illustrator

Read more about Mary Agnes Chase here - blog.photography.si.edu/2009/03/08/formidable/

Famous women with names U, V, X, & Y: Usula B. Marvin, geologist, Harvard-Smithsonian Center forum.wgbh.org/lecture/life-our-home-turf-scanning-solar-... Vita Sackville-West, author, gardener,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vita_Sackville-West Victoria Regina, queen Vera Brittain, author, pacifist en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Brittain Valentina Tereshkova - Russian cosmonaut en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentina_Tereshkova (lots of Valentinas en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentina) Xenia Desni, Ukranian, silent film star Yoko Ono, Japanese artist Unity Mitford, Fascist sypathizer and friend of Hitler en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_Mitford

More about Mary Agnes Chase: Botanist Mary Agnes Meara Chase was born April 20, 1869, in Illinois. Her father Martin Meara, an Irish railroad worker, was hung as a murderer when Mary Agnes was a toddler. After a elementary education in Chicago, Mary Agnes quit school to work as a newspaper typesetter, a proofreader, even as a meat inspector. She was briefly married, then widowed, at 19. She had always been artistic, and interested in plants; a minister who was also a botanist hired Mary Agnes to draw specimens of mosses he had collected. Some of her illustrations were selected for publication in scientific journals. In 1903, she took a Washington-based job as an illustrator for the US Department of Agriculture. She would eventually become a senior botanist at the Smithsonian, and one of the world's experts on grasses of North America. She went on several collecting expeditions to Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico (her personal collection was donated to the Smithsonian and the National Herbarium). Her strongly feminist politics led her to activism that endangered her government employment, including jail time and forced feedings during a hunger strike for suffrage. Here's a local history account mentioning her father's lynching, for the murder of his son, the older brother of Mary Agnes Meara: www.rootsweb.com/~ilicgs/monthly/meara2.htm

An inspiring story, of success against the odds.

Hi, I'm an admin for a group called Systematic Botany (not for "pretty flower images"), and we'd love to have this added to the group!

It's not an unidentified photographer. The credit in the lower left says "Pirie MacDonald, Photographer of Men". Also see this similar photo in the Library of Congress collection.

Thanks for the comment! You're correct, it looks like Pirie MacDonald is the photographer. I'm confirming it with the Archives of American Art and will update it once I hear from them. Cheers, Effie, Smithsonian Institution Archives

Hi, I'm an admin for a group called Painters in the Studio, and we'd love to have this added to the group!