Coming Out of the Shadows: Women and Geology at Oxford, 1813-1914

Landmark histories of nineteenth-century geology have long been blind to the importance of women’s contributions to the discipline. Particularly, Roy Porter and Martin Rudwick’s hugely influential accounts have deliberately emphasised geology’s masculine culture at the expense of understanding how women shaped the theoretical developments they charted. This neglect has egregiously impoverished our understanding of the making of geological knowledge. Following recent feminist scholarship, this thesis addresses this consequential omission by asking two, key questions: How did women fit into the social fabric of nineteenth-century geology? What was the bearing of their work on the making of geological knowledge?

As a Collaborative Doctoral Project, this study is anchored in the collections of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH). Oxford remained a significant institutional locus for geology throughout the nineteenth century, and it also witnessed consistent activity from female geologists including Mary Buckland (1797-1857), Anne Phillips (1803-1862), Grace Prestwich (1832-1899), and Igerna Sollas (1877-1965). I suggest that this activity was characteristic of broader patterns of women’s changing participation in the nineteenth-century earth sciences. Locating the study at Oxford is therefore doubly fruitful, simultaneously illuminating OUMNH’s collections and the shifting patterns in women’s engagement with geology.

The two parts of this dissertation use Oxford’s collections to answer the questions outlined above in turn. Part I charts women’s changing roles in geology by probing familial relationships and professional opportunities. A pattern of increasingly formal participation emerges, which, perversely, reduced women’s capacity to participate in the discipline’s highest levels. Led by OUMNH’s collections, Part II then asserts that collecting, drawing, and writing – three frequently disregarded aspects of geological practice that women often undertook – were fundamental to the making of geological knowledge. Together, the parts build fragmentary evidence of women’s activities into a critical mass: nineteenth-century British geology relied on an unacknowledged female workforce.