Education, Ornithology and Photography in the Life of Cordelia Stanwood: 1865-1958 Cynthia Watkins Richardson
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The University of Maine DigitalCommons@UMaine Electronic Theses and Dissertations Fogler Library 2002 Picturing Nature: Education, Ornithology and Photography in the Life of Cordelia Stanwood: 1865-1958 Cynthia Watkins Richardson Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/etd Part of the Environmental Sciences Commons, Poultry or Avian Science Commons, and the Women's History Commons Recommended Citation Richardson, Cynthia Watkins, "Picturing Nature: Education, Ornithology and Photography in the Life of Cordelia Stanwood: 1865-1958" (2002). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 195. http://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/etd/195 This Open-Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UMaine. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UMaine. PICTURING NATURE: EDUCATION, ORNITHOLOGY AND PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE LIFE OF CORDELIA STANWOOD: 1865-1958 BY Cynthia Watkins Richardson B.A. University of Massachusetts at Boston, 1972 M.A. University of Southern Maine, 19% A THESIS Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (in History) The Graduate School The University of Maine December, 2002 Advisory Committee: Marli F. Weiner, Professor of History, Advisor Nathan Godfried, Professor of History Richard Judd, Professor of History William TeBrake, Professor of History Kent Ryden, Associate Professor of American and New England Studies, University of Southern Maine PICTURING NATURE: EDUCATION, ORNITHOLOGY AND PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE LIFE OF CORDELIA STANWOOD:1865-1958 I By Cynthia Watkins Richardson Thesis Advisor: Dr. Marli F. Weiner An Abstract of the Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfdlrnent of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (in History) December, 2002 The field of environmental history, with a few exceptions, has neglected gendered analysis; in addition, several women's histories have analyzed a few environmental issues, but disregard environmental scholarship. In the joining of women's and environmental history, this dissertation examines the life of one woman, Cordetia J. Stanwood of Ellsworth, Maine (1865-1958), to determine how a woman could use nature to transcend the social limits of domesticity in the early twentieth century. Research of her correspondence, published writing, photqraphy and forty years of field notes reveals that like many other women, she took advantage of technology and evolving ideas about womanhood in order to maintain her autonomy. Most important, she pioneered in bird life history and photography for ornithologists, in the process commodifying nature for her economic support. Stanwood's life as a naturalist began upon her return home to Ellsworth, Maine at the end of a nineteen-year teaching career in which she practiced nature study in the service of art instruction in the public schools. Once in Ellsworth, she became renown for her I ornithological expertise, conducting bid studies from 1904 until 1922. She contributed new frndings to ornithology and broke new ground with the bird photograph. In an era of limited professional opportunities for women, she crafted a second career as a path- breaking nature photographer, writer, and environmental advocate. Following the publication of her scientific ornithology, Stanwood pioneered the illustrated popular ornithology article. Stanwood's bird life histories make her a transitional figure in the history of ornithological writing, and her bird photographs inspired the generation of nature photographers that followed her. Stanwood distinguished herself in her work for bird conservation as a professional ornithologist, setting herself apart fiom mainstream female "club lady" conservation reformers. She shares a genre of writing with other women in her scientifically oriented writing and photography, contributing original scientific work adapted to the popular audience during a period of proliferating print and visual media At the end of her life, Stanwood donated her house, papets, and land as a house museum and sanctuary, foreshadowing the increasingly popular land conservation ethic that is widespread today. To James and Stewart, who have helped me through every stage of this project, bird by bird. