HISTORICAL CHALLENGES FOR WOMEN MAKING GEOLOGICAL MAPS, AND THE LEGACY OF FLORENCE BASCOM

You might be surprised that GSA’s award for geological mapping is named for a woman – Florence Bascom (1862-1945). After all, to be able to make a geological map typically requires field training and of course field work­, and in various ways, women have been excluded or discouraged from such activities--in some cases until quite recently. For example, Stanford did not admit women to their summer geology field course until 1964. Women were commonly excluded from the field due to social mores and gender expectations. Thus, one of the most historically important maps in Earth sciences, which was made by a woman, used remotely sensed data. Marie Tharp (1920-2006) employed sounding data collected on ships, from which she was excluded, as well as mapped earthquake locations, to connect the dots and bathymetric profiles in the North Atlantic to produce a map of the ocean floor (1957).

Despite the odds, however, in the early 20^th century in the U.S., there was a notable group of women doing field work and producing original geological maps at a research level. Most of these women were trained by Florence Bascom (1862-1945) in her graduate program at Bryn Mawr College, and many went on to their own distinguished careers. Their Ph.D. dissertations typically consisted of making and interpreting an original geological map--a practice common at least into the 1960s for many geology Ph.D.’s. Most of Bascom’s students focused on petrology and structure of the central to northern Appalachians and the Appalachian Piedmont, to which she and her students made fundamental contributions. The group’s distinguished work extended to bedrock geology in Scandinavia, as well as to glacial geology, paleontology, crystallography and geochemistry.

That Bascom’s protegees came to be field mappers emerged from highly unusual circumstances. Bascom herself was originally trained in field mapping by George Huntington Williams (1856-1894) for her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University, which did not admit women to their Ph.D. program. Her earlier geology degrees at Wisconsin did not include field work, and her situation at JHU was extra-ordinary. The next notable influxes of women field geologists in the U.S. would come primarily from strategic needs during the first and second world wars, and would be focused on military and petroleum geology.