Women in American Cartography : An Invisible Social History

Major histories of cartography have, until recently, ignored women’s contributions to mapmaking and the assumption was that women played no role. 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. The standard histories of cartography have focused on men. A woman’s name is rarely found. In Women in American Cartography, Judith Tyner argues that women were not deliberately erased but overlooked because of the types of maps they made and the jobs they held.Tyner looks at over fifty women exemplars in American cartography and their maps. She looks at teachers who made school atlases in the early nineteenth century; at pictorial mapmakers and book illustrators who created popular maps; at women who pioneered social and persuasive mapping, promoting causes such as suffrage; at women travelers who recorded their trips and mapped unexplored places; at women whose maps helped win Word War II; at women academics who studied, taught, and wrote about cartographic theory at colleges and universities; and at women who worked in government agencies and commercial mapping companies. These are just a few of the stories of women in American cartography.