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This article uncovers examples of women scientists' attempts to challenge American science from within, to democratize it by making scientific knowledge accessible and its practice comprehensible to a broad audience. It posits that natural history museums are important locations for understanding both the opportunities for and the barriers to women's professional engagement with the public understanding of natural science in the United States. Using a feminist standpoint approach as an entry into these scientists' world, this article explores the work of freelance naturalist and museum founder Martha Maxwell, carcinologist Mary Jane Rathbun, agrostologist Agnes Chase, and botanist Alice Eastwood. While Maxwell's and Rathbun's lives illustrate two women's strategic and situational assimilations to scientific "best practice" and institutional bureaucracies during their particular historical periods, Chase's and Eastwood's lives provide feminists with more timeless models for crafting a democratic science.
In 1903, Agnes Chase signed on to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Plant Industry as a scientific illustrator. Her job soon included managing the Smithsonian Institution's grass herbarium, and she advanced in fits and starts up the curatorial ladder, always shouldering a large administrative workload at the same time as she conducted research.1 During her decades at the Smithsonian, she came to resent many of these administrative tasks. An assertive woman, Chase made herself a thorn in the side of her supervisors. She refused to submit quietly to bureaucratic strictures or to male colleagues she saw as inflexible or disrespectful.2 She complained, for example, of "the way the work is made secondary to the regulations" and of how her own methods of record keeping were more efficient than the "elaborate system" created by the National Museum.3
Across the country in San Francisco, one of Chase's colleagues and friends, Alice Eastwood, faced similar challenges. For example, in 1917, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology Director Joseph Grinnell relayed a distinguished professor's criticism of the mismatched containers used by the botanical curator in her displays at the California Academy of Sciences. Eastwood responded bluntly: "If I could do it I'd have a different kind of receptacle in color and form for each kind of flower as I abhor uniformity just as nature does. So long as I run that flower show I do it according to my ideas....