The Hidden Histories of Maps Made By Women: Early North America
In the 1970s, early in her career as map librarian at the New York Public Library, Alice Hudson started researching women mapmakers throughout history. With few other women in her chosen field, she wondered how many had come before her. “I thought I might find 10,” she tells CityLab.
But over the years, as she combed through maps, censuses, newspapers, and tips from colleagues, she was amazed by how many women there were in the early days of mapmaking. By the late ‘90s, she’d found over a thousand names of women who had drawn, published, printed, engraved, sold, or traded maps prior to 1900 alone.
Reading mainstream history books, or even CityLab’s coverage of oldmaps, you might never know that women historically had much of a role at all in cartography. But really, they’ve been involved in mapmaking about as long as any man has. This week, I’ll present a selection of maps, profiles of mapmakers, and stories that testify to this history. Women have made maps to chart territories, educate students, sell propaganda, convey data, argue policy, and make art. In other words, women have made maps, period. And they continue to, as this century’s geospatial revolution turns.
Which women, and when? Mapmaking spans genders, centuries, cultures, and technologies. A complete history of women in cartography would require many volumes of pages, and possibly a graduate degree. To make this series sensible for online readers, I’ve narrowed my selection to works by women mapping North America over the past 300 years. Within this “small” range is a diversity of stories, styles, and approaches that, collected together, should provoke curiosity about the many more ways women have mapped the world.
Cartography exploded in 17th- and 18th-century Europe, a period sometimes called the Age of Discovery. European explorers and settlers were competing for conquests and territory in the Americas, and navigational tools of all kinds proliferated and evolved in support of them. Women were involved in mapmaking during this time, though they almost invariably learned the trade through the men in their lives.
Mary Ann Roque—who was among the first women Hudson discovered in her research—was one of these mapmakers. Long after her husband, John Roque, died in 1762, she carried on his prominent London map business, printing and selling maps of the world that he had drawn. One such map of North America is on display now at the Boston Public Library, in an exhibit curated by Hudson called “Women in Cartography.”