The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed America's Early Science

The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed America’s Early Science

The Morris sisters made vital contributions to botany and entomology, but their stories have been erased from the early history of American science, either by the whim of fate or by design.

By Katie Hafner, Catherine McNeur, Michelle Nijhuis, and the Lost Women of Science Initiative

Keren Mevorach, credit: University of Delaware Libraries

In this episode of Lost Women of Science Conversations, Michelle Nijhuis tells historian Catherine McNeur how she discovered the life and paintings of Elizabeth Carrington Morris and Margaretta Hare Morris, two naturalists who made significant contributions to botany and entomology, respectively, in the mid-nineteenth century. Elizabeth collected rare plant species and sent them to establishments around the world. Not only did Margaretta discover new insects, but she also helped farmers combat the pests that were devastating their fields. Despite the contritions of these women, their achievements have been lost to history. McNeur tells us how this happened and how, piece by piece, he recovered their stories.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Catherine McNeur: But one thing that really stuck with me as I researched this ebook and wrote it was the joy that Margaretta and Elizabeth had, despite all the animosity that they faced, all the adversity that they faced. Hanging out together, often. They packed their lunches in vascular boxes and headed to Wissahickon Creek. And it was their ideal day, they just spent it outdoors looking for new specimens.

Katie Hafner: My calling is Katie Hafner. This is the time for our new series, Conversations about Lost Women in Science, in which we invite others who have discovered and celebrated women scientists in books, poetry, film, theater, and the visual arts to come and reach out to us. In this episode, host Michelle Nijhuis speaks with Catherine McNeur, writer of Mischievous Creatures, which tells the story of two remarkable sisters who worked quietly, and not so quietly, in Philadelphia in the mid-19th century. Over the decades, the Morris sisters, Margaretta and Elizabeth, have disappeared from the stories of the early days of entomology and botany in the United States. Catherine McNeur replaced her.

Michelle Nijhuis: Hi, my call is Michelle Nijhuis and I’m here today with Catherine McNeur. She is the protagonist of Mischievous Creatures, the story of sisters and scientists Margaretta and Elizabeth Morris. You probably haven’t heard of any of them, but they still made significant contributions to 19th-century entomology and botany, for which they have generally not been credited. Catherine’s e-book saves her story and shows the burden of its erasure for today’s science. Catherine, thank you so much for being here.

Catherine McNeur: Thank you for having me.

Michelle Nijhuis: When we met about 10 years ago, you were just beginning to study the history and ecology of an urban tree called the Tree of Heaven. But those studies have taken him in an absolutely unforeseen direction. So tell us how you found sisters Elizabeth and Margaretta Morris.

Catherine McNeur: yes, I had been working on this e-book assignment on the Tree of Heaven for about two years, and I was at the New-York Historical Society researching seed catalogs and the archivist recommended that I take a look at the papers of a botanist named William. Darlington, because he had talked about that tree in his e-book. And as I went through all those letters, there were 250 letters from Elizabeth Morris and I didn’t know who they were. So I googled his call and couldn’t find much. Digging a little deeper, I discovered that she was the sister of an entomologist named Margaretta Morris, so I wrote it down on my papers and set it aside.

As it happens, the next month I was back on the East Coast, this time at the Harvard Zoology Library and I was looking through the papers of an entomologist, Thaddeus William Harris, and in his collections I found letters from Margaretta Morris. . . Again, coincidentally, those sisters seem to be everywhere, and their words stopped me in my tracks.

There is a passage in one of the letters that caught my attention. She wrote, “I was breathless for the sympathy of someone who can appreciate my love of science and forget about my lack of academic love derived from e-books that, sometimes speaking, are beyond success in women. And then he went on to say that, you know, even though he couldn’t have access to the universities, libraries, and clinical associations that men had access to, he still had the nature e-book. In other words, your garden, nearby farms, and the forest. And that night I went to dinner with a friend and I even thought, I think I’m going to put this book about trees aside. I think I want to be more informed about those women and why we don’t know them.

Michelle Nijhuis: yes, they kept talking to you, didn’t they? So you met Elizabeth Morris first, or you met Elizabeth Morris first, the older sister. She was the one who had those 250 letters that she exchanged with this well-known botanist, and then Margaretta Morris, the younger sister, is the entomologist who is passionate not only about her painting but also about her popularity in the medical community.

