The Woman Zoologist Who Found a Home for Her Science in Chicken Farming
Edith Nason Buckingham, the first woman to receive a PhD in Zoology from Radcliffe College in 1911, spent much of her post-graduate life owning and operating a successful chicken farm in Sudbury, Massachusetts. In some ways, this is a success story. Buckingham managed to earn a doctoral degree in a technical field during a period of widespread discrimination and hostility toward women in academic science. And unlike many isolated women scientists in the U.S. in early 20th-century, she maintained a full social and intellectual life while completing her studies. Yet, Buckingham’s story reveals just how much the deck was stacked against women scientists of her time. Despite her family’s wealth and social status and her own brilliance, Buckingham still was unable to navigate her way into the academy, instead applying her zoological training to commercial chicken farming.
The story of this virtually unknown biologist’s professional path reveals the significant ways that gender and class intersected to enable elite women who chose scientific lives in the early 1900s. Born in 1877 in Boston, Edith was the daughter of a prominent physician, Edward M. Buckingham, and she enjoyed the perks of an upper-class life. Her mother, Alice, shared her two daughters’ enthusiasm for animals and encouraged Edith’s interest in nature. In 1891, Alice wrote home to Edith and her sister Margaret after visiting a major poultry show in New York City about the “many hundred animals there” who “all wanted to talk at once.” She continued, “There were a number of incubators or hatching machines and quantities of little chicks that had been hatched during the exhibition. Some were picking their way out of the shells while we were there. I kept thinking how much you both would have enjoyed it.”
“The story of this virtually unknown biologist’s professional path reveals the significant ways that gender and class intersected to enable elite women who chose scientific lives in the early 1900s.”
The Buckinghams prioritized their daughters’ educations. Edith attended the progressive Girls Latin School and the Curtis-Peabody School, known for preparing young women for college. She enrolled in Radcliffe College, Harvard’s sister institution, in 1898 and turned her childhood love of animals into collegiate work in natural history. Buckingham became the president of the Radcliffe Science Club, which emphasized science education for future secondary school instructors. After graduating, she spent a summer at the Bermuda Biological Station for Research conducting advanced study in marine zoology. There, Buckingham’s social status set her apart from the rest of the biology party. The station’s administrators carefully assigned her the best room on the steamer from New York to Bermuda and the most well-appointed quarters at the research station’s hotel. Buckingham’s father supported her marine research, writing “I am very glad you are having so satisfactory a time, and am sure it will do you good in every way.”
In Bermuda, Buckingham interacted with exceptional women scientists including the Mt. Holyoke biologist Cornelia Clapp, Mary Alice Willcox from Wellesley, and Vassar’s Elizabeth E. Bickford, as well as a cohort of Harvard zoological men in the midst of their graduate studies. Upon her return to Boston, Buckingham remained close with these scientists. Using connections she built in Bermuda, she began her doctoral studies in zoology at Radcliffe. Radcliffe relied on Harvard’s faculty and resources, including laboratory space and instruction, which meant Buckingham did her graduate work in the exclusively male world of Harvard’s Department of Zoology and with many of the men she met studying abroad.
Unlike some of her fellow women biologists, many of whom forged career paths without the support of family and friends, Buckingham had a surprisingly social scientific life, full of collegial engagement with Harvard men and activities with friends and family. It is rare to get a glimpse of how some women scientists of the decade balanced their social and academic lives, but archival records of Buckingham’s correspondences offer a window into the ways that gender expectations outside the laboratory structured her work.
One cold spring in 1906, Buckingham wrote about spending weekends in the laboratory with three male colleagues in an attempt to teach herself paleontology by copying a set of lecture notes. She explained to her mother, “We have no instructor or assistant, but help each other.” Buckingham fit this paleontological work into a hectic schedule that included dashing out of the lab to buy a new coat, back to her bench to check on her ant research, running home to trim and refresh her hats, taking a break to review her biology notes, visiting her aunt, and making “over the sleeves of my last few years' blue silk waist…” She apologized to her mother for falling behind on her social calls: “As for me I do not have time to make any calls at present, as I am rushing now so as to not leave everything to the last minute.”
