Growing up in “Bloody Kansas” before the Civil War, young Mary E. Byrd (A.B. 1878) watched as her father, a Congregationalist minister, spoke fervently against the evils of slavery. She witnessed the painful injuries he suffered when slavery supporters attacked him. He endured boot kicks to the body, thumbs jammed into his eyes, and a two-week kidnapping by men who hated his demands to free enslaved African Americans.
The Rev. John Byrd never backed down. His daughter learned the importance of a principled stand.
Mary Byrd enrolled at U-M in 1876 as a 26-year-old junior following studies at Oberlin College and time spent as a teacher. She enjoyed exploring mathematics and astronomy with Professor James C. Watson (A.B. 1857), director of the Detroit Observatory. But she disliked the atmosphere on campus, then in its first decade of admitting women.
“The professors themselves, so far as I knew personally, were always courteous and considerate. The professors’ wives, the president’s wife, could hardly do enough for the boys; to the girls, I never knew of their extending any courtesy,” Byrd wrote years later. She and her female classmates didn’t care much, though—“we were rather an earnest and self-reliant group.”
Byrd found a strong advocate for women scientists in Professor Edward C. Pickering at the Harvard College Observatory, where she worked for several years. In 1887, Smith College recruited her to be the first director of its new observatory. She was known as an influential teacher, with rigid moral standards, who believed in hands-on training for her astronomy students.
Byrd was a one-woman operation at Smith, writing a textbook while teaching classes, conducting research, penning journal articles, and managing the observatory. Her days began at 8 a.m. and went well into the night for studying the skies.
“May I beg you,” she wrote to administrators, “to consider how short, under such circumstances, must inevitably be the time during which a teacher can keep fresh springs of inspiration for her students.” She received help eight years into the job when Smith hired one of Byrd’s students, Harriet W. Bigelow, who would earn a U-M doctorate in astronomy in 1904.
As much as she enjoyed teaching, Byrd was distressed by Smith’s increasing reliance on outside financial support. When the college accepted donations in 1906 from industrialists John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, she quit. The gifts, she said, were “tainted money” from men “whose business scheme involves disowning truth and justice and driving their neighbors to the wall.” Her resignation after 19 years of directing the observatory made national headlines.
“It seems to me that colleges and churches are accepting money that is in the nature of hush money that tends to subsidize brain and conscience,” she said. “Especially is this true when such money is accepted with public laudation of the giver.”
Byrd taught briefly in New York City and then retired to gardening. She died in 1934 at age 84 in Lawrence, Kansas, where her father had held firm to his convictions.
