There was one woman who shows up in photographs of the Museum of Comparative Zoology entomology staff during the early to mid 1900s. She was Elizabeth Bangs Bryant. She was also an expert on the spider fauna of the Caribbean, which belies the usual idea that women are afraid of spiders.
Although she went to Radcliffe, she did not graduate with her class of 1897, possibly because of family illness, or because her family fell on temporary hard times. Having come from a well-to-do New England family she always had resources throughout her life and she became a very shrewd investor. Because she was interested in natural history she got to know the staff at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, especially the arachnologist J. H. Emerton, and was soon given responsibility for the spider collection. She really did not begin publishing seriously until she reached the age of 55, but she made up for this by turning out paper after paper, mostly on the spiders of the West Indies. Sadly, she was unable to go to these places, but depended on the MCZ collections for her taxonomic work, to a large extent because she took care of her ailing mother. Elisabeth Deichmann noted that Bryant was the only person she knew who used the term "twaddle" regularly in reference to nonsense and that she had a rather colorful vocabulary of "Yankee" expressions, for which she apologized. Bryant was white-haired at 60 and somewhat stout, with a regal bearing that earned her the nickname of "Queen Victoria," which was not actually meant to be derogatory. She was very much interested in giving money to good causes and followed that money to make sure it was used as she intended. Because she had accomplished so much in her lifetime, and although she refused to be referred as a professional, Radcliffe awarded membership in Phi Beta Kappa, and she was an ardent member and supporter of the research society of Sigma Xi.
Because she described numerous species of jumping spider (family Salticidae) from the West Indies, I used her works a lot during my own research. For a while I shared an office with a retired curator from the MCZ, Dr. Joseph Bequeart, who knew her well. He could recall his association with Bryant, Nathan Banks, and others during the first half of the Twentieth Century at the MCZ. Bequeart, who was in his eighties when I knew him, had been a specialist in Hymenoptera, but later took up land snails.
I will always owe a debt to pioneers in arachnology like Elizabeth Bangs Bryant, because they left a basis on which the rest of us were able to build.
Internet References:
Deichmann, Elisabeth. 1958. Elizabeth Bangs Bryant. Psyche 65:1-10 http://psyche.entclub.org/...
Elizabeth B. Bryant http://en.wikipedia.org/...