The Women Who Mapped the Stars is a new work by Joyce Van Dyke, a rising dramatist with several awards to her credit. Her three previously produced plays also focus on women’s lives. When The Woman Who Mapped the Stars opened at the Central Square Theatre in Cambridge, her fifth piece premiered in New York.

The play tells the story of five of the women “computers” who worked at the Harvard Observatory beginning in the late nineteenth century. This was a period in which great strides were being made in astronomy with the aid of better telescopes and the invention of the camera. Professor Edward Charles Pickering who headed the observatory without sufficient funding decided he needed more help in collecting data, i.e. to study the photographic plates and compute the properties of the stars. In order to save money, he hired his maid, Williamina Fleming (Becca A. Lewis), a hard-working Scottish woman. Since she proved herself capable of dealing with the “boring” side of the work, he decided to employ more women, paying them half the salary a man would earn for the same task. …

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