The quiet workforce: the various roles of women in geological and natural history museums during the early to mid-1900s

Abstract

When examining the work of women in geology during the 18th and 19th centuries, one can broadly, and perhaps crudely, divide those women with geological interests into two broad groups: firstly, the geological wife, sister, or daughter, and the museum assistant; and secondly the museum user, the academic and the museum research scientist. It was not until the close of the 19th century that women began to have a role, albeit minor, in museum education. Women typically were employed in the major national or university museums as preparators, illustrators or assistants, and this trend continued until the 1930s. These women received little academic credit for their research as it was frequently incorporated into the publications of the men for whom they worked. Adelaide

Gender Representation in Molluscan Eponyms: Disparities and Legacy

“…Therefore, far fewer women than men influenced taxonomy and systematics as naturalists and 'advanced amateurs' in the 1800-1900s. When women did collections-related work in museums it was usually as artists and illustrators, assistants to curators, and specimen preparators; nearly all were unmarried and many were poorly paid or unpaid (Jackson and Jones 2007, Madsen-Brooks 2013, Byrne 2019. Married women working in natural history museums were often the wives of male curators and took unofficial museum positions as assistants and volunteers or were given titles but no pay (Jackson and Jones 2007).…”

“…When women did collections-related work in museums it was usually as artists and illustrators, assistants to curators, and specimen preparators; nearly all were unmarried and many were poorly paid or unpaid (Jackson and Jones 2007, Madsen-Brooks 2013, Byrne 2019. Married women working in natural history museums were often the wives of male curators and took unofficial museum positions as assistants and volunteers or were given titles but no pay (Jackson and Jones 2007). Both married and unmarried women were varyingly credited for their contributions to published research (Rossiter 1993, Pillon 2021.…”

Organizers of Museum History: Honoring the Labor of Librarians and Archivists in the Bureau of American Ethnology

“…In the 1920s and 1930s, women made inroads across the US and Europe as paid museum workers. Many started as secretaries and assistants; women also moved quickly into roles such as preparators, catalogers, and illustrators (Taylor 1994;Wyse Jackson and Jones 2007). In the early years of natural history museums, male curators often "published on the material that they or their female colleagues collected" (Wyse Jackson and Jones 2007, p. 99), while women "fulfilled men's directives, tidied up, and kept the records" (Taylor 1994, p. 12).…”

Slit-bearing gastropods in the Jane Longstaff Collection at the Natural History Museum, London from the Visean (Carboniferous) of Dalry, Ayrshire, Scotland

“…Jane Longstaff (née Mary Jane Donald) was one of the pioneering specialists on Paleozoic gastropods of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Creese and Creese, 1994; Wyse Jackson and Spencer Jones, 2007). She is best known for her work on Carboniferous gastropods, especially on Murchisoniidae (Donald, 1889, 1899, 1902, 1906; Longstaff, 1926), Loxonematidae (Donald, 1905a, b; Longstaff, 1909, 1933), Zygopleuridae, and Pleurotomariida (Longstaff, 1912), but also for her taxonomic work on Elizabeth Gray's lower Paleozoic gastropod collection (Longstaff, 1924; Cleevely et al, 1989).…”