‘Breaking Ground’ and Beyond: A Century of Women and Geology at OUMNH 1813-1914

When you walk around the Main Court at Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH), you might notice that something’s missing.

Looming over you are statues of Darwin, Linnaeus, Aristotle and Newton—but there’s only one woman immortalised in the space, the chemist, Dorothy Hodgkin.

Hodgkin is far from the only woman to have contributed to the scientific life of OUMNH; in ‘Breaking Ground’, you’ve heard about Mary Buckland’s collaboration with her husband, William—and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

This talk with OUMNH researcher Grace Exley will delve deep into a century of women’s involvement in the sciences at Oxford. You’ll learn more about the women featured in ‘Breaking Ground’—particularly Mary Buckland (1797-1857)—as well as others you might not have heard of, including Ann Phillips (1803-1862), Grace Prestwich (1832-1899) and Maud Healey. In telling the stories of these largely forgotten women, this talk will show that there’s another side to the history of science at OUMNH; behind the statues, there hides a long tradition of women contributing to scientific research.