Map Worlds: A History of Women in Cartography by Will C. Van Den Hoonaard (review)

Often in feminist scholarship words like cartography, mappings, politics of space, and border crossings are liberally used to advance global, local, and transnational understandings of women’s unequal movements in the world – in private or in public. However, Will C. Van Den Hoonaard’s Map Worlds: A History of Women in Cartography restores these terms back to their origins in the field of map-making. Within the profession of cartography, these terms serve as more than metaphors, but they also demonstrate women’s central roles in the profession. Indeed, many would be stunned to know that women have been involved in map-making from its inception, as some of the earliest map-makers were medieval nuns who used symbolic representations of space in rendering the world.

Van Den Hoonaard’s book is an exhaustively detailed work that traces women’s roles in cartography from the medieval era to our own contemporary period of Google Maps and GPS. Integral to his focus is the way that women can participate in the field of map-making, indeed lay many of its foundations, and yet remain on the margins of the profession. Like so many other women in STEM fields, their labour is often taken for granted as they remain in the shadows of science and technology. Van Den Hoonaard combines historical research with qualitative and quantitative data, reproducing historical images of maps and women at work while also including charts and graphs and featuring various interviews with contemporary women map-makers. This makes for a useful and worthwhile resource on the subject, but sometimes the overwhelming data made for dull and weary reading.

Van Den Hoonaard highlights the particular ways of women’s work – their attention to details, their sense of aesthetics – that make them ideal map-makers. However, the author never essentializes women as if these qualities are innate to their gender. Rather, we are shown in different ways how women’s socialization – from being chosen to design maps as an extension of weaving and engaging in crafts to developing skills through different families entering the map profession – contributed to their ascendancy. Some of the more engaging anecdotes from presentday interviewees discuss women’s love of cartography since elementary school, where they may have been encouraged by teachers who incorporated maps in hands-on geography lessons. Their sense of design and aesthetics overlaps with their practical uses of mathematics and other scientific methods. Indeed, Map Worlds demonstrates how women in the field continue to stress utility over abstract appreciation for world maps and atlases – a value that may shed light on the different pedagogical outreach needed to attract more women and girls to STEM fields.

Such hands-on work has altered over time with each new technology, whether brought on by the printing press or by the digitization of today’s maps. These technologies, which also shifted the skills needed for the profession, also marginalized women since cartography became more masculinized with the hiring of more men in such fields of science. Nonetheless, Van Den Hoonaard makes the argument that the inclusion of women map-makers brought with it a diversity of new uses and readings of cartography beyond simple colonization or militarization projects and toward private and interpersonal uses – a utilization, Van Den Hoonaard argues, that laid the foundation for our more interactive maps today, such as the OpenStreetMap, crowdsourcing, and other democratic uses of cartography.

Unfortunately, Map Worlds does not incorporate intersectional analyses when discussing women’s roles in cartography, so we don’t get the nuances of different experiences and expectations. Issues of race and class are elided for a more generalized perspective on the subject of “women.” Ironically, the “world” of women cartographers created in this book remains quite confining and Eurocentric in its perspective. Nonetheless, as one of the few books focusing its attention on women in the profession of map-making, it is a valuable resource.