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A “Central Bureau of Feminine Algology:” Algae, Mutualism, and Gendered Ecological Perspectives, 1880–1910

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Abstract

While women’s participation at research stations has been celebrated as a success story for women in science, their experiences were not quite equal to that of men scientists. This article shows how women interested in practicing marine science at research institutions experienced different living and research environments than their male peers; moreover, it illustrates how those gendered experiences reflected and informed the nature of their scientific practices and ideas. Set in Roscoff, France, this article excavates the work and social worlds of a Russian scientist, Natalie Karsakoff (1863–1941), and a British émigré in France, Anna Vickers (1853–1906), to show how a small group of single women who studied algae created a “central bureau of feminine algology.” The social aspects of this bureau, and the physical space and support funded by Vickers, allowed these women scientists to both participate in male-dominated practices of science and lend evidentiary support to an ecological category that emphasized benign coexistence rather than struggle. This study adds an empirical case of single women scientists managing successful careers in science and contributing to science through publication and research.

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Notes

  1. Natal’ia Vladimirovna Karsakova, in Russian. She signed her letters “Natalie Karsakoff” when writing in French or English (Lipschitz 1947, p. 90).

  2. Karsakoff to Anna Weber-van Bosse, 26 August 1894, (original in English), Box 2, Anna Weber-van Bosse Papers, National Herbarium Nederland Archives, Leiden, The Netherlands; hereafter cited as Weber-van Bosse Papers.

  3. Karsakoff to Anna Weber-van Bosse, 23 April 1895, Weber-van Bosse Papers.

  4. Alberti (2001) notes how amateur-professional relationships were often collaborative and friendly in the late nineteenth century rather than at odds with each other. Still, his use of British algologist Margaret Gatty exemplifies how gender intersected with these positions; he details how Gatty was not troubled by her professional scientific correspondents’ insistence on her amateur status (1872, p. 121). On Bornet’s career, see Farlow (1912).

  5. Karsakoff to Weber-van Bosse, January 1898, Weber-van Bosse Papers.

  6. Vickers and Karsakoff were the major figures, but other women algologists, largely unknown in our current historiography and some known from the records only by their first or last names, also performed algological research, including the British Mary Helen Shaw, the American Martha Clarke, and the Russian Rachel Jope (a student of Charles Flahault), Mlle Orloff, and Mlle Sophie.

  7. Around the mid-twentieth century, practitioners of the scientific study of algae began to call themselves phycologists (using the Greek phykos rather than the Latin alga), particularly as this group of scientists began distinguishing themselves as a distinct subdiscipline within botany.

  8. Taylor was discussing phycology in the US as well as Great Britain; the characterization refers to the women who worked with British botanist W. H. Harvey.

  9. Two British figures from the mid-nineteenth century represent the strong associations between feminine algology and amateur or artistic pursuits in the history of women and algae. Anna Atkins (1799–1871) is famous for creating the cyanotype photographs of algae, an effort in experimenting with light to produce beautiful and scientific representations of specimens. Margaret Gatty (1809–1873), a prolific seaweed collector, is best remembered as a children’s author. Her correspondence with professional botanist William H. Harvey (1811–1866) helped her publish the well-regarded British Sea-weeds (Gatty 1872). Still, Gatty emphasized her own status as an amateur. Gatty and Atkins exemplify the historical characterizations of women and algae; one made artistic blue sun prints of seaweed forms and the other, a self-described amateur, wrote to help others begin the hobby of seaweed collecting. For work on Atkins, see Armstrong and de Zegher (2004); for work on Gatty and other women who published about algae in this period, see Hunt (2005); for how Gatty collaborated with professional scientists as an amateur, see Alberti (2001); for biographical details about Gatty and her scientific career, see Le May-Sheffield (2001).

  10. Wilhelm Hofmeister established the alternation of generations as a general rule in plants as well as in algae in 1851 (Nyhart and Lidgard 2017, pp. 141–145).

  11. These include the Germans Albert Bernhard Frank, Anton de Bary, Ernst Stahl, and Johannes Reinke; the French Édouard Bornet and Gaston Bonnier; the Russian Andrei Famintsyn; and American Albert Schneider (Sapp 1994, p. 5).

  12. In the original German, Frank coined the term Symbiotismus (Sapp 1994, p. 6).

  13. De Bary gave a lecture on symbiosis, "Die Erscheinung der Symbiose" (“The appearance of symbiosis”) in 1878, published in 1879 (de Bary 1879, p. 5).