Tell us a little more about these sisters. What were your formative years like?

Catherine McNeur: So they were born in Philadelphia, which is probably the most glorious position to be born in right now if you’re interested in science, because it was a scientific center in the early 19th century. Elizabeth was born in 1795 and Margaretta in 1797, then their father died when they were very young and soon, their great-aunt, who is something of a real estate magnate, ends up buying them a space in the Germantown neighborhood, which would later become Philadelphia. It’s kind of a suburb and the space they grow in has a huge botanical garden. One of the first botanical gardens of the États-Unis. They use it as their playground, their laboratory, their everything.

Her parents were Quakers and Episcopalians and they took women’s schooling very seriously. His daughters were as knowledgeable as his son.

But no one expected these women to have careers. They were free to spend their days wandering the woods, following their passions, and proceeding to be informed in that way. They had glorious tutors who were the leading naturalists of the time and couldn’t make ends meet as scientists. And so what they were doing is they were essentially tutoring in the aspect just to pay the bills. And Margaretta and Elizabeth seized that opportunity.

Michelle Nijhuis: That’s how Margaretta, the younger sister, became famous for her insect paintings. She is an entomologist and has become famous for some species. Tell us about that.

So, you know, while a lot of women of that era would probably have collected butterflies and flowers, Margaretta became more interested in the not-so-beautiful insects, the parasites, and her main discoveries concerned both cicadas, which she discovered, subsisted. underground, sucking the roots of fruit trees from your garden. And he also made discoveries about wheat flies, which were an economic and agricultural problem of the first order.

Elizabeth Array is best known because, uh, she was an expert on ferns, in particular. He knew ferns so well that he could distinguish between the familiar and the rare. They lived very close to a forest, along Wissahickon Creek in Philadelphia, and they walked along the Wissahickon and became, you know, very reliable specimen suppliers to botanists all over the country.

Michelle Nijhuis: One of the lovely descriptions in your book is about this kind of glorious organization of herb history enthusiasts and they had some pretty adventurous early exits. So what would they do together?

Catherine McNeur: Yes, I mean, one of the pleasures of this book was to discover how huge the global number of women in science was, that it wasn’t just exceptions, the few names that we know about, but that still exist. It was a massive organization of women with whom Margaretta and Elizabeth were friends, who shared botanical adventures, and to some extent it was a substitute for the Academy of Natural Sciences or other kinds of teams where we are literally de facto exclusive to men. That meant Margaretta and Elizabeth formed their own teams and also had to go through an organization to get to protection in the forest.

So, all those clinical outings in search of insects, in search of orchids, would end up being social outings. Um, they were big proponents of rubber boots and hunting to show that rubber boots that were advertised for men, for military use, were literally useful for gardening and doing those hikes, that they were waterproof, that we could just wade through them. cross the river and cross it to locate the fern you’re looking for if you’re dressed in boots.

Margaretta didn’t care about her appearance. Elizabeth was more embarrassed by the fact that those boots looked so ugly under her dresses, but Margaretta said, anyway, it’s okay. That’s right, get outside.

Michelle Nijhuis: So that education, which was, you know, self-directed and, you know, obtained from their tutors, et cetera, led them into vital clinical careers. So let’s talk about sisters for a moment. Um, Margaretta, who was an entomologist, was concerned about paintings that not only had primary clinical implications, but also, as you mentioned earlier, primary economic implications. Tell us about your paintings on the wheat fly or the Hessian fly.

Catherine McNeur: So, in the summer of 1836, anything that happened in the wheat fields around Pennsylvania ended up along the East Coast, uh, where they were infested with Hessian flies or wheat flies, which would have essentially ruined the crop. And what that meant for America at a time when flour and wheat costs were going up so much that there were even flour riots in New York.

