Florence Bascom

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Florence Bascom in 1893

Florence Bascom (1862 in Williamstown, Massachusetts; died 1945) was the first woman hired by the United States Geological Survey. She was of Huguenot and Basque ancestry.

She came from an academic background as her father, John Bascom, was President of Williams College. In the 1880s she received her Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the University of Wisconsin. She received her doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 1893 and two years taught at Bryn Mawr College.

She received her position at the USGS in 1896 and continued there until 1936. She also had three students who would also become members of the USGS. Two of those students, Eleanora Bliss and Anna Jonas Stose, were also important in other respects to her story.

A great deal of her work involved the crystalline rocks and geomorphology of the Piedmont. This led to an unusual, for the time, example of a scientific dispute solely among women. The two students of Florence Bascom's mentioned above came to a different conclusion than her regarding the age of Wissahickon schist/gneiss. She contradicted them in a dispassionate way and the dispute is recorded as civil on the part of the three. That said by the 1930s it had broadened to most of those studying Appalachian geology and at times these individuals became more vehement than the original disputants.