  14. Van Beneden used the French term commensaux in the original text; he included this term in the translation but translated it as “mess-mates” in English. The terms commensalist and commensalism became adopted by English-speaking ecologists in subsequent decades, so I used these better-known terms here. Van Beneden also established the first marine station, in Ostende, Belgium, in 1843 with private funds (Adler 2017, p. 174).

  15. Different spellings of Pereyaslawzewa reflect the different transliterations of Russian Cyrillic into English or French; alternate spellings include Perejoslavzeva and Pereiaslavtseva.

  16. Sapp (1994) makes the argument that many biologists over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century saw symbiosis as interesting but orthogonal to true causes of evolutionary change, which led to delayed acceptance of the view of symbiosis as a primordial character of life and mitochondria as symbiotic prokaryotes.

  17. Even as Julian Huxley’s Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942) argued that separate traditions within the study of life, such as the field-based study of paleontology and the experimental basis of Mendelian genetics, could be synthesized to explain biological evolution, histories of biology emphasize the experimentalist takeover in the life sciences at the beginning of the twentieth century (Sapp 2003). Similar to the entanglement of amateurism and femininity in botany, the distinction between objective fact-gathering and experimental knowledge-making in science in general is gendered; for the objective nature of women’s work in the sciences, see Oreskes (1996); for the women computers at Harvard, see Sobel (2016); for genetics, see Richmond (2006).

  18. Others have addressed the marine station movement and how it shaped the research trends and knowledge production in biology; for American marine stations, see Muka (2014), for European biological stations, see de Bont (2016).

  19. Despite Rossiter’s focus on American women, her work also highlights general trends at research institutions in Europe. For instance, research universities in Germany lagged behind the US and Switzerland in their decision to allow women graduate students earn degrees; they begrudgingly accepted foreign women graduate students in the 1890s (e.g., Ida Hyde), but did not allow German women graduate students until 1910 (Rossiter 1982, pp. 41–43, 51). While Britain allowed women graduate students to study at its research institutions in the 1880s, they were not granted degrees (Rossiter 1982, p. 40). Women’s colleges in the US did hire women faculty but did little to systematically support their research agendas. Women were also hired as research assistants but remained as subordinates to a male researcher (Rossiter 1982, pp. 25–28, 61–62).

  20. There are precedents in seaside summer schools for teaching teachers about natural history, in which many women participated (Kohlstedt 2010, pp. 21–25, 2022).

  21. Women of Science at the MBL, MBL: Biological Discovery at Woods Hole, The University of Chicago Marine Biological Laboratory. http://comm.archive.mbl.edu/publications/women_index.html

  22. E. G. Conklin, professor of zoology at Princeton, notoriously made this claim about Woods Hole.

  23. See Tonn (2019) for a history of the Bermuda Station that addresses the career paths of multiple women scientists.

  24. For the founding the Naples Table Association for Promoting Laboratory Research by Women, see Sloan (1978).

  25. Much has been made of the Lacaze-Duthiers’s push against the physiological school of Claude Bernaud and Delage’s subsequent neo-Lamarckian direction (Debaz 2005; Dayrat 2016).

  26. Lacaze-Duthiers also secured funding from the French Ministry of Marine Affairs (Adler 2017; Kofoid 1910, p. 95).

  27. The use of the term experimental was in response to Claude Bernard’s 1865 Introduction à l'étude de la médecine expérimentale, which called physiology a true science (Toulmond 2014).

  28. There was a small fee for research supplies. Under Delage’s directorship, the station later adopted the table system like the Naples Station.

  29. A blueprint map of the station shows 25 tables, 1891, SBR Roscoff Station archives.

  30. Delage to Minister of Finance, 1913, SBR Roscoff Station Archives.

  31. Notice sur la Station biologique de Roscoff (Finistère) France, SBR Roscoff Station Archives. Lacaze-Duthiers passed away in July of 1901 and Delage officially assumed the role of director in 1902; he likely began acting as director directly following Lacaze-Duthiers’s passing in 1901.

  32. Karsakoff made this statement in reference to a lecture given by experimental botanist Philippe Édouard Léon van Tieghem; see Karsakoff to Weber-van Bosse, December 1897, Weber-van Bosse Papers.