Then Margaretta was interested in the wheat worm. She had learned it from her tutor, Thomas Say, who was the user who had officially named the wheat fly, Hessian fly, and she just wanted to examine it. And she went to her neighbors’ fields where they were growing wheat and she was watching them and reading them and she essentially said Thomas Say was wrong. He saw that they were laying their eggs in a different position than the one he had described, that they were laying them in the ear of wheat. And that was a problem. If there are farmers across the country looking to defeat the Hessian fly and get their crops back, they want to know where they lay their eggs and how the insect behaves. She told her cousin that her cousin is a professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and the cousin is a member of all those clinical associations, plus the American Philosophical Society.

And he said, you’ve got to post this. You want to write a report and send us to the American Philosophical Society. I’m going to have to tell the farmers. And she said, Oh, no, no, I don’t want to. I knew it would. She was subjected to a lot of criticism, so she objected. But she went back into the field, and she kept looking, and finally her cousin kept pushing her, and she said, okay, okay, I’m going to post this. . And he posted it and it all went off the rails.

The American Philosophical Society essentially had a peer-review committee that reviewed it, and not only did they publish it, but they also sought to publish it without delay in agricultural journals. And one of the members of that committee wrote a report on his paintings. And he tried to do it justice, but he was very condescending to the farmers. He basically wanted to teach them what entomology was and that’s why the farmers attacked Margaretta. They say this woman doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She is not a farmer. They just got to her. These were also, in fact, sexist attacks. It was more commonly this lady. I don’t know what he’s doing.

Even other people who enjoyed their studies also continued to use their sex. And like, oh, well, a woman’s observational skills come in handy. Her delicate sense of sight will help, you know, everything has been gendered in this way, in a transparent way. turning her into an outsider. And even an agricultural entomologist came to attack her as well, telling her that she had revived an old argument, that it was old news. In the end, what became apparent to her was that she had heard of some other wheat fly, almost indistinguishable from the Hessian fly, but which behaves differently and yet, even then, it took a lot of effort to get other people to see and accept her as sincere with her and recognize that she had indeed discovered something. new.

Michelle Nijhuis: So what did Margaretta tell you from this?What must have been an incredibly frustrating experience?

Catherine McNeur: I may have actually taken a step back and said it was a great access, you know, or not, to the world of public science, but I don’t need to do it ever again. decision he was looking for in order to participate in those conversations. You may just not wait to fight back. She wrote open letters defying the attacks of agricultural entomologists against her. And it has also followed safe strategies. She needed other people, other scientists, to see what she was seeing and publicly endorse her work, not for other people to write for her and take the pen away from her to maintain control of the message. And that’s what he did in the future.

Michelle Nijhuis: As you mentioned, Elizabeth, the sister, had other interests. So what were your main interests in botany?

Catherine McNeur: She’s a real fern enthusiast. He knew where very rare splenitis was seen along Wissahickon Creek and ended up supplying this fern not only to Asa Gray at Harvard, a close friend of his, but also to William Hooker at Kew Gardens and then also to the Imperial Gardens of Russia at the time, everywhere. His specimens were distributed all over the world and were later used to illustrate books and make greater notices about ferns and other similar plants. And she also collected all kinds of specimens, very close to Asa Gray and William Darlington, the botanist whose papers helped me get my eye on her, um, in the first place.

Asa Gray, who is Harvard’s top botanist, was not a very wealthy user and needed to increase Harvard’s collection. Darlington told Asa Gray in a letter: “I recently met a botanist. Your call is Miss Elizabeth C. Morris. Et and then goes on to say that she, quote, “has a pretty zeal and intellectual power in her sex and adds a deeper wisdom about plants than any woman I’ve ever met. So. . .

Michelle Nijhuis: A little compliment to lefties,

Catherine McNeur: I know, yes, it’s kind of sarcastic about the rest of sex, but it sustains it and it quickly becomes a key piece in building not only William Darlington’s collections, but also Asa Gray’s career at Harvard and giving her a place in the world of botany by helping her behind the scenes.

Michelle Nijhuis: So, Catherine, one of the most poignant parts of your book is a bankruptcy where you see how all the hard-earned popularity that they gained over the course of their lives has gradually eroded over time, either intentionally. and unintentionally. How did this happen?