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Mine has always been a "birdy" family. For Christmas, my great uncle Chester would give the family hand-cut jigsaw pw3es of bids and his own hand-made birdfeeders In an era when backyard bird feeding had not yet come into vogue, our windowsills and yards were littered with bird feeders. Uncle Chester's wife Aunt Gladys had assembled a scrapbook of color bird photographs that I longed for, and when I went to visit them over holidays I would pore over it for hours. My father's sister Aunt Polly had a huge collection of carved wooden birds that I was allowed to take down off the mantel and look at. When my brother John returned home from an expedition, he always had a report of an interesting bird. Our family friend Joan Phenix could tame birds to eat out of her hand, and she taught me how to do it. Dinner table talk sometimes consisted of the day's interesting bird sightings, and the spring season, always an exciting time following the long, snowy, wld winters in our New England climate, was filled with ecstatic reports of the fust robin, phoebe, swallow, or hummingbird. I was particularly seized with bird passion when I was around ten years old, and my family moved across town to a new house and I went to a newly-built school. The baby boom and the development of Route 128 around Boston coincided so that our town, once filled with forests and dairy fams, was giving way to tract houses, sidewalks, and crowded schools. New to this more pastoral end of town, and without any of my familiar friends, I often lingered in the schoolyard before my walk home, investigating the perimeter of the playground next to an active dairy farm. For the first time I discovered the amazing activity iii that takes place in a meadow in spring: bobolinks bubbled over the grass, meadowlarks chimed from their lookouts, and tree swallows circled and twittered over the dizzying field buzzing with insects. I loved watching the cows munching on the grass and wouM gaze at them for hours Erom my desk next to the window. Much to my horror, however, the school had a darker side. Built on three levels terraced on a hill, each section of classrooms had large windows that afforded plenty of natural light into the classroom (an innovation to me, accustomed as I was to two and three-story classrooms with small thickly-paned windows positioned above my eyelevel). Although these windows connected the pupils to the natural world on the other side of the glass, their reflective property created a death chamber for birds. That first migratory spring ahthe school was built, the birds returned in large, energetic, love-sick flocks, only to bash themselves headlong into the glass. Usually they were just stunned, but often they would deflect off the glass with a loud thud, dropping to the pebbled drainage area beneath the window. No one ever except me ever seemed to be aware of this slaughter taking place outside the classroom; at the sound of barn! my teacher would look up in mid- sentence, glance at the window, and continue talking. At the end of the day, after all the other children had sped out of the school yard, I would creep around looking for the brightly colored bodies of the returning bashed birds. Carefidly I would wrap them in remnants of my brother's outgrown flannel shirts and carry them home in the brown paper bag left over from the lunch I had brought to school. Once home, I would spread their wings out on my desk and carellly sketch their bodies, each wing feather exactly positioned, each barb and spicule rendered on paper with my sharply pointed drawing pencil. Fascinated with their curled toes and scaly, prehistoric- looking feet, I studied the differences between the shape of the toes of woodpeckers, swallows, warblers, and robins. One day, my mother came into my room unexpectedly and stopped short, sniffing the air. "What is that smell?'' she asked me. Peering at my collection of dead bi(I had collected five or six in the last two or three days) she was horrified. "How morbid!" she exclaimed. "Get rid of those poor dead creatures!" I also did not know that I had been illegally possessing migratory birds. Forced to give up my treasures, I buried them in the woods behind my house, giving them a funeral to the tune of "All Things Bright and Beautifid." My father convinced my mother that I did not need to see a psychiatrist because I was fascinated with death; he knew I was just fkcbted with the birds. There followed many trips to the hobby shop, where my mother would purchase plastic models of birds that I would snap together and then paint by number over their rigid bodies. Out of scale and lifeless, these birds did not interest me long, despite the hesof the paint. One day, my father came into my room bearing a sheaf of yellowed clippings. "I found some of my old scrapbook things, and I thought you might like them for your bulletin board. Take a look at this one." Amongst the scattered clippings of robins and bluebirds posed on plants floating in mid air was a rectangular black and white magazine photograph of six little chick& perched on a branch. One little bid had a piece of moss clinging to it.feet, and each of the little birds was looking up at the camera with an attentive gaze that I would learn was similar to that made famous by the "Little Folks" photography studio in Boston. Enchanted, I pinned the photograph up on my bulletin board, where it retained a position of honor until ten years later when we moved out of the house.