A Great Astronomer and Pulsars - The Story of Jocelyn Bell Burnell
“Presumptions about a woman’s role in society”
Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a great radio astronomer, was born in 1943 in Northern Ireland. Bell Burnell has a clear memory, when she was a child, about the reactions of the domestic helpers (staff) in her home when her younger brother was born. She heard the nannies say, “Isn’t it great that Mrs. Bell has a son now?” While her parents were loving and supportive and made no distinction between their son and Bell Burnell and her two sisters, Bell Burnell clearly felt the prejudice against women from an early age.
Bell Burnell’s mother had not gone to school because Bell Burnell’s maternal grandparents had limited means and decided to educate her mother’s younger brother and not her mother. Bell Burnell says that her mother was, therefore, “very keen that her three girls should have equal education to their brother.”
At age 11, Bell Burnell remembers going to a new school where “all the girls were to go to the domestic science room (cookery and needlework), and all the boys were to go to the science lab. And I was a bit puzzled by this. After about twenty minutes in this first domestic science class, I said to the teacher, ‘I think I’m in the wrong place.’ And so did two other girls, and three of us moved…
