Dixy Lee Ray was not an obvious candidate for governor. In an era when Washington politics still rewarded the practiced politician, she arrived from another world. She was a marine biologist, university professor, museum director, and federal science administrator who had spent most of her adult life studying the natural world rather than cultivating political […]
Mary Treat, Victorian Entomologist and Visionary Biologist
Mary Treat (1830-1923) was a prolific scientific writer who earned a reputation as “the world’s most famous and industrious woman naturalist” at a time when few women were professionally engaged in biology. The daughter of a minister, Treat attended a private girls’ academy early in life. Such academies, or “seminaries,” were an answer to the […]
Katharine McCormick, biologist & millionaire philanthropist
Katharine Dexter McCormick is a name that every woman today should know, because your life would probably be very different today if it wasn’t for her. Katharine funded what The New York Times called the “most sweeping sociomedical revolution in history. . . [whose] impact on the United States and other nations [is] almost too […]