Isabella Cintron

Isabella Cintron plays astronomer Antonia Maury in The Women Who Mapped the Stars. Her character is the voice of women’s rights not just in astronomy, but in society at large in the early 1900s. This was a epoch during which few women went to college or worked outside the home. Those who did made less than half of what their male counterparts were paid. That didn’t sit well with Antonia Maury, who says at one point during the play, “it’s barbaric. In 1999, yes, mark my words, in 1999, the women will be paid what men are paid, and everyone will look back at us appalled.”

Antonia Maury goes on to say that she wants “to live long enough to see equal pay for women.” Sadly, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research concludes that she would have had to live until 2059 to see that happen. That’s the earliest the Institute projects we’ll finally achieve gender pay equity. [In 2022, women still earned only 82 cents for every dollar a man makes, with Black and Hispanic women making just 56 cents for every dollar that white, non-Hispanic men earn. A 20-year-old woman just starting full-time, year-round work stands to be paid $407,760 less over a 40-year career than her male counterparts.]

At another point in docudrama, Cintron’s character urges her colleagues to take off their “mental corsets.” Maury not only looked forward to the day when women would have the franchise, but would be taken seriously in both the arts and sciences, ‘publishing their discoveries and other finding under their own name and no longer growing up wishing they’d been born a boy.

Isabella’s community theater credits include the role of the girl in Sanctuary City for Theatre Conspiracy at the Alliance for the Arts (2023).

February 13, 2024.