Every morning, I bike on Howe Street to go to work at the Peabody. I always pass by a brick apartment at 133 Howe, where undergrads or grad students typically live. Only recently did I discover that the first woman at Yale to receive a PhD in zoology used to live there too: Katharine J. Bush.
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| 133 Howe Street, where Bush lived briefly from 1908-1910. |
Katharine J. Bush (1855-1937) was the first woman at Yale to receive a PhD in zoology, and one of the first women to receive a PhD from Yale in the general sciences. She worked as an assistant to Yale invertebrate zoologist Addison E. Verrill for over twenty years and was involved in the U.S. Fish Commission.
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| Katherine J. Bush (1855-1937) |
Bush was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and grew up going to school in New Haven. At age twenty-three, Bush began working as Verrill's assistant. She was especially involved in cataloging specimens from the U.S. Fish Commission, which paid for her directly to catalog work at the Peabody Museum. Just four years after she started working for him as an assistant, Bush began co-publishing papers with Verrill.
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| Verrill & Bush co-published paper, 1898 |
In 1885, Bush began taking classes in the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale as a 'special student', while continuing her work assisting Verrill. Her sister, Charlotte Eliza Bush, also attended Sheffield as a special non-degree student. Charlotte eventually married Wesley R. Coe's, Yale's professor of biology and zoology curator in the Peabody Museum at the time. Coe was integral to Bush's dissertation work on sabellid and serpulid polychaetes, which Coe collected in Alaska on the Harriman Expedition of 1899. Bush published her paper, "Tubicolous annelids of the tribes Sabellides and Serpulides from the Pacific Ocean." in 1904.
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| Bush's dissertation on polychaetes collected on the Harriman Alaska Expedition |
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Metachone mollis Bush
(polychaete Bush described, specimen YPM IZ 002793.AN) |
I went to the nave of Yale's Sterling Memorial Library to see if Bush was featured on the large painting of first women to receive PhDs from Yale. Unfortunately, she was not. (I later discovered that this painting features women PhDs of 1894—Bush received her PhD ten years later in 1904.) The other women sporting Victorian dress and pinned hair are holding objects relevant to their fields of study—a telescope, a typewriter, an architectural model of a house. Had she been included, Bush would've held some marine invertebrate specimen.
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| Yale's First Women PhDs, 1894. Painting by Brenda Alamany, 2015. |
The only image of Bush seems to be a photo of her sitting on a dock with three other women—carcinologist Mary Jane Rathburn, Eloise Edwards, and her sister Charlotte Bush—at the Marine Biological Laboratory and United States Fish Commission Station at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Like the way she took her work in invertebrate zoology head-on, Bush looks right at the camera. Parasol in hand and floral hat on head, Bush sits tall by other women pioneering in invertebrate zoology and representing women in the sciences at the turn of the century.
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From left to right: Mary Jane Rathburn, Katharine J. Bush, Eloise Edwards, Charlotte Bush
Photo from the late 1890s |
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