Empowered women empower (all) women.

Digital illustration of two women. On the left is a brown woman with a bob haircut with her back turned. She’s smiling with her hand on her hip. She’s wearing a dress with different heart characters printed on it with a green sweater vest. Her sweater reads, ‘empowered women empower women.’ On the right is a Latina woman with blonde hair who is looking at you. She is wearing a glittery star-print bodysuit and pink ombré jeans. In her back pocket is a trans flag.

March is Women’s History Month-Suffragette Inez Milholland

An angel on a white horse with black hair, when Inez Milholland rode into history, as the most daring and effective voices of the women’s suffragette movement in the early 1900s, she invoked the image of a Joan of Arc going into battle. Both a socialist and socialite of her era, Milholland became a martyr for the movement, when she died from illness while campaigning for the right to vote in the West.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, on August 6, 1886, Inez grew up in a wealthy household where the fight for human rights was always at the forefront. Her father, John Milholland, was a newspaper writer, as well as a progressive reformer and one of the founders of the NAACP. He remained an avid supporter of his daughter’s activism throughout her life.

Like many socialites of her time, Inez attended finishing school in London and went on to attend Vassar College, where she exceeded expectations not only with her great oratory skills, but in athletics as well. She played basketball, field hockey, and was a member of the 1909 girls track team

A radical activist at college, she introduced the suffrage movement there as well, enrolling students for the cause, even though the college had forbidden it. She went on to receive a law degree from New York University and then joined her first law firm.

It was at the March 3, 1913, Women Suffrage Procession in Washington, D.C., that gave Inez the title of “the most beautiful suffragette.” Wearing a white cape and riding on a white horse, it was this image of a women fighting for the right to vote that managed to sway the opinion of many men in favor of the suffrage movement.

Described as woman with “a spirit like lighting who complicated gender expectations of brains and beauty”, Inez once said ‘women need not play the game of politics.” Her ability to convince her male counterparts that women could have the right to vote, without completely losing their feminity, was part of her success as a spokesperson for the movement.

During the fall of 1916, Inez collapsed while giving a speech in Los Angeles. Suffering from pernicious anemia, she died on November 25, 1916, at the age of thirty. Her last words spoken publicly were, “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty.”

[ID: a black and white photo of a young woman in professional clothing. She holds her glasses and sits at a desk.]

Clare Luce Booth. She left the Women’s Lobby in 1978 after they gave their support for abortion. After serving in Congress, she would go on to become an ambassador.

lotto march

Cosmic Alphabet Soup: Classifying Stars

If you’ve spent much time stargazing, you may have noticed that while most stars look white, some are reddish or bluish. Their colors are more than just pretty – they tell us how hot the stars are. Studying their light in greater detail can tell us even more about what they’re like, including whether they have planets. Two women, Williamina Fleming and Annie Jump Cannon, created the system for classifying stars that we use today, and we’re building on their work to map out the universe.

By splitting starlight into spectra – detailed color patterns that often feature lots of dark lines – using a prism, astronomers can figure out a star’s temperature, how long it will burn, how massive it is, and even how big its habitable zone is. Our Sun’s spectrum looks like this:

Astronomers use spectra to categorize stars. Starting at the hottest and most massive, the star classes are O, B, A, F, G (like our Sun), K, M. Sounds like cosmic alphabet soup! But the letters aren’t just random – they largely stem from the work of two famous female astronomers.

Williamina Fleming, who worked as one of the famous “human computers” at the Harvard College Observatory starting in 1879, came up with a way to classify stars into 17 different types (categorized alphabetically A-Q) based on how strong the dark lines in their spectra were. She eventually classified more than 10,000 stars and discovered hundreds of cosmic objects!

That was back before they knew what caused the dark lines in spectra. Soon astronomers discovered that they’re linked to a star’s temperature. Using this newfound knowledge, Annie Jump Cannon – one of Fleming’s protégés – rearranged and simplified stellar classification to include just seven categories (O, B, A, F, G, K, M), ordered from highest to lowest temperature. She also classified more than 350,000 stars!

Type O stars are both the hottest and most massive in the new classification system. These giants can be a thousand times bigger than the Sun! Their lifespans are also around 1,000 times shorter than our Sun’s. They burn through their fuel so fast that they only live for around 10 million years. That’s part of the reason they only make up a tiny fraction of all the stars in the galaxy – they don’t stick around for very long.

As we move down the list from O to M, stars become progressively smaller, cooler, redder, and more common. Their habitable zones also shrink because the stars aren’t putting out as much energy. The plus side is that the tiniest stars can live for a reallylong time – around 100 billion years – because they burn through their fuel so slowly.

Astronomers can also learn about exoplanets – worlds that orbit other stars – by studying starlight. When a planet crosses in front of its host star, different kinds of molecules in the planet’s atmosphere absorb certain wavelengths of light.

By spreading the star’s light into a spectrum, astronomers can see which wavelengths have been absorbed to determine the exoplanet atmosphere’s chemical makeup. Our James Webb Space Telescope will use this method to try to find and study atmospheres around Earth-sized exoplanets – something that has never been done before.

Our upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will study the spectra from entire galaxies to build a 3D map of the cosmos. As light travels through our expanding universe, it stretches and its spectral lines shift toward longer, redder wavelengths. The longer light travels before reaching us, the redder it becomes. Roman will be able to see so far back that we could glimpse some of the first stars and galaxies that ever formed.

Learn more about how Roman will study the cosmos in our other posts:

• Roman’s Family Portrait of Millions of Galaxies
• New Rose-Colored Glasses for Roman
• How Gravity Warps Light

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