Appointed Head of Stellar Photometry at Harvard College Observatory

On May 20, 1921, Henrietta Swan Leavitt was formally named Head of Stellar Photometry at the Harvard College Observatory under the directorship of Harlow Shapley, who had recently succeeded Edward Pickering. This appointment formally recognized the leadership role Leavitt had effectively held for years in overseeing the meticulous photographic measurement of stellar magnitudes across the observatory's vast photographic plate collection.

Throughout her career, Leavitt had developed and refined the "Harvard Standard," a photographic photometric sequence used to measure the brightness of stars with unprecedented consistency, work that was adopted internationally by astronomers as a standardized reference. Her appointment to this formal leadership position, though coming late in her career and life, represented a rare acknowledgment of a woman's technical authority within the male-dominated field of astrophysics in the early twentieth century.

Unfortunately, Leavitt would have little time to fully exercise this authority; she died just seven months later, in December 1921, from cancer. Nonetheless, this appointment stands as a marker of the respect and recognition she had earned among her peers despite decades spent in the underpaid, undervalued role of "computer" typical for women scientists of the era. It also reflects a broader, slow shift in Harvard Observatory's institutional culture toward acknowledging the substantial scientific contributions of its female staff.