Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin - Early Life

Early Life

Cecilia Helena Payne was one of three children born in Wendover, England to Emma Leonora Helena (nee Pertz) and Edward John Payne, a London barrister, historian and accomplished musician. Her mother came of a Prussian family and had two distinguished uncles, historian Georg Heinrich Pertz and the Swedenborgian writer James John Garth Wilkinson. Cecilia Payne's father died when she was four years old, forcing her mother to raise the family on her own.

She attended St Paul's Girls' School. In 1919, she won a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge University, where she read botany, physics, and chemistry. Here, she attended a lecture by Arthur Eddington on his 1919 expedition to the island of Principe in the Gulf of Guinea off the west coast of Africa to observe and photograph the stars near a solar eclipse as a test of Einstein's general theory of relativity. This sparked her interest in astronomy. She completed her studies, but was not awarded a degree because of her sex; Cambridge did not grant degrees to women until 1948.

Cecilia Payne realized that her only career option in the U.K. was to become a teacher, so she looked for grants that would enable her to move to the United States. After meeting Harlow Shapley, the Director of the Harvard College Observatory, who had just begun a graduate program in astronomy, she left England in 1923. This was made possible by a fellowship to encourage women to study at the Observatory. The first student on the fellowship was Adelaide Ames (1922) and the second was Payne.