Map Worlds: A History of Women in Cartography

13. Gender Shifts

269 CHAPTER 13 Gender Shifts Our story of women in historical and contemporary cartography does not easily lend itself to creating a grand narrative, whether feminist or otherwise . Aside from the inconsistent and incomplete historical record of women’s participation in cartography, cartography spans too many cultures and too many varied periods to warrant an easy explanation. Nevertheless, the reader is entitled to ask two fundamental questions: (1) What can one learn from tracing the engagement of women with cartography (primarily since the sixteenth century)? and (2) What is the relevance of our findings when we relate those findings to the feminist discourse about women and cartography? Many scholars acknowledge that the historical record has been slow in recognizing the involvement of women in map-making. Moreover, those responsible for developing that historical record have carved out particular niches and decided which of those niches belong to map-making. If one would explore map-making in previous eras, would one include printers? Publishers? The business widows of the seventeenth century who ran mapping firms? Colourists? Engravers? The niches get more complex as one moves forward through time: globe makers, geography teachers, academics , map librarians, map archivists, and so on. How would one go about arriving at such a boundary? Those steeped in historical cartography bring in CHAPTER 13 270 assumptions about the field that make integral sense to them, but boundaries can be arbitrary. Even when we speak of the “margins” of these niches, we unwittingly underscore, according to Adams and Tancred (2000: 122), the male discourse as to what is regarded as important, or not. Hence, the idea of map worlds is a good one. It invites us to consider wider aspects of cartography than are normally included. THE ENGAGEMENT OF WOMEN IN THE HISTORY OF CARTOGRAPHY Map Worlds shows an unmistakable engagement of women in cartography. It took the efforts of Alice Hudson (1989, 1999a, 1999b, 2000) and of Hudson and Mary Ritzlin (2000a, 2000b), when they published their lists of pre-twentieth-century women in cartography, to demonstrate that women’s engagements in cartography were extensive and influential. Soon thereafter, other scholars (e.g., Huffman, 1997) became apprised of the works by Hudson and Ritzlin and began contemplating the implications of a feminist cartography and geography. The root argument always began with a reflection on the historical contributions of women to cartography. Hence, they justifiably turned to the lists generated by Hudson and Ritzlin, the New York City map librarian and owner of a Chicago-area map antiquarian shop, respectively . Those lists set the whole study of women in cartography, including Map Worlds, into motion. The search for early women cartographers was on. We became apprised of, for example, Hoogvliet’s bold claims (1996) that women produced the thirteenth-century Ebstorf map; Barbara Whitby (2005) provided details of Shanawdithit (ca. 1800–1829), a Beothuk, producing some maps in the nineteenth century. Mina Hubbard (1870–1956) mapped Labrador (Chapter 5). Numerous other studies piqued interest in the subject matter. While Map Worlds followed in their footsteps, highlighting specific women in early cartography , it has placed their participation in a social and historical context. Drawing on a wide swath of Dutch, English, French, German, and Norwegian sources, the book points to the deep relevance of women in the map trades: for example, when it came to creating, maintaining, and developing the famed Houses of Cartography in the Low Lands in the golden age of cartography (Chapter 3), when masses of schoolgirls at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created embroidered maps, or when one finds a wealth of women engravers, such as Eliza Coles, who was America’s first map engraver. Moreover, in both Europe and the United States, women ran numerous map businesses (Chapter 4). Of further note is Kirstine GENDER SHIFTS 271 Colban (a.k.a. Stine Aas), who was among the first to have produced perspective maps. Map Worlds, it is hoped, does more than reclaim the past of women’s engagement in cartography: it constructs a link between women and cartography, without which cartography might have looked quite different . It is a historiography that, in effect, entails both women and men, and a narrative that is shaped by the wider workings of society. The first wave corresponds to the epoch in Western cartography when map ateliers were the currency, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries . Women were engaged in specialized tasks...