I have reading and enjoying immensely Scott Weidensaul's Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding (the year of unrelenting bird books continues...). If you are interested in general history at all then you will love this book. He profiles all sorts of fascinating Americans who obviously have a love of birds in common but more broadly are just a very eccentric and interesting group to boot. I was especially intrigued by the mention of Martha Maxwell, the first woman field naturalist who "obtained and prepared her own subjects" (According to a current exhibition on her work at the National Cowboy Museum). As she did her work in the mid 19th century I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that she likely was not the first ever but rather the first to receive any sort of popular notice or acclaim. Her taxidermy is what really puts her above pretty much all others working in the field at the time. Martha was the first person ever - and this seems assured - to build dioramas with taxidermy and show the animals as they appeared in the wild. Every time you visit a natural history museum and see creatures in a naturalized setting doing what they would do in the wild, it is because Martha showed how effective such presentations could be.

Of course her life was hard. (Of course, of course.) From all accounts her husband seems to have been little more than a drag upon her. (Weidensaul can't understand why on earth she seems to have married him in the first place let alone stayed with him.) She tried more than once to attend college, even after she became famous, but never had the money for tuition to stay for long. In the end she died under "difficult circumstance" of ovarian cancer. To add insult to injury her animals ended up being sold to a man of poor character who apparently sold some off piecemeal while the rest were poorly stored and destroyed by the elements. The woman who had such a great impact on what we see in museums does not have her work in any of them.

There is one book written about Martha which came out ten years ago. In all my reading on women in the field (explorers, adventurers, etc.), I've never heard of her. I suppose part of the problem is that she created large things that were lost - and seems not to have left a written record of her work, or life. (Although Weidensaul notes that a sister did write a book about her at the height of her fame.) Oddly enough (or maybe not) she was a vegetarian. As a woman of her times, I think she was a startlingly original artist. It's amazing how quickly all evidence of your life can vanish from the face of the earth, isn't it? Like you were never there - and never created anything at all.

[Post pic of Martha Maxwell courtesy Nat. Cowboy Museum. You can see stenographs of her amazing display at the 1876 Centennial Expo here. The post title is taken from that mammoth taxidermy display there - which she cheekily titled "Women's Work".]