Florence Bascom: A Woman Who Really Rocked

When Florence Bascom graduated from high school in Madison, Wisconsin, she was hardly fifteen years old. By the time she was twenty years old, she had obtain two degrees from the University of Wisconsin - Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Letters.

But two degrees wasn't enough for Bascom. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree two years later and three years after that, she completed a Master's degree in geology.

Geology itself was a young science. So young, in fact, that Germany had only recently developed methods of analyzing thin, translucent rock sections with microscopes and polarized light. This was during the late 1880's and there were no textbooks to study from which to study the methodology.

So Bascom studied the original German texts.

Her thirst for knowledge about geology unquenchable, Bascom applied at Johns Hopkins to earn a PhD. Johns Hopkins, however, had not yet opened its doors to women for a degree program. The executive committee allowed Bascom to attend classes without being officially enrolled.

Very cloak-and-dagger, Bascom attended classes, sitting in a corner and hidden behind a screen. Undaunted, Bascom completed difficult and solitary field work, writing a dissertation that was esteemed as "brilliant" by a writer in American Mineralogist. Bascom finally earned her Ph.D. in geology from Johns Hopkins University, the first the university had ever awarded to a woman.

Three years after receiving her degree from Johns Hopkins, Bascom was hired as the first woman geologist by the United States Geological Survey. After that, came a list of firsts for Bascom and for women:

* First woman elected to the Council of the Geological Society of America
* First woman to present a paper before the Geological Society of Washington
* First woman office of the Geological Survey of America

She was an associate editor of American Geologist Magazine for nine years. The first edition of American Men and Women of Science in 1906, listed Bascom as a four-starred geologist. This listing put her among the country's hundred leading geologists.

Bascom joined the faculty of Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania in 1895. She taught a single course in geology with no plans of creating an entirely new department. But after a few years of Bascom's successful class, Bryn Mawr established a curriculum of a major in geology.

Bascom specialized in the study of how present-day rocks were formed and focused most of her research in the mid-Atlantic Piedmont region (New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland). She wrote over forty publications on the subject of geology and her findings.

Bascom died June 18, 1945 of a cerebral hemorrhage in Williamstown, Massachusetts.