Hidden HERstories | Priscilla Fairfield Bok

Priscilla Fairfield Bok
Boston University B.A. Class of 1918

Priscilla Fairfield Bok was an accomplished astronomer and researcher who graduated from Boston University with an A.B. degree in 1918. Fairfield would go on to earn her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley just three years later in 1921. She worked as a researcher at the University of California’s Lick Observatory and at Harvard University, as a professor at Smith College, Wellesley College, and at Connecticut College for Women. She married fellow astronomer Bart Bok, and the two formed a dedicated professional relationship publishing research and a very popular textbook titled “The Milky Way.” However, Fairfield Bok had to contend with her time’s attitudes towards women, particularly in how her husband’s career was able to progress quickly and her career was affected by child raising and a lack of proper recognition due to her gender. With their textbook and other efforts, Fairfield Bok and her husband had a significant impact in popularizing the Milky Way in the public mind, with the 1944 Boston Globe dubbing the pair the “Salesmen of the Milky Way”. Fairfield Bok died in 1975 at the age of 79.

Art Piece

loading slideshow...

Full Biography

Priscilla Fairfield Bok
Boston University B.A. Class of 1918

Priscilla Fairfield Bok (1896-1975) was an accomplished researcher, writer, professor, and astronomer in the twentieth century, who began her career and education at Boston University. She and her husband Bart Bok became some of the most prominent astronomers of their time.

Priscilla Fairfield was born in Littleton, Massachusetts in 1896 and went on to attend BU. There, she completed research at the Judson B. Coit Observatory. She published her findings, her first scientific paper, in 1916 before she graduated, titled “Observations of sunspots at Boston University” in Popular Astronomy. Her epigram in BU’s 1917 “The Hub” yearbook reveals her passion:

Ho! there goes our proctor on the run!
Why this flurry?
She’s discovering spots upon the sun.
That’s her hurry.

After finishing her undergraduate studies at BU, Fairfield studied toward her PhD for a mere three years and then graduated from UC Berkeley in 1921. She worked under astronomer William Wallace Campbell (1862-1938), future President of the University of California system, at the University’s Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton. The observatory had some of the best equipment and viewing conditions at the time, but research there included long, dark nights of monotonous observation, and heavy unwieldy equipment that was often difficult––and even dangerous––to use. There, she coauthored at least two publications with fellow astronomer Edith Eleanor Cummings Taylor and completed further work on her own.

Fairfield received work offers from the Lick Observatory and the University of California at Berkeley, but she chose to move to Smith College where she eventually became an associate professor after nine years of teaching, research, and service. While at Smith, she spent time researching at Harvard, where there was superior observatory equipment. Over those years, she primarily studied stellar astrometry, measuring motion in star systems. She also grew close to Harvard faculty member Harlow Shapley (1885-1972) with whom she would remain lifelong friends.

Shapley, Fairfield, and others attended the International Astronomical Union in Leiden between July 5 to 13, 1928, where Fairfield met her future life partner. Bart Bok, a 22-year-old Dutch graduate student, was a member of the IAU receiving committee and met Fairfield at the train station to welcome her. The two spent the duration of the following days together, and before she returned to the U.S., he proposed to her. Over the following year they corresponded, and in September Bok moved to Boston in part to marry Fairfield, a move he was able to make thanks to a scholarship at Harvard. There, Shapley helped get him a paid scholarship to continue his graduate studies, while Fairfield continued to work for Shapley as an unpaid researcher. Meanwhile, she continued to teach at women’s colleges in the area including Smith, then Wellesley College, and later Connecticut College for Women.

After meeting Bok in 1928, Fairfield’s career was impacted firstly by child rearing, and second by the direction of her husband’s career––both its substance and its location. She continued to teach during her children’s youth, but in those years she was unable to dedicate as much of her time to her research given those familial distractions. They had their son John in and then their daughter Joyce in the 1930s. While Fairfield maintained a balance of personal and professional life, her husband climbed the ranks at Harvard, defending his doctorate work in the same year as Joyce’s birth, and moving on to be an assistant professor. In their years living in Cambridge, Belmont, and Lexington, Bok was listed on the census as a “university professor” while Fairfield was a “college tutor”; apparently, she only worked for 26 weeks of the year as opposed to his 52.

After her children began high school, Fairfield was able to dedicate more time to her astronomical work. Yet the balance often remained disproportionate, with Fairfield remaining most responsible for their children. For example, during their time at Harvard the Boks had a chance to complete astronomical research in Africa. Yet, while they originally planned to remain there for eighteen months, Fairfield and Joyce returned to the U.S. at the end of 1950 so that Joyce could graduate from an American high school.

In the 1920s, Fairfield published several papers on comets and star motion. Later in her career, her work transformed as she and her husband mapped new areas of the Milky Way. In part, this led them to make the move to Australian National University in 1957, which gave them access to different astronomical observations in the Southern Hemisphere. Following those years in Australia, in 1966, the pair moved to Tucson, Arizona so Bok could work as professor at the University of Arizona and as director of their Steward Observatory.

One of Fairfield’s greatest accomplishments was a collaboration with her husband, the popular astronomy textbook The Milky Way (Harvard University Press, 1941), which they wrote in the years between 1937 and 1941, largely at their home in Lexington. It is notable that this was all unpaid work she didn’t list as part of her yearly 26 weeks on the census. The two split the chapters equally, writing four each. They published five editions of the book, and it was then translated into various other languages. It covered nearby stars, clusters, the galaxy’s motion, its nucleus, interstellar gas, dark nebulae and cosmic grains, and their brand new research on the Milky Way’s spiral structure. This important book was part of Fairfield’s lifelong passion for popularizing astronomy, and the Milky Way in particular. She and her husband gave numerous public lectures and published dozens of articles to expand public knowledge about the subject. Famously, in 1944, the Boston Globe dubbed the two the “Salesmen of the Milky Way.”

Toward the end of her life, Bok developed what was likely Alzheimer’s disease, and began losing her memory. However, even as her intellectual life changed, she continued to revise the fourth edition of The Milky Way, complete its index, and discuss the directions of her husband’s research. She also continued gardening, attending events, and even taught Bart how to cook. She died in 1975.

Priscilla’s legacy remains in the names of a telescope, a crater on the moon, an asteroid, and a star. The research she and Bart completed during their lengthy collaborative career endures as some of the most important twentieth-century work in the astronomy community.

Artist Statement

Artist statement to be added soon.