Texas A&M University Press


American Women Afield
Writings by Pioneering Women Naturalists
Edited by Marcia Myers Bonta

Early women naturalists observed nature just as their male counterparts did. Their written accounts were scientific in substance and exquisite in style.

Marcia Myers Bonta has selected the most charming and sensitive writings of twenty-five women naturalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and supplemented them with biographical profiles. From Susan Fenimore Cooper's early warnings about the profligate use of natural resources to Mary Treat's tenacious defense of her scientific discoveries and Rachel Carson's impassioned pleas to save the earth, American Women Afield catalogs the determination and devotion of these early scientists and acknowledges their contributions to ornithology, entomology, botany, agrostology, and ecology.

Each excerpt in this book reveals the important role these women played not only as writers but also as popularizers of nature study at a time when very little literature on this subject was available to the general public.

American Women Afield, written as a companion book to Bonta's earlier work, Women in the Field: America's Pioneering Women Naturalists, adds an additional dimension to female scientific history by presenting the authors' own words. Each selection is unique in style, tone, and subject and shows not only the authors' love of nature but their desire to communicate that love to others.

MARCIA MYERS BONTA is the author of five previous books, including Women in the Field, Appalachian Spring, and Appalachian Autumn, and has published more than two hundred nature-oriented articles in regional and national magazines. She lives in the mountains of central Pennsylvania.

Number Twenty: Louise Lindsey Merrick Natural Environment Series

American Women Afield
ISBN 0-89096-633-8 cloth $35.00s
ISBN 0-89096-634-6 paper $16.95

LC 94-3664. 6x9. 272 pp. 25 b&w photos. Bib.
Women's Studies. Natural History. Nature Writing.

Publication Date: February 1995.


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