Women in American Cartography: An Invisible Social History

(Hardback)

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Description

Although women have been involved in mapping throughout history, their story has largely been hidden. Standard histories of cartography have focused on men and maps and only rarely is a womans name found. Judith Tyner argues that the women were not deliberately erased but overlooked because of the types of maps they made and the jobs they held. In American Women in cartography Tyner looks at over 50 women exemplars who made maps in America and the various types of maps they made. She looks at teachers who made school atlases and taught students to make maps in the early 19th century, at pictorial mapmakers and book illustrators who created popular maps, at women who were pioneers in social mapping and persuasive mapping promoting causes like suffrage, women travelers who recorded their trips on maps and mapped unexplored places, at women who made the maps that helped win WWII, at women academics who studied and wrote on cartographic theory and taught cartography to both male and female students at colleges and universities, and women who worked in government agencies and commercial mapping companies. These women are the tip of the iceberg of the history of women in American cartography.

Reviews

"Women in American Cartography" pulls together a lifetime's of research on the place of women in cartography in the United States. Its author, Judith Tyner has a longstanding interest in the history of cartography and in particular, on the role of women therein. In summary, the volume breaks new ground by bringing together the stories of women cartographers to make sense of their contributions to the field and to show how social attitudes and circumstances shaped their opportunities to make maps.

-- "The Globe: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Map Society"

Judith Tyner's most recent book "Women in American Cartography" begins with a refreshing moment of context when she shares that she can read a map despite her gender. Tyner seeks to uncover how women have made and interacted with maps from the eighteenth century onward. This book can be viewed as something of a call to action, a roadmap gifted by Tyner to a new generation of women and male academics and cartographers.

-- "The Portolan"

Map histories have until recently largely ignored female cartographers, partly because maps were not always signed by their creators. However, as women gained greater access to education in the 19th century, geography and mapmaking became important school subjects for them. Tyner (California State Univ., Long Beach), who has written previously on embroidered maps and globes, discusses the roles of Emma Willard and the Westtown School in Pennsylvania in teaching cartography to these women. A surge of American women cartographers came during WW II, when there was an urgent need for new maps of all parts of the world. With men serving in the military, opportunities for training and employment in the field were finally made available to women, and many continued to serve in the map departments of federal and state governments, libraries, and commercial firms once the war ended. Through her investigation Tyner presents brief biographies of a number of notable women, including Marie Tharp, who mapped the ocean floor and discovered the Atlantic Rift Valley, and Gertrude Bracht, the creator of state highway maps for Oklahoma and a map of Route 66, "the Main Street of America." Summing Up: Recommended. All readership levels.

-- "Choice Reviews"

Women in American Cartography: An Invisible Social History will be of interest to students and researchers in women's and gender studies, as well as the history of cartography, and should be on the shelves of libraries supporting these programs.

-- "Cartographic Perspectives"

Women in Cartography: An Invisible Social History, by Judith Tyner, is an engaging and timely contribution to the history of cartography and the culmination of a career spent making women's contributions to map making more visible.

-- "Imago Mundi"

Author Bio

Judith Tyner is professor emerita at California State University Long Beach.