Florence Bascom--Pioneering Geologist

By Eugene C. Robertson and Kathleen Gohn

Florence Bascom was the first woman geologist hired by the USGS.

Florence Bascom collected many "firsts" in her geological career: she was the first woman to receive a Ph. D. from Johns Hopkins University (sitting behind a screen so the male students wouldn't know she was there), the first woman geologist hired by the USGS, the first woman to present a scientific paper at the Geological Society of Washington, and the first woman officer of the Geological Society of America.

Dr. Bascom was born in 1862 in Williamstown, MA, and died in Northampton 83 years later. Her father, president first of Williams College and later of the University of Wisconsin, encouraged her interest in geology, and she earned bachelor's and master's degrees in geology from the University of Wisconsin in the 1880s. Her professors at Wisconsin, Roland Irving and Charles Van Hise, were also employed by the USGS, as was her professor at Johns Hopkins, George Williams. After receiving her Ph.D. in 1893, she began teaching geology at Bryn Mawr College in 1895, but she combined her teaching career with active field and laboratory work for the USGS. Bascom retired from teaching in 1928 but continued to work at the USGS until 1936.

She was an authority on the crystalline rocks of the Piedmont and published maps and folios; she also studied the geomorphology of the Mid-Atlantic Piedmont and water resources of the Philadelphia region. Her writing was vigorous and incisive; her conversation was forceful, clear, if sometimes caustic. She developed the geology curriculum at Bryn Mawr from a single course to a full major and then a graduate program, which trained most American women geologists during the first third of the 20th century. At least three of her students later joined the USGS: Eleanora Bliss Knopf, Anna Jonas Stose, and Julia Gardner.