Florence Bascom

Florence Bascom was an American geologist and educator who became a pioneering figure for women in the earth sciences. In 1893 Bascom earned a PhD from Johns Hopkins University, becoming the first woman to receive a doctorate from that institution in any field and only the second American woman to earn a doctorate in geology. In 1896 Bascom became the first woman to work as a geologist for the United States Geological Survey, where she carried out detailed fieldwork mapping the schists and gneisses of the Piedmont region across Maryland, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, identifying at least nine separate cycles of erosion in the Pennsylvania Piedmont where earlier geologists had recognized only two or three. In 1895 Bascom founded the geology department at Bryn Mawr College, building a graduate program considered one of the most rigorous of its kind in the United States and training many of the leading American women geologists of the early twentieth century. By 1930 Bascom had risen to vice president of the Geological Society of America, the first woman ever to hold that office.