Mischievous Creatures

Starred review from August 28, 2023
Historian McNeur (Taming Manhattan) paints a vibrant portrait of botanist Elizabeth Carrington Morris and her younger sister, entomologist Margaretta Hare Morris, restoring the women to their rightful place in the history of science. Born in the 1790s to a well-to-do family, the sisters grew up in Philadelphia, where they conducted scientific observations and wrote up the findings from their family home. Margaretta made a name for herself by publishing her research into how the Hessian fly destroyed wheat crops, then went on to study, among other subjects, the cicada’s 17-year cycle and the possible role of beetles in causing potato blight. Elizabeth named and categorized plants, drew illustrations of local flora for plant journals, and assisted Harvard botanist Asa Gray. The sisters regularly contributed to popular scientific publications, and Margaretta gained membership to several scientific associations. Yet the Morris sisters and other women scientists of the era were increasingly marginalized by men in the field who viewed them as subordinate helpers and cast doubt on their findings—as Charles Darwin did with Margaretta’s water beetle study. Age and ill-health slowed the sisters’ output; Elizabeth died in 1865 and Margaretta in 1867. With deep insight into the gendered power dynamics that shaped the first half of the 19th century, McNeur serves up an incisive study of institutional bias. It’s a vital account. Illus.

Starred review from September 1, 2023
Lively biography of two sisters who made substantial contributions to 19th-century natural history. Elizabeth and Margaretta Morris were sisters who, writes McNeur, "lived together, hiked together, and debated new scientific theories together." They were hardly alone in their vocations and avocations. As the author notes, the term scientist came about in 1834 to describe "a woman with a talent for turning complex scientific phenomena into understandable prose for popular audiences." Some men whom we would now call scientists believed that women were better equipped mentally to ponder the minutiae of classification than men, whose supposed task was to come up with big ideas. Well to do but constrained by their time, Elizabeth and Margaretta turned to botany and entomology. Margaretta, in particular, became well known for her work describing the 17-year cycle of the cicada--and as for big ideas, she corresponded with none other than Charles Darwin, then "an up-and-coming naturalist in England," on the subject of water beetles. McNeur notes that the sisters may have approved of Darwin's ideas about speciation and natural selection, even if they also collaborated with the anti-evolutionist Louis Agassiz. The sisters were acknowledged as skilled researchers and observers in their time, although when Margaretta, arguably the more accomplished of the two, passed away, "the Academy of Natural Sciences announced her death...but included no details about her life or accomplishments." As a result, they were never properly acknowledged nor memorialized, an erasure that may not have been intended, strictly speaking, but that "gradually accumulated until the sisters' stories faded from view." Fortunately, in a well-written book that digs deep into the literature, McNeur recovers those stories and places them in the context of a science that, for all its strides forward, took no trouble to include women in the conversation. A welcome addition to intellectual history that restores two gifted women to the scholarly record.

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Starred review from September 15, 2023
McNeur illuminates two scientific sisters, Elizabeth and Margaretta Morris, whose contributions to science had previously been erased. Margaretta was an entomologist who specialized in agricultural pests, while Elizabeth's specialty was botany. Margaretta was more well-known in her research, as Elizabeth preferred to work behind the scenes using pseudonyms and mentoring others. Still, both were noted experts and contributed much to their respective fields, including articles in journals and regular correspondence with other experts, including Charles Darwin. However, the sisters faced many challenges due to their gender. McNeur is masterful at weaving the cultural and community prejudices the sisters encountered while conducting research during the 1800s. Black-and-white images appear throughout the text, including examples of the sister's scientific drawings and specimen sheets, which lend an immediacy to the text. In the final chapter, McNeur expounds on how and why the Morris sisters and their many contributions were erased from the historical record. With detailed research and excellent writing, McNeur has thoughtfully provided a place in history for the sisters that had previously been denied them.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.