01-07-2025
Annie Walker's image is missing from Cambridge. There are so many people history does not see
What did Annie Walker look like? Had she been a man, her portrait would have graced the hallowed halls of Cambridge University and perhaps even the Royal Society. Yet, both during her lifetime and for decades after she died in 1940, one of the most significant figures in the history of astronomy was all but unknown. Walker, recently unearthed evidence confirms, was the first British woman paid to map the heavens. Now, the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge has appealed to readers of The Guardian in the UK and Australia for a picture of the forgotten scientist to correct a historical injustice.
Walker is not the only woman to be ignored by history. Rosalind Franklin did pioneering work with DNA, proposing the double helix model that is the foundation of modern genetics. Her contribution was ignored when the Nobel Prize for work on DNA was given in 1962. In literature, Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife of F Scott Fitzgerald, was demonised for decades, in no small part because of how Ernest Hemingway portrayed her in A Moveable Feast. She not only helped her husband write and edit but could do little as he plagiarised and plundered her private diary. For long, it was believed that Walker was a mere human calculator, helping men chart stars. In fact, she mapped and identified thousands of heavenly bodies.
Women, workers, those marginalised across human history — there are many whose portraits are lost. People know the architect, not the mason; they remember the 'gentleman' astronomer but not the miller's daughter who actually did the astronomy. Walker left after the Cambridge Observatory came to be headed by Robert Ball, who disapproved of women working. A science that looks at the infinite was hobbled by petty prejudice.
