Women in American Ornithology

Among the authors featured in these works are the first three women to be named elective members of the American Ornithologists' Union in 1901, eighteen years after the organization’s founding. Women had belonged to the Union as associate members, but the elective member title was reserved for individuals who had made significant contributions to the field of ornithology.

In 1894 and 1895, Mabel Osgood Wright studied at the American Museum of Natural History in New York under ornithologists Frank M. Chapman and Joel Asaph Allen and published this work on her research. A contemporary review in Science critiqued the work’s “horrible pictures” but noted that “The spirit of the book is in touch with the popular and growing fashion of studying birds in the field, and its chief purpose seems to be to interest the novice and aid in identifying birds 'in the bush.'” The pictures that the reviewer panned were recolored reproductions from Audubon’s Birds of America. Shortly after the publication of this work, Wright helped found the Connecticut Audubon Society, serving as its first president from 1898 to 1924.

Mabel Osgood Wright (1859-1934).
Birdcraft; a Field Book of Two Hundred Song, Game, and Water Birds. New York: The Macmillan company, 1897.

Lehigh University Catalog Record: https://asa.lib.lehigh.edu/Record/132085

A version of this text has been digitized and is available through The Internet Archive.

Miller began her writing career with animal stories and other works intended for children. Her first dedicated book about birds was 1885’s Bird Ways. She went on to write numerous other bird books over the next twenty years. This work republished excerpts from Miller’s other bird observation books alongside other major naturalists, including Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and John Burroughs.

Olive Thorne Miller (1831-1918).
In American Fields and Forests. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909.

Lehigh University Catalog Record: https://asa.lib.lehigh.edu/asa/Record/121972

A version of this text has been digitized and is available through The Internet Archive.

In 1917, Bailey collaborated with her husband to write a visitor guide for Glacier National Park for the U.S. National Park Service. Her husband, Vernon Bailey, worked for the Bureau of Biological Survey within the Department of Agriculture. He contributed the section of this guide dedicated to the park’s mammals while Florence covered the birds. Her other writings about the American West include Birds of New Mexico and Among the Birds in the Grand Canyon Country, both of which were published by government agencies.

Bailey was already a significant figure in American ornithology. In the late 19th century, she published How Birds Affect the Farm and Garden and Birds of Village and Field: A Bird Book for Beginners, which were written for amateur birders rather than an audience of scientists. Like many ornithologists of this era, Bailey corresponded with Frank M. Chapman, writing Handbook of Birds of the Western United States in 1902 as a companion to Chapman's Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America.

Florence Merriam Bailey (1863-1948) and Vernon Bailey (1864-1942).
Wild Animals of Glacier National Park. The Mammals, with Notes on Physiography and Life Zones. Washington: Govt. Print. Off., 1918.

Lehigh University Catalog Record: https://asa.lib.lehigh.edu/asa/Record/124583

A version of this text has been digitized and is available through The Internet Archive.

Digitized Versions