Women in American Cartography : An Invisible Social History

Major histories of cartography have largely ignored women’s contributions to mapmaking. Women in American Cartography examines the work of over fifty American women cartographers from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century.

Although women have been involved in mapping throughout history, their story has largely been hidden. Standard histories of cartography have focused on men and maps and only rarely is a woman’s name found. Judith Tyner argues that the women were not deliberately erased but overlooked because of the types of maps they made and the jobs they held.In American Women in cartography Tyner looks at over 50 women exemplars who made maps in America and the various types of maps they made. She looks at teachers who made school atlases and taught students to make maps in the early 19th century, at pictorial mapmakers and book illustrators who created ‘popular maps’, at women who were pioneers in social mapping and persuasive mapping promoting causes like suffrage, women travelers who recorded their trips on maps and mapped unexplored places, at women who made the maps that helped win WWII, at women academics who studied and wrote on cartographic theory and taught cartography to both male and female students at colleges and universities, and women who worked in government agencies and commercial mapping companies. These women are the tip of the iceberg of the history of women in American cartography.