  33. Karsakoff to Weber-van Bosse, December 1897, Weber-van Bosse Papers.

  34. However, while French universities granted certificates and degrees to women, the state did not always recognize their right to use their degrees: Karsakoff discussed with Weber-van Bosse the case of Jeanne Chauvin (1862–1926), the first woman lawyer in France. Chauvin had enrolled in law school at the Sorbonne and defended her thesis in 1892. Despite her credentials, Chauvin was not allowed to practice law, although she fought to be allowed to work as a lawyer and was finally accepted to the bar in 1900 (Hause and Kenney 1984; Balteau et al. 1933).

  35. Karsakoff to Weber-van Bosse, 24 December 1893, Weber-van Bosse Papers.

  36. Alice Fol (1873–1972) and Marie Dujardin-Beaumetz (1887–1984) were two of 11 recorded women visitors in 1906, with Fol the only nonstudent researcher. The daughter of Swiss cytologist Hermann Fol, Alice Fol was a zoologist who married French zoologist Georges Pruvôt (1852–1924). Marie Dujardin-Beaumetz visited the SBR as a student and also returned to the SBR as a researcher (in algology) as Marie Lemoine, along with her husband, French geologist Paul Lemoine (1878–1940). For work on how marriage affected women’s careers in science, see Pycior et al. (1996). Valkova (2008) also notes how Russian women managed scientific education and careers through family connections.

  37. Sorties de Mers Folder, 1890–1900, SBR Roscoff Station archives. Shaw is listed in Ray Desmond’s Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturalists as having “exhibited flower paintings at Royal Academy, 1896–1904” (Desmond 1994, p. 620).

  38. Pereyaslawzewa’s presence in 1894 is recorded in the Station Logbook, 1894, SBR Roscoff Station Archives.

  39. Karsakoff to Weber-van Bosse, 26/14 August 1894 [until 1918, Russia followed the Julian calendar while other European countries followed the Gregorian calendar. As a result, there existed a difference of 13 days across the their calendar years], Weber-van Bosse Papers.

  40. Mlle Nadejda Camamcheff “Demande d’admission” (my translation), 1906, SBR Roscoff Station Archives.

  41. Mlle Levinger’s form (original in French; my translation), Travailleurs folders, 1908, SBR Roscoff Station Archives.

  42. For analysis of how French physiology and lab-based practices were taken up by holistic Russian science to inform ecological thinking, see Ackert (2007).

  43. French universities let women take degrees but did not often let them practice a profession.

  44. Karsakoff to Weber-van Bosse, 30 October 1893, Weber-van Bosse Papers.

  45. After 1898, Karsakoff worked at the St. Petersburg Botanical Gardens (Karsakoff to Weber-van Bosse, 8 January 1895 and July 1900, Weber-van Bosse Papers). Valkova (2008) notes that Russian women received more language training than Russian men and were thus better suited to translate European scientific works.

  46. They arrived on July 15 (Karsakoff to Bornet, 23/11, August 1889, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle archives, Botanical Section.

  47. Karsakoff’s friends knew Delage and his wife, and they offered to help her gain informal authorization to see the laboratory’s herbarium. As preparator, Delage held some administrative power: French historian Debaz notes that the preparator (le préparateur) was the “master of the station” at Roscoff due to Lacaze-Duthiers’s other activities; in 1882, Lacaze-Duthiers also founded a marine station on the Mediterranean, Arago Laboratory at Banyuls-sur-mer (Debaz 2005, p. 140). Karsakoff to Bornet, 23/11 August 1889 (original in French, my translation), Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle archives, Botanical Section.

  48. Dany Guillou-Beuzit is a researcher in comparative literature, a Roscoff resident and a volunteer historian and archivist. I interviewed her during my archival research trip to Roscoff in 2019; she shared with me her historical research on the Vickers family and gave me digital copies of archival documents from the municipal archives in Roscoff, including census reports and legal documents.

  49. Roscoff was the premier port for smuggling contraband into Great Britain for three centuries after passage of the British Navigation Act of 1651, which restricted trade from other nations and empires (Andre Toulmond, pers. comm., June 2019; Blanken 2015, p. 239).

  50. In the coming decades, Roscoff became a resort town for wealthy Parisians and others who sought thalassotherapy, the use of seawater and marine products for their medicinal properties. According to Cabioch, thalassotherapy is what drew the Vickers to Roscoff (Cabioch 2019; Kofoid 1910).

