Tag: Pioneering Women in the Geosciences
The Standing of the Stones Spring ’22 Edition
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Yeah, it has been a long time since I wrote something substantial, hasn’t it? Even Women’s History Month passed without a peep. Both work and my poor teeth exploded, so it’s been a few months of ending up too drained to word properly while I take care of those matters. Thank you so much for sticking with me regardless. It’s about to get good and earth sciency around here.
I haven’t been completely idle: I’ve been researching Marguerite Thomas Williams, the first African American to earn a PhD in geology. Dozens of articles are out there about her. Precisely none contain any of her words. They list off the same few facts, mostly, which tell us some important and interesting things about her, but don’t give her a living memory. She feels remote, removed, like we’re viewing a damaged newsreel from the back of a theater with a moth-eaten screen and a failing projector. Some of the facts given are there to try to illustrate how unique she was, but they’re wrong: she wasn’t born in the Reconstruction era, in fact was nearly twenty years too late. Even the photo many use to portray her isn’t actually her.
Mary Horner Lyell: “A Monument of Patience”
You never hear of the other Lyell. Sir Charles, you know quite well: he set the infant science of geology firmly on its feet and inspired Charles Darwin. But there’s another Lyell who was a geologist, and without her, Charles Lyell would have found his work far more difficult, if not impossible. When he married Mary Horner, he pledged himself to a lifelong scientific partner.
Why don’t we know her?
Zonia Baber: “The Public May Be Brought to Understand the Importance of Geography”
Zonia Baber(1862-1955) is one of those people you aspire to be and fear you will never manage to become even half as good as. She was a legend.
I had no idea. I chose her as our first Pioneering Woman in Geology because of her name. I had this list of women I knew next to nothing about, and I hovered a finger over it, and said, “There. That’s an interesting name. Let’s start with her.” Then I found out she was a geographer, and thought, “Oh, dear.” A teacher, when I wanted women who worked in the field. Oh, no. An American when I’d hoped to start with a different country. Oh, bugger. But Mary Arizona “Zonia” Baber? Still couldn’t resist the name. So I read past the first sentence in the Wikipedia article, and promptly fell in love. Co-founded the Geographic Society of Chicago, which was modeled after the National Geographic society? Awesome! Involved in social issues? Brilliant! Feminist, even so! And then I found out that, in addition to the whole geography teacher thing, she’d got her start in geology. Perfect.
I don’t think Zonia understood the concept of “Women can’t do x.”
5 Favorite Facts about Mary Anning
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You know, I liked Mary Anning even before I read Shelley Emling’s book about her, but now I frankly adore her. Here’s five of the reasons why:
1. Everything male naturalists could do, she did in heavy skirts and pattens.
You know how Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire could do, only backwards and in high heels? That was basically Mary. She not only was a supremely talented fossil hunter, she had impediments the men didn’t have. She scrambled over incredibly challenging terrain in bulky skirts, wearing metal and wood contraptions over her shoes that, while handy for keeping one from sinking into mud, must have been a nightmare as far as balance and traction are concerned. She outran rogue waves, sudden storm tides, and actual bloody landslides in that gear.
The dudes would have died.