Mary Agnes Chase

Image from Smithsonian institute from Wikimedia Commons (Creative Commons)

Mary Agnes Chase was best known for being a grass specialist worked as a botanical illustrator. Illustration was one of the few ways that women were able to enter science at that time as a woman. Chase also around the same time was involved in the suffrage movement and other political movements pushing for women’s rights. This was met with resistance from the USDA who threatened to kick her out of her illustrator position. One main reason why she was not kicked out was because of how exceptional of a scientist she was. Despite these threats, Chase pushed for more women to get involved into botany, and she also continued to train women botanists. She is also known for surveying grasses in Southern Brazil and later in her life, at around 70 she was hired to survey grasses in Venezuela and advised the government based on that survey.. Her deep interest in grasses came from the fact that she believed that they are what hold the world together.

One thing that I found interesting about Chase’s story was that she grew up in a time where for example, when it came to field work, women often wouldn’t get funding to carry out research in the States. So Agnes’s solution to this was to fund it herself (with help from her connections in the women’s groups she was involved in). In my view, it is because of people like Mary Agnes Chase that we now have more ecologists and botanists in North America. If she and others who had paved the way had given up, it would have been less likely that someone like Rachel Carson 50 years later would get the recognition she did for her work. It would have also made the path to science degree more difficult for all the female botanists and (plant, insect and animal) ecology professors and students that we have in North American universities.

If you would like to learn more, here are the links I used to write my blog: