the acceptance of the Draper
Left: Parlor showing dining room through open door at 273 Upland Road. Harvard University Archives Chest of 1900, 1899-1900. HUA 900.13.
Below: Cabinet card from the diary of Williamina Fleming, March 1900( front and back).
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