Rosa Smith and the Gender Politics of 19th-Century Ichthyological Discovery
On a brisk March afternoon in 1880, Rosa Smith returned home after hours of tidepooling on the coast of San Diego with several specimens in tow. The inhabitants of one pool had especially interested her. In a pool “heavily lined with algae,” she had observed three scaly blennies: one “a dark brownish gray,” another of lighter gray, and a third that was “lavender in color.” Sensing something unusual about these fish, the amateur naturalist scooped them from the water and proceeded to document her discoveries in a letter to her new mentor, ichthyologist David Starr Jordan, who was stationed up the California coast in Monterey.
Jordan responded positively to Smith’s observations, encouraging her to either send him the specimens or “to describe [the species] yourself and thus have the honor of being the first woman who has entered descriptive Ichthyology.” Smith took him up on the latter invitation, drafting at least three different observations of the scaly blenny before submitting her findings to the Smithsonian.
Smith’s professional relationship with Jordan purportedly began after he unexpectedly attended one of her lectures at the San Diego Society of Natural History. It was a partnership that proved invaluable to her career in ichthyology. For the next couple of decades, they exchanged notes, supplies, and specimens by mail. Upon her mentor’s advice, Smith altered the initial draft of what would become her first scientific publication to better relay the fishes’ color in life in order to distinguish her scholarly work and discoveries from those of other scientists. The final observation, titled “On the Occurrence of a Species of Cremnobates at San Diego, California,” was published in the 1880 edition of the Proceedings of the United States National Museum, marking Smith’s formal entrance into the American scientific academy at the age of 22. The drafting of this publication reveals the ways empirical debates in the field of ichthyology converged with 19th-century gender politics.
Photograph of a young Rosa Smith. From the Eigenmann manuscript collection at the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Fish presented empirical challenges to ichthyologists since specimens were quick to decay and disintegrate. Smith recounted submitting her specimens as a kind of limbo: keeping the fish alive in baths of salt water just long enough to document their colors but transferring them to vials of alcohol shortly after. This is where the fish’s gleaming colors fell away. Smith lamented this transformation while describing fading colors of the vibrantly orange Garibaldi damselfish, remarking, “Thus it is with many fishes, whose fine iridescence is succeeded by a sombre, lusterless gray when the fish dies.”
Nearly all 19th-century ichthyologists shared this frustrating experience. Naturalist William Swainson wrote in 1822, “The impossibility of preserving the beautiful but evanescent colours of fish, and the unsightly appearance they generally present in spirits, have conspired to render our knowledge of these animals very imperfect.” As 21st-century researchers have discovered, a fish’s changing iridescence and color are qualities specific to the animal in its natural habitat; its iridescence is caused by guanine crystals which can shift shape and, therefore, color according to different light levels. In many ways, a fish’s colors in life are contingent upon the dynamic relationship it shares with its natural environment. Though modern scientific photography has changed things for fish scientists, in the 19th-century, a fish’s colors were nearly impossible to document or preserve with total accuracy once removed from the water, as processes of decomposition changed the specimen’s materiality, including its color. Written description was one way scientists attempted to preserve these qualities as the specimen’s colors quickly turned gray once it was plucked from its natural habitat.
Smith’s first species observations show the ways she attempted to re-compose the color of her scaly blennies as they were in life. The first known draft of this work is a strict anatomical description, without any reference to color. Later drafts, however, give a fuller picture of the challenges Smith encountered during revision. Take, for instance, the following passage:
Color varies in three individuals. One is a dark brownish grey, another of equal size (2 ⅛ inches long) is lighter, while a third of 1 ½ inches in length is lavender in color. The markings are similar on all my specimens, each being maculated with a darker shade of its own color; the dorsal region is always darkest and each individual has an ocellated spot [^black with narrow pale edges] on posterior portion of dorsal fin. Fins colored except caudal which is translucent. Pectoral fins reddish at base, with a black bar, the rest of the fin pale with dark cross bars. Ventrals barred. Caudae with a dark bar at base, the rest of the fin translucent, faintly barredwith narrow dark bars formed of spots..
