Elizabeth Shurtleff and Helen McMillin, Highways and Byways of Girl Scouting, 1927.
Caroline Gerber, from Cousins Island, Maine, graduated from Yarmouth High School in June of 2025. She completed a research internship at the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education during the summer of 2025, and is now a Freshman at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania. She plans to major in History.
Since the fall of my senior year of high school, I knew I wanted to spend my summer gaining valuable research experience prior to beginning my first year of college. It’s often difficult to find these kinds of internship opportunities before college, so I was absolutely thrilled to be able to work with Dr. Libby Bischof at the Osher Map Library this summer.
Libby, a historian and the Executive Director of the Osher Map Library, has been researching and planning various writing projects about 20th century female pictorial mapmakers for some time, but due to her busy schedule, she needed a hand in finding additional examples of these maps, creating a comprehensive list of the cartographers, and writing short biographies of these women. My internship researching American women pictorial mapmakers from the 1920s-1980s was a continuation of the work of Libby’s research assistant from last summer, Sophia Tuchinsky, who had given me a great starting place. She and Libby had created a spreadsheet with two tabs, one with several columns detailing where certain maps could be found, the titles, who made them, and what year they were published, and another with the alphabetized names of the cartographers and the space to write a short biography.
My first step in this project was to read up on pictorial maps. Libby checked out two books from the Osher Map Library for me: Stephen J. Hornsby’s Picturing America: The Golden Age of Pictorial Maps and Judith Tyner’s Women in American Cartography: An Invisible Social History. I thoroughly enjoyed these books as a student with an interest in history, but they also prepared me well for this internship by explaining the background of pictorial maps, including how these maps are defined and why so many women pursued them.
A pictorial map is a map with illustrations woven into it, usually to detail a particular story or the history of the location depicted. This style of cartography was more accessible to women because pictorial maps didn’t require as much cartographic accuracy as traditional maps, which usually required schooling and additional training, and, as such, was historically restricted to predominantly men. Many women artists and graphic designers also found pictorial mapmaking to be an accessible complement to their existing artistic practices. This was true of Elizabeth Shurtleff from Concord, New Hampshire, who studied at the school of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and then produced a variety of illustrated pictorial maps of New England and beyond in the 1920s-1940s. Pictorial maps weren’t always produced on traditional media such as paper, either. Mary Ellen Crisp (1896-1974), for example, created patterns of maps to be embroidered. Her work was sold in department stores, allowing women who were skilled in domestic crafts to practice a form of cartography. Although only one of her map designs is easily accessible online, as part of David Rumsey’s collection in California, newspapers of the time include illustrations of some of her other embroidered designs, among them, maps of the Pacific and European theaters of World War II.
Finding and tracking down the locations of the actual pictorial maps made by women was relatively easy, albeit time-consuming. I was able to browse digital maps through several online library and map dealer collections, including the Osher Map Library, the Library of Congress Map Division, the David Rumsey Map Collection, Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps, Geographicus, and Curtis Wright Maps, to name a few. To ensure I wasn’t skipping over anything, I went through each individual map labeled or categorized as “pictorial” in these collections and then determined if the maps in question were created by a woman. Sometimes, I initially believed a map to have been created by a woman cartographer, but several names that are considered to be primarily feminine today were actually used for men in the 20th century, so I ran into a few dead ends.
Although the process of looking through thousands of individual pictorial maps across various online collections took a lot of time, almost two weeks, it yielded more than 150 new names to add to the list of women pictorial mapmakers. To date, we have identified 332 pictorial maps made by 188 different women between 1920-1980.
Caroline working in the Osher Map Library & Smith Center for Cartographic Education vault.
The much more difficult part of this project was the biographical research I conducted after I researched and recorded the names of the women cartographers and the titles of their maps. During the 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon to see a map produced by a Mrs. [Husband’s first and last name], such as “Mrs. Walter Henricks.” Most of the time, although it took extra work, I was able to discover the first and last name of the woman behind the map, separate from her husband. Mrs. Walter Henricks was actually named Namée Olivia Henricks (née Price) and lived a highly interesting life, contributing to beautiful pictorial maps. I was able to find the names of these women using websites such as Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank, which provide digital archives of newspapers, some of which included announcements and articles about the publication and distribution of these pictorial maps, and occasionally additional biographical information about their creators. On these websites, I was able to search by full names and find any related newspaper articles mentioning the women I was researching. It was particularly helpful to come across wedding announcements and obituaries, as they often included important information about the people involved, such as their education and place of birth.
Other useful websites were FamilySearch and Find a Grave, which provide census records and other government documents to piece together and corroborate biographical information found in newspapers, helping me ensure that I was writing about the right person.
Overall, my internship was incredibly valuable, and confirmed that my passion in academia is history. I was fascinated by the lives of all these women, and their ability to create art and teaching materials during war, and during a period where so many of their rights were heavily restricted by society. These women proved that there were more opportunities for them than most people knew. For many of these women, cartography was a passion alongside their jobs as engineers, pilots, artists, and authors. I’m so grateful to have had this experience, and there’s still so much more to learn about these incredible women.
Louise E. Jefferson, Makers of the USA: A Friendship Map, 1957
