Bertha Stoneman

Bertha Stoneman (August 18, 1866 – April 30, 1943) was an American-born South African botanist. She was president of Huguenot College from 1921 to 1933, and founder of the South African Association of University Women.

Bertha Stoneman
Alma materCornell University
Occupation(s)botanist and university professor
EmployerHuguenot College
WorksPlants and their ways in South Africa
Scientific career
Notable students

Early life and education

Bertha Stoneman was born on a farm near Jamestown, New York, the daughter of Byron Stoneman and Mary Jane Markaham Stoneman. Her aunt, Kate Stoneman,[1] was the first woman admitted to the New York State bar, and her uncle George Stoneman was a general in the American Civil War and later governor of California. Bertha Stoneman completed undergraduate and doctoral studies in botany at Cornell University in 1894 and 1896, respectively.[2] Her dissertation research involved anthracnoses.[3]

Career
an illustration from Bertha Stoneman, Plants and their ways in South Africa (1915) (14773569171)

After graduate school, she accepted a position as head of the botany department at Huguenot College, a women's college in Wellington, South Africa.[4] She started Huguenot's herbarium developed its plant collection, and taught courses in psychology and logic as well as botany.[5] In 1923 she founded the South African Federation of University Women, and served as its first president. She became president of Huguenot University College in 1921,[6] and retired from that position in 1933.[7] Stoneman's textbook, Plants and their Ways in South Africa (1906),[8][9] was a widely assigned text in South African schools, for several decades. Among her notable students were Olive Coates Palgrave and Ethel Doidge.[10]

The standard author abbreviation Stoneman is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.[11]

Personal life

Stoneman died at home in South Africa in 1943, aged 76 years.[12] Her papers are archived at Cornell University.[13] There is a botany laboratory at the University of Pretoria named for Stoneman, and the South African Association of Women Graduates awards an annual fellowship in her name.[14]

References
  1. "Professor of Botany" Harrisburg Daily Independent (September 4, 1897): 7. via Newspapers.comopen access
  2. Bertha Stoneman, PhD 1894, Botany, Cornell University Graduate School.
  3. Bertha Stoneman, "A Comparative Study of the Development of Some Anthracnoses" Botanical Gazette 26(2)(August 1898): 69-120.
  4. Emmanuel D. Rudolph, "Women in Nineteenth Century American Botany; A Generally Unrecognized Constituency" American Journal of Botany 69(8)(September 1982): 1352.
  5. Ruth C. Ellenwood, "Bertha Stoneman, CHI: College President" The Anchora of Delta Gamma (January 1934): 189.
  6. "A South African Presidency" Cornell Alumni News 23(August 1921): 512.
  7. Mary R. Creese and Thomas M. Creese, Ladies in the Laboratory III: South African, Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian Women in Science: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Scarecrow Press 2010): 12-14. ISBN 9780810872899
  8. Bertha M. Stoneman, Plants and their Ways in South Africa (Longman, Green 1915).
  9. Henry C. Cowles, "A South African Textbook in Botany" Botanical Gazette 43(2)(February 1907): 139-140.
  10. "Ethel Mary Doidge" JStor Global Plants.
  11. International Plant Names Index.  Stoneman.
  12. "Native of Chautauqua Dies in South Africa" Dunkirk Evening Observer (May 1, 1943): 4. via Newspapers.comopen access
  13. Guide to the Bertha Stoneman Papers, 1894-1945, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
  14. South African Association of Women Graduates, National Fellowship Awards 2016.
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