In this draft, the account of the fishes’ color in life is refined through revision. An initially vague description of the fishes’ appearance is struck through and replaced with an extended description of the color of the different pectoral and caudae (tail) fins, as well as the fishes’ abdomen. The first published version of Smith’s observation contains even further revisions. “Edges” become “edging,” “reddish” becomes “reddish violet,” and “black bar” becomes “black crescent.” As her observations indicate, even if the preservation of color was not possible through the chemical immersion of the fish specimen, it was at least attempted through language. Her writing process indicates the perpetually elusive encounter between scientist and the specimen, and her written observation of the three scaly blennies stands as only a temporary approximation of iridescent colors that had originally beamed through the surface of Smith’s beloved tidepools.
Photograph of an elderly Rosa Smith, holding a photograph of a fish. From the Eigenmann manuscript collection at the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington.
While the process of ichthyological species observation was messy and malodorous, Smith found beauty in fish, animals she likened to “animated flowers.” In a public lecture, Smith compared them both to butterflies and blossoms, describing her tidepool friends as “lovely” and “charming.” Yet, in her scientific writing, she distinguished herself not by using feminine vocabulary for her observations, but instead by adopting phrases that appeared in many other species descriptions and observations authored by men. In the publication where Smith’s first observation appeared, for instance, the verbiage of “dark bars,” “ocellated spot[s],” and color maculation appears throughout several entries by different authors, not just Smith’s own observation.
In fact, Smith resisted the special distinction that sometimes came with being a woman in science. In an 1892 piece for The West American Scientist, she denounced the patronizing encouragement that often accompanied women’s scientific work, arguing, “Comparatively speaking, so few women have entered this field of knowledge that when one does accomplish somewhat she is as loudly lauded as the precocious child. But in science as everywhere else in the domain of thought women should be judged by the same standard as her brother. Her work must not be simply very well done for a woman.” In the same essay, she described the importance of professional mentorship while going on to extensively highlight the accomplishments of her women peers.
“Conditionally welcomed into research expeditions, experimental laboratories, and scientific academies, as Smith later described, women were obliged to adopt the empirical vocabulary of “their masculine friends” in order to carve a space for themselves in science.”
Smith’s resistance to standing out as a woman scientist and her ready adoption of the common scientific language of ichthyology reflects and extends the 19th-century phenomenon of communitarian objectivity. The term, coined by historian Lorraine Daston, describes the standardization of scientific language “to achieve communicability and commensurability across continents and centuries, perhaps even across planets.” One of the goals of the Smithsonian’s Proceedings, for instance, was to support a common repository for scientists seeking to identify specimens they hadn’t seen before.
For Smith, however, achieving such communicability was also necessary both for proving her ichthyological expertise and for differentiating her species observations from the work of other professional ichthyologists, nearly all of whom were men. As much as she might have tried outwardly to resist the politics of her field, the objectivity for which Smith strived was inextricable from her negotiation of gender dynamics during an important time of scientific inquiry in the field of ichthyology. Smith’s experiences were representative of other women scientists working in the late-19th-century. Conditionally welcomed into research expeditions, experimental laboratories, and scientific academies, as Smith later described, women were obliged to adopt the empirical vocabulary of “their masculine friends” in order to carve a space for themselves in science.
*Author’s note: Smith’s letters and paper drafts come from the Rosa Eigenmann papers at the Office of University Archives and Records Management, Indiana University, Bloomington and the Eigenmann manuscript collection at the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Further Reading
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, eds. Objectivity. Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2007.
Robert McCracken Peck, “Alcohol and Arsenic, Pepper and Pitch.” Natural History in North America, 1730-1860, edited by Sue Ann Prince. 27-53. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003.
Image credit: Header: Redspotted Blenny - Blenniella periophthalmus by zsispeo, March 15, (flickr | CC BY-SA 2.0)