Like many of her male colleagues, after Buckingham received her PhD, she looked for teaching positions. But women scientists during this period rarely found high-status positions as teachers or researchers, even at women’s colleges. Excluded from coeducational universities due to her gender and unable to find a position in the all-male faculty at Radcliffe College, Buckingham restricted her search to secondary schools. Buckingham was well regarded as a temporary teacher, but never received a long-term position. Her lively correspondence with Harvard men, many of who were starting new college positions outside of Boston and reorienting their attention after getting married, tapered off during this time. Either Buckingham’s limited career options meant she couldn’t keep up with networks of active scientific men or such letters have been lost.
By 1920, Buckingham’s family situation changed and offered a new set of choices for her future. Within four short years, both of her parents died and her sister Margaret married her scientific colleague, Addison Gulick, and moved with him to Missouri. Buckingham became the sole owner of her family’s home in the wealthy Back Bay neighborhood of Boston and began to search for new ways to support herself. Despite flirtations with men during college, Buckingham remained unmarried, in part perhaps because men in her social circle found her academic degrees intimidating. In 1912, for instance, her cousin wrote to Buckingham about accidentally revealing to a potential suitor that she was “a lady of high degree, if not of several.” The suitor, surprised at the news, “seemed to bear up well and...his face expressed unutterable things. Being unutterable of course I cannot repeat them, but I don’t think your reputation has seriously suffered.”
Instead, Edith Buckingham found a lifelong companion in her friend Emily G. Fish. Margaret wrote about her sister’s and Fish’s relationship in 1921, saying, “I am glad that you and Emily find so much in each other, and hope that it will continue to be so. Perhaps it may work out that she can be permanently with you, if you continue to grow together.” Census records suggest that Buckingham and Fish lived together for the rest of Buckingham’s life and traveled together abroad on vacations to Bermuda and England. As with many queer histories, due to archival silences it is hard to interpret the romantic signfiicance of their relationship. But the longevity of their life together indicates that Buckingham’s elite status and the general acceptability of homosocial relationships between women at the time offered them a life of comfort together.
In 1927, Buckingham sold her family home and purchased her own commercial poultry farm in Sudbury, Massachusetts, called Featherland Farm. According to the American Poultry Journal, Featherland Farm expanded from a small poultry farm with 1,000 birds in the 1930s to a mid-size operation with 7,000 birds and diversified income from 210 acres of wheat, sweet corn, and a farm equipment rental service in the 1950s. Buckingham worked with her farm manager, Bill MacColloch, to experiment with ways to tend their flocks, electrify their barns, and market their products.
“Buckingham had all of the advantages possible as a woman pursuing a scientific career in the early 20th century and pivoted due to the impossibility of making a career out of scientific research and teaching.”
Archives from Buckingham’s life are sparse in clues about how Buckingham approached this work, or whether she found it more fulfilling than her biological research. But we do know that in her Radcliffe alumnae reports, she made it a point to state that she had a paid occupation as “[h]ead of my own farm.” Aside from her involvement in the day-to-day managing of the farm, she also became an avid dog trainer and dog breeder, specializing in breeding and showing Old English Sheep dogs. She was a founding member of the New England Old English Sheep Dog Club and contributed articles to dog magazines like the American Kennel Gazette. Buckingham also actively participated in Sudbury’s civic life, teaching Sunday school at the local Episcopal church and participating in the Sudbury Woman’s Club and the Sudbury Garden Club.
Buckingham’s obituary in the Radcliffe Quarterly described her business acumen: “What she did with that farm, raising it from minute beginnings to a large, up-to-date and very successful business, sending baby chicks by the thousands over the United States — all this speaks of untiring effort and superb ability.” Without additional archival information, it is hard to know what Buckingham thought about her life in science and her pivot to the commercial world of chicken farming. Buckingham had all of the advantages possible as a woman pursuing a scientific career in the early 20th century and pivoted due to the impossibility of making a career out of scientific research and teaching. As an unmarried woman with means, Buckingham applied this background to a different context and transformed her intellectual engagement with biological ideas into successful farm and a well-regarded reputation as a dog enthusiast. It may be impossible to know if Edith Buckingham lived the scientific life she’d dreamed of, but the one she did have was boundary-pushing for her time.
*Author’s note: All quoted Buckingham correspondence comes from the Gulick Family Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Image credit: Barnard and Briggs Halls, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass., The Tichnor Brothers Collection, ca 1930-1945 (Digital Commonwealth | Public Domain)