Catherine McNeur: yes, it’s very frustrating to see all those kinds of erasures and how they ended up in oblivion. Some of those occasions occurred during their lives. The entomologists who attacked Margaretta, especially with her discoveries about the wheat worm. These men, especially Asa Fitch, who had been an entomologist in New York State, had written that Margaretta did not know what she was talking about and that she had made serious errors in her observations and this had been published in a collection, such as a pamphlet. which was then cited and quoted and quoted over and over again in the 19th and 20th centuries and was used as a primary source for others reading about wheatworms and other pests. And that’s why, because of that discredit at the beginning, it ended up being erased from history.

For example, look for a 1950s e-book about Hessian flies and other wheat insects and the writer will say, “Oh, that Margaretta Morris didn’t know what she was talking about and she’s quoting Asa Fitch. “Footnotes, which is maybe one of the most annoying ways, I don’t know, to notice those smudges, but it happens. Just as those kinds of credits, or lack of credits or discredits in this case, have spread in a number of ways.

None of these women were married. They lived together and had no children. And in a way, it affected their legacy because they didn’t have a circle of relatives to pass on that legacy. And even today, that’s not the case with his herbarium and insect collections. And even his mineral collections, they had a lot of herbal history collections, they seem to have gone extinct and probably just haven’t been taken care of by his nephews and nieces, so it’s all been dispersed, or, and this is tricky to understand. To deal with this kind of thing, you need to have smart protections for them.

Um, and normally scientists who were members of clinical associations, when they died, their peers would write what was called memoirs, what was called a memoir of their life, essentially a memorial, a long obituary, it was a first draft of the story. And though Elizabeth had it, Margaretta didn’t, she was never given any of it. Her death was noted through members of the Academy of Natural Sciences, however, it was just a short one-line sentence saying that she had passed away and that was it. So that, and this begins this erasure because that’s where historians, that’s where I would start a story, is through searching for those obituaries, and so, if you can’t locate that piece of information if it’s not written down.

Even their archival collections, which did not bear their names in their name, but in honor of some of the most prominent men in collections, such as the Library of Congress, purchased a collection from a collector of herbal history who, with all the letters they had gone to Margaretta and Elizabeth, yet the most prominent name in that pile is Asa Gray, the Harvard botanist and thus the collector, who sold it as the Asa Gray Papers, and then, when it was bought by the Library of Congress, the curator of history. of science. The collections kept this title and called it the Asa Gray Papers, although the only thing that keeps this collection in combination is the fact that they were letters won through Elizabeth and Margaretta Morris.

However, what’s appealing, what I find appealing about all those erasures, is that he’s not a single villain. There’s, you know, there’s rogue conservatives, there’s, uh, insecure entomologists, you know, all that kind of stuff, but it’s, it’s accumulation, it’s systemic, and that’s why we keep stumbling upon those lost scientists, over time. It’s that all those erasures just happen and it’s a discredit here, an erasure there, and then you lose track. of who they are.

Michelle Nijhuis: So, one of the things that I find remarkable about your ebook is that in Lost Women of Science, we cover women who have done amazing things in science, but who aren’t remembered enough. But Elizabeth and Margaretta, in fact, were, almost completely lost to history.

So how did you manage to locate the few surviving fragments of his story and combine them into this narrative?

Catherine McNeur: Yes, it was, it’s complicated. It’s an old-fashioned, complicated detective job. Their work was hidden in the collections of male scientists. Thus, in many tactics, the digitization of the archives has made it imaginable to locate the needles in haystacks: this letter that was in the University of Pennsylvania, or the one that was in the archives of the University of Michigan, or the consultation of Darwin’s articles, all scanned and digitized from Cambridge. All of this has made it possible to recreate parts of their history with tactics that would not have been imaginable a generation earlier.

And there are other things, I noticed the fact that they had a neighbor who lived down the street. She was a generation older than them. She was about the same age as her mother, wrote amazing journals, and was incredibly talkative. And then he talked about her coming, and oh, Elizabeth must have been in a bad mood because she looked awful, or dressed awful, or has a boyfriend so young, or all that kind of gossip.

So I was able to recreate parts of their lives because they had a loquacious neighbor who documented everything and I’m so grateful to have stumbled upon that.

Michelle Nijhuis: Unbelievable, blessed be the curious neighbors of this world.