  51. These comprise Cadastral A 151 and A 152, Roscoff Municipal Archives.

  52. It appears that Vickers’s father was no longer in the picture as of 1881, and that Vickers was the arbiter of the family affairs and finances.1881 census, Roscoff Municipal Archives.

  53. These include the “movables and arrears of a life pension” (Guillou-Beuzit 2019).

  54. For instance, Hélène Karsakoff, Natalie’s younger sister, played tennis in this area. The plot of land was later acquired by the SBR and today functions as part of the city cemetery. It contains the graves of people associated with the station, such as former director Georges Tessier and station guardian Charles Marty. The younger siblings of Natalie Karsakoff, Paul and Hélène Karsakoff, are also buried there (Karsakoff to Weber-van Bosse, September 1896, Weber-van Bosse Papers).

  55. Karsakoff’s two younger siblings, Paul and Hélène, both returned to Roscoff and lived there as adults even though Natalie Karsakoff did not join them. Karsakoff to Weber-van Bosse, 23 April 1895, Weber-van Bosse Papers.

  56. Karsakoff to Weber-van Bosse, 23 April 1895, Weber-van Bosse Papers.

  57. William A. Setchell, an American algologist and student of William Farlow, considered Bornet to be the “head of the profession” of algology (Setchell to Bornet, June 20, 1906, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle archives, Botanical Section. Sapp shows that a number of experimental botanists demonstrated this duality in lichens in quick succession (1994, p. 5).

  58. Bornet finished his medical degree in 1855 (Woelkering and Lamy 1998, p 49).

  59. Vickers to Weber-van Bosse, February 15, 1904, Weber-van Bosse Papers, Box 5.

  60. Karsakoff to Bornet, July 6, 1901 (original in French; my translation), Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle archives, Botanical Section.

  61. Karsakoff, 10 June/29 May 1895, letter to Weber-van Bosse, Weber-van Bosse Papers.

  62. Beyond Karsakoff’s multiple references to Mlle Orloff, there were no traces of her in the French and Dutch archives. See Karsakoff to Weber-van Bosse, 10 June/29 May 1895, Weber-van Bosse Papers.

  63. There were other instances of ecological thought that predate Warming’s 1895 book; these include Swiss botanist Augustin Pyrame de Candolle’s work in geographical botany that distinguished “stations” from “habitations,” which is considered a key plant-ecological idea (Egerton 2010).

  64. Another instance of this trend is the seaside station run by run by algologist Josephine Tilden and botanist Conway Macmillan. The coeducational station, which readily accommodated both male and female students and researchers, was self-consciously interested in ecology in 1902 and began formally training students how to use plots for ecological studies on the beaches of Vancouver Island in 1907, which was also the last year the seaside station ran (Kohlstedt 2022).

  65. Karsakoff to Weber-van Bosse, December 1897, Weber-van Bosse Papers.

  66. See Todes (1989) and Sapp (1994, chap. 4, Symbiogenesis in Russia).

  67. McIntosh suggests that dredging was an early means of ecological sampling (1985, pp. 50–51).

  68. Karsakoff to Weber-van Bosse, September 1896, Weber-van Bosse Papers; Cabioch (2010).

  69. Karsakoff to Weber-van Bosse, September 1896, Weber-van Bosse Papers.

  70. Karsakoff suggested that Victor and the guardian at Lacaze-Duthiers’s station, Charles Marty, had a falling out and this was the reason for his departure from the main station (Karsakoff to Weber-van Bosse, September 1896, Weber-van Bosse Papers). For more on Marty’s role in the functioning of Lacaze-Duthiers’s station, see Adler (2017).

  71. Karsakoff to Weber-van Bosse, September 1896, Weber-van Bosse Papers. For a brief biography of Simon Sirodot, see Franqueville (1895, p. 320).

  72. For more on how masculine norms shapes scientific inquiry, see Milam and Nye (2015).

  73. Karsakoff to Weber-van Bosse, [likely 1896—this page was out of order in the dossier], Weber-van Bosse Papers.

  74. Karsakoff to Weber-van Bosse, January-March 1897, Weber-van Bosse papers; Tomas (1985) noted that A. Vickers contributed to the study of marine flora in the Bay of Naples.

  75. Karsakoff to Weber-van Bosse, September 1896, Weber-van Bosse Papers. For more on Ethel Barton, see her obituary (Britten 1922).

