Barbara Marchioness of Hastings (1810-1858)—Fossil Collector and ‘Lady-Geologist’

Abstract

During the first half of the nineteenth century a large group of non-professional scientists still existed in British geology. For these ‘gentleman-geologists' geology was more or less a private interest. Female counterparts or ‘lady-geologists'—following an independent research program, publishing their results, and presenting them to the contemporary scientific community—were quite rare. One of these remarkable exceptions was Barbara Marchioness of Hastings (1810-1858). She was married and a mother of seven children. She was a keen collector of fossils and sold a large collection of several thousand vertebrate fossils to the British Museum in 1855. Beginning in 1845, she undertook detailed stratigraphical fieldwork in the Eocene strata at Hordle and Beacon Cliff near Milford (Hampshire), where she produced a coloured, scale-drawn section of the strata. Between 1848 and 1853, she published three papers summarising this work. Hastings considered herself a serious geological worker and her contributions were of high quality. Her high social position ensured a reasonable reception among her male colleagues, allowing her to present a short paper at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Oxford in 1847. Nevertheless her opus is rather small compared to male contemporary geologists. Being female, she had no liberal access to the geological ‘scientific community'. Additionally, family commitments held her in Hampshire, confining her work to this restricted area.

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