Catherine McNeur: Yes, and my most productive discovery, so far, was the most magical, on my son’s playground. That’s where I was talking on the playground with another parent about our other jobs and a month later he’s back on the playground. And it says, you know, it could be similar to those scientists that you’re writing about. And it just so happened that his uncle who lives in Hood River, Oregon, had one of Margaretta’s albums of her botanical, entomological paintings in his attic. paintings and poetry she collected, as well as her reflections on grief after the loss of her sister. It was a discovery and it’s a discovery I still can’t comprehend.

Michelle Nijhuis: It’s unbelievable. And it replaced the finish of the book, right?Yes.

Catherine McNeur: That’s true. This allowed me to tell the story of how Margaretta experienced the loss of her sister with whom she had lived all her life.

Michelle Nijhuis: And the sisters have published some of their own names, but they’ve published a lot of pseudonyms, so how did you go about locating the e-book in which they had published pseudonyms?

Catherine McNeur: Oh, it was very complicated and I’m sure I didn’t locate everything, but Elizabeth wrote prolifically as a science writer. He has written in agricultural and horticultural journals. And when she died in 1865, the editor of one of those horticultural magazines wrote her an obituary and denounced her, and she would have hated him. He would have hated the obituary and he would have hated to have all his pseudonyms revealed. But this is the first time I find out that she had written under a pseudonym. And with those clues, I was able to piece together some of his articles from Gardener’s Monthly, specifically this gardening magazine. But then I found out that some of those pseudonyms gave the impression that they were in other agricultural journals, the American Agricultureist, and I started researching and I found that she was writing there, and next to those articles, there were articles on entomology and they were written. . through someone

Michelle Nijhuis: Uh, uh.

Catherine McNeur: For someone with a pseudonym that said The Old Lady, and all that, fainting and being informed about pests in your garden, and that’s how you can convince your kids to learn more about apple moths. And I thought, oh, that looks awful, maybe it’s just Margaretta. Then, when I was at the University of Delaware, I found, in their collections, an e-book in which Elizabeth had essentially saved drafts of her articles that she wrote under her pseudonyms. and so I was able to notice even more of her pseudonyms, and some of them she was pretending to be a boy and, which expanded the list of names that I can consult, and I was able to verify through some of the drafts that Margaretta had left. that she’s the oldest girl who wrote about insects, and try to get the kids outdoors so they’re informed about insects as well.

Michelle Nijhuis: Unbelievable, so what classes do you expect young scientists, regardless of gender, to be informed from Elizabeth and Margaretta’s shared story?

Catherine McNeur: You know, I think when you write or read about those specific erasures, it can be frustrating, even depressing, to think and think about how all of this work, all of this environmental wisdom has been erased because of those powers. relations.

But one thing that really stuck with me as I researched this ebook and wrote it was the joy that Margaretta and Elizabeth had, despite all the animosity that they faced, all the adversity that happened to them, they would go out together, from time to time. they packed their lunches in vascular boxes and headed to Wissahickon Creek. And it was their ideal day, they just spent it outdoors looking for new specimens.

They would continue to actively engage with other scientists, despite the backlash, criticism, and anything else they received. They continued to enjoy getting outdoors and I think that’s pretty inspiring. That doesn’t negate the frustrating aspect of erasing, however, maybe it’s a life lesson passed on to me, at least, and I hope others will keep it too.

Michelle Nijhuis: Well, Catherine, thank you so much for sharing Elizabeth and Margaretta Morris’s discovery and your own in rediscovering their story.

Catherine McNeur: Thank you, Michelle.

Katie Hafner: Conversations about women in science have been lost. This episode was hosted by Michelle Nijhuis. Samia Bouzid, our producer and sound engineer. Thanks to Jeff Delviscio of our editorial partner, Scientific American. And my co-CEO Amy Scharf, as well as our senior executive manufacturer, Deborah Unger.

Episode art created through Keren Mevorach and Lizzy Younan composed our music. [Lexi Atiya, our fact-checker. ] Lost Women of Science is funded in part through Alfred P. Sloan and the Anne Wojcicki Foundation. We distribute it through PRX.

If you enjoyed this conversation, head over to Lostwomenofscience. org and subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss any episodes. That’s perduwomenofscience. org. Je Katie Hafner calls me. Next.

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