  76. Karsakoff to Weber-van Bosse, January 1898, Weber-van Bosse Papers.

  77. Karsakoff to Weber-van Bosse, December 1897, Weber-van Bosse Papers.

  78. Karsakoff to Weber-van Bosse, January 1898, Weber-van Bosse Papers. Regarding M. Holmes, in the correspondence between Ethel Barton and Weber-van Bosse, Barton characterized Holmes as an “untrustworthy” and “disagreeable” man who was prone to “making new species” and thus multiplying the problems of synonymy. See Barton to Weber-van Bosse, February 8, 1896 and March 14, 1896, Weber-van Bosse Papers.

  79. Mary Helen Shaw to Weber-van Bosse, 8 January 1908, Weber-van Bosse Papers; Karsakoff to Bornet, 1906, (original in French; my translation), Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle archives, Botanical Section.

  80. Fontainebleau was a rural retreat near Paris where many botanists created their own personal laboratories. Gaston Bonnier, another experimental botanist who worked on lichens, had a laboratory there, like van Tieghem. See Karsakoff to Bornet, September 13/26, 1902 (original in French, my translation), Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle archives, Botanical Section.

  81. Sauvageau was well-known in algology for his work on algae life cycles and respected in Roscoff as a scientific expert. Sauvageau and Karsakoff corresponded. Karsakoff once stated that she restrained herself from quarreling with him over taxonomic names (Karsakoff to Anna Weber-van Bosse, January 1898, Weber-van Bosse Papers).

  82. Vickers to Weber-van Bosse, 15 February 1904 (original in French, my translation), Weber-van Bosse Papers. Roughly half of the Russian women who pursued scientific degrees in the decades of the 1860s and 1870s abandoned their studies in order to support the Revolution (Valkova 2008, p. 147). While it appears Karsakoff left her scientific work for a brief period (perhaps during the revolutionary period of 1905–1907), Mary Creese notes that Karsakoff continued to publish into the twentieth century, but her work likely appeared in publications from the Moscow Oceanographic Institute, which neither she nor I have been able to access (Creese 2015, p. 75).

  83. French phycologist and Roscoff resident Cabioch (2010) supplied the author with a document about Karsakoff, used in preparation of her public remarks about the Karsakoff headstone in the city cemetery. An online version of her remarks can be found at https://cimetiereduvil.blogspot.com/2017/12/georges-teissier-et-helene-karsakoff.html.

  84. Charles Flahault, of the Montpellier-Zurich school of ecology, has been recognized in the history of ecology, see McIntosh (1985).

  85. One of his students, Marie Goldsmith (1873–1933), a Russian zoologist, worked closely with Delage throughout her career, coauthoring two major works with him and co-editing the journal L’Année Biologique (Ogilvie and Harvey 2000, p. 1046). Photos of women at the SBR after 1900 include Delage’s family, Roscoff Station Archives.

  86. Delage frequently used the terms victim, parasite, and host (1884, pp. 419, 438, 538).

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Lynn Nyhart, Marsha Richmond, Harry Stopes, and the graduate students and faculty in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for commenting on earlier drafts of this article. I extend my deepest gratitude to André Toulmond, former director of the Station Biologique de Roscoff and creator of the station’s archive, and his wife Claude Toulmond for their help while I was in Roscoff. Toulmond facilitated my meetings with Dany Guillou-Breuzit, who shared her meticulous research from the Roscoff City Archives on Anna Vickers and Natalie Karsakoff; Dr. Jacqueline Cabioch, whose own research in phycology at the station and knowledge of Karsakoff clarified my understanding of algae science in Roscoff; Angélina Cattois, whose memories of the Karsakoff siblings in Roscoff gave me a sense of the social world in Roscoff; and Geneviève Roussel, Vickers’s own grand-niece, who let me see their family photos and shared their personal history. While writing this manuscript, I was supported by a generous fellowship from the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Support for this fellowship was provided by the Graduate School, part of the Office of Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and the UW-Madison.

Funding

I received funding from the Center for Culture, History, and Environment, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to conduct portions of this archival research. I also received a Summer Fieldwork Research Award from the Institute for Regional and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which supported my research travel. While writing this manuscript, I was supported by a generous fellowship from the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Support for this fellowship was provided by the Graduate School, part of the Office of Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and the UW-Madison.

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Hutcheson, E.S. A “Central Bureau of Feminine Algology:” Algae, Mutualism, and Gendered Ecological Perspectives, 1880–1910. J Hist Biol 55, 791–825 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-022-09698-1

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