Born: 1696, Germany
Died: 6 May 1782
Country most active: Germany
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
Although thirty years younger than her husband, astronomer Maria Margaretha Kirch was a valuable collaborator, who earned acclaim with her writing on the conjunction of the sun with Saturn, Venus, and Jupiter. After her husband’s death in 1710, Maria petitioned to take over his role as the Royal Academy of Science’s astronomer and calendar maker, noting that “for some time, while my dear departed husband was weak and ill, I prepared the calendar from his calculations and published it under his name.” She also made clear that she needed the income to support herself and her children, as her husband had left her little financial support. There was a well-established precedent of widows assuming their dead husband’s trade, as would be later seen in the election and appointment of political widows to fill their spouses’ seats. Women also made up around fourteen percent of astronomers at the time, but as noted elsewhere, were routinely excluded from professional organisations. But although the academy’s president supported her and she had worked at the academy for a decade under her husband, the executive council rejected her proposal to fill a formal position because “what we concede to her could serve as an example in the future… If she were now to be kept on in such a capacity, mouths would gape even wider.” Instead, they appointed the inexperienced Johann Heinrich Hoffmann, who soon fell behind on the work and failed to make required observations—it was suggested that Kirch become his assistant. She wrote, “Now I go through a severe desert, and because… water is scarce… the taste is bitter.”
The following year, Kirch published an acclaimed pamphlet in which she predicted a new comet, followed by a paper about Jupiter and Saturn. In 1712, she secured the patronage of Bernhard Friedrich von Krosig and returned to working in his observatory, where she had previously worked with her husband, and achieved the rank of master astronomer. She had trained her children in astronomy, and following the death of the incompetent Hoffmann in 1716, her son Christfried was appointed an observer at the Royal Academy of Science observatory. Kirch and her daughter Christine joined him as assistants, though (male) academy members complained she was “too visible at the observatory when strangers visit,” and took too prominent a role in the operations of the observatory. Kirch was ordered to “retire to the background and leave the talking to… her son.” She chose to retire the following year, but the Academy requested she continue to reside nearby so that Christfried could still dine at home without neglecting his duties.
Christine was not paid for her own decades of work assisting Christfried. It was only after his death in 1740 that the academy began paying her for calculating calendars, a major source of income for the organisation.