Abstract

Although women had long contributed to geological knowledge, it was only in the late nineteenth century — and especially in Cambridge — that they started to gain formal training, publication opportunities, and research positions. Among the most prominent women geologists in this period were the charismatic Gertrude Elles and Ethel Wood, two Newnham-College-trained researchers who would collaborate on the epochal Monograph of British Graptolites(1901–1918), edited by Charles Lapworth. Classifying and illustrating these tiny, pencil-scratch-like invertebrates was a technical challenge, but one with immense importance for biostratigraphy — and a subject so far largely overlooked by historians of science. Drawing on the Sedgwick Museum archives, this talk explores how Elles, Wood, and Lapworth made graptolites newly 'readable'. In the process, we will see how they wrestled with obscure printing technologies, advocated for more 'objective' methods in palaeontology, and imagine what it meant to be a woman geologist in the modern world.