Metamorphosis and One Forgotten Woman

I just finished reading Kim Todd's book Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis, another one of my sales purchases at BookPeople in Austin. Merian, the daughter of a man who owned a thriving publishing house in Frankfurt, Germany, lived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and she was among the first to realize the importance of studying insects in their environment. She spent a lifetime studying caterpillars, pupa, and butterflies; observing them in their natural habitat; identifying the food they ate; preserving their stages of development through her drawings and paintings; publishing her works to great acclaim. Well-known and respected during her lifetime, Merian's work fell into disfavor as science pushed toward professionalism, away from the dedicated amateur, and as her works were misinterpreted and misrepresented in successive translations and publications.

However, in the 1970s, original volumes of Merian's works re-surfaced from where they had been buried in St. Petersburg. (Peter the Great had purchased many of her drawings and paintings and beautifully published portfolios immediately after Merian's death in 1717. Also, one of her daughters had settled in St. Petersburg with a second husband and children.) Kim Todd's book re-examines Merian's work in order to honor Merian's contributions to science and her influence on naturalists who immediately succeeded her.

Reading this book reminded me once again of the many contributions of women to science and other fields of study, contributions that are too often overlooked, disregarded, or otherwise forgotten. Merian was working during a time when women didn't have much power in society, but she lived where there was more tolerance than one found elsewhere in Europe: Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and in the province of Friesland in the Netherlands. And she was also possessed of a strong will to go her way within the constraints of the time in which she was born. When she was fifty-two years old, she traveled to Surinam to study caterpillars and moths and butterflies there.

Yet, as Todd points out

. . .most books detailing the history of science and insect studies leave [Merian] out entirely. John Ray's biographer writes that "he grasped, as no entomologist for more than a century after him succeeded in grasping, the necessity of studying not merely the imago, but the whole metamorphosis of a species." Merian's first caterpillar book had come out twenty-six years before Ray's History of Insects.

Todd also notes, ironically, that

[t]he second edition of the 2004 textbook Forest Canopies covers the ecology of treetops, from rotifers to orangutans, as well as the history of canopy biology and the biologists who breached this new frontier. The text doesn't mention Merian, offers no hint that she was the first European to observe the life in the canopy, the first to provide the images of tree-top dwellers, to know that life was different up there. It does, however, have an image from her Surinam book, a giant silk moth hovering near a coral tree, uncredited, on the first page.

So here's to Maria Sibylla Merian--and women everywhere who do not get the credit they deserve in fields of study dominated by men.

Along those lines, my son sent us all an e-mail this weekend linking to a podcast that describes a study challenging the idea that men are better at math than women. Spread the word!