Cornelia Clapp

Cornelia Maria Clapp (March 17, 1849 – December 31, 1934) was an American zoologist and educator, specializing in marine biology. She earned the first Ph.D. in biology awarded to a woman in the United States from Syracuse University in 1889, and she would earn a second doctoral degree from the University of Chicago in 1896. Clapp was the first female researcher employed at the Marine Biological Laboratory, as well as its first female trustee. She was rated one of the top zoologists in the United States in 1903, and her name was starred in the first five editions of ''American Men of Science'' (now ''American Men and Women of Science'').

Education

Clapp matriculated at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in 1868 and completed the equivalent of an undergraduate program in 1871. (The school would not become a degree-granting college until 1888.) She would continue to pursue postgraduate studies while she taught at the school, for example by accompanying colleague (and former professor) Lydia Shattuck in 1874 to the Anderson School of Natural History on Penikese Island, an experimental residential summer school that provided women with postbaccalaureate education when it was not a formal option for them.

Since a doctorate was required for a full faculty appointment to engage in complex research, Clapp took a leave from Mount Holyoke to pursue graduate work at Syracuse University, earning a Ph.B. in 1888 and a doctoral degree in 1889, which made her the first woman in the United States to be awarded a Ph.D. in biology. In 1891, she published a paper entitle
"Some Points in the Development of the Toadfish (''Batrachus tau'')"
in which she described features of its embryonic development and nesting habits; this is one of the earliest known publications on segmentation of the toadfish egg. Her doctoral dissertation completed at the University of Chicago five years later was a continuation of her study of ''Batrachus tau'' (now known as ''Batrachoides surinamensis''), and that work was published in the ''Journal of Morphology'' in 1898.

Career

After graduating from Mount Holyoke, Clapp spent a year as a Latin teacher at a boys' boarding school, Potter Hall, in Andalusia, Pennsylvania. She returned to Mount Holyoke in 1872, teaching mathematics and natural history before becoming the college's gymnastics instructor from 1876 to 1891.

Clapp incorporated knowledge gained from her postgraduate studies at the Anderson School into her teaching, in particular adopting co-founder Agassiz's dictum "Study nature, not books!" For example, she introduced an embryology course, supplanted by specimens sent by alumni living abroad, to encourage study through hands-on laboratory experience instead of through books. Additionally, along with other New England entomologists, Clapp collected insects from the White Mountains of New Hampshire in the summer of 1875, as well as from various mid-Atlantic states, including the Johns Hopkins University marine station in Beaufort, South Carolina and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., in 1877.

Clapp also completed brief studies on chick embryos and earthworms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Williams College in the early 1880s. In 1888, Clapp began her affiliation with the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) during its inaugural session. While at the MBL, Clapp conducted laboratory research using specimens from the area and later became a lecturer and a trustee. In 1892, Clapp was one of the first women who joined the American Morphological Society (later the American Society of Zoologists and now the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology).

When she returned to Mount Holyoke after obtaining her doctoral degrees, she helped organize the department of zoology and develop its teaching facilities. She was named professor of zoology in 1904, fifteen years after her first Ph.D. Although she was primarily known as an educator and authored few scientific research papers, she was ranked one of the top 150 zoologists in the U.S. by a 1903 study reported in '' American Men of Science''. She was named professor of zoology at her alma mater in 1904, fifteen years after her first Ph.D.

Clapp retired from teaching in 1916, though she would continue her research at the MBL and remain involved with the Mount Holyoke community as professor emeritus.

Mount Holyoke awarded Clapp an honorary Sc.D. in 1921, and in 1923, $600,000 in funds was raised for a new biology building to be named the Cornelia Clapp Laboratory in her honor. The building was completed in 1924.

By 1926, she was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as her name was included in a list of special committee members that year. The rest of the committee was composed entirely of men: David Starr Jordan, Liberty H. Bailey, J. McKeen Cattell, F. V. Coville, Barton W. Evermann, J. Walter Fewkes, Samuel Garman, Leland O. Howard, Herbert Spencer Jennings, Vernon Kellogg, John C. Merriam, Henry Fairfield Osborn, George H. Parker, Charles D. Walcott, and Edmund B. Wilson.

Marine Biological Laboratory

Clapp was the first female investigator at the Marine Biological Laboratory and also served as librarian and trustee. Her affiliation with the institution ran from its opening in 1888 to her death in 1934. Clapp was instrumental in helping to establish the fledgling Marine Biological Laboratory, of which she was one of the students during MBL's inaugural season in 1888. She was adamant about the need for a library in Woods Hole with subscriptions to the top scientific journals, and she served as the first MBL librarian. In that role, she initiated an exchange program whereby the MBL sent out its ''Biological Bulletin'' and received other international journals in return, which over time added up to a magnificent collection.

Clapp was elected to the MBL Board of Trustees in 1910. While three Boston women had been appointed trustees of the MBL upon its founding (Florence M. Cushing, Susan Minns, and Anna D. Phillips), women disappeared from the board after an 1897 shake-up, when the lab's founders ceded control of the board to a national cadre of scientists. Over the next 50 years, Clapp was one of only two women (along with Ethel Brown Harvey in the 1950s) to be elected an MBL Trustee, a position she held for the rest of her life.

In 2021, the Marine Biological Laboratory renamed their primary lecture hall the Cornelia Clapp Auditorium.

Legacy

Clapp was a pioneering zoology researcher whose influence as a teacher was great and enduring at a time when the world of science was just opening up to women in the United States. She preferred fieldwork to writing publications and would dedicate much of her time to extending scientific knowledge and opportunities to women through education. For example, Louise B. Wallace, one of her students who worked as her assistant, was also published in an 1898 issue of the ''Journal of Morphology'', with an article that built upon Clapp's toadfish research. Wallace would go on to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1908.Clapp was a leading ichthyology scholar; her work on the toadfish was instrumental in correcting the idea that its egg was attached by a "sucker" to the yolk stalk, as she discovered that it was instead adhered with a disc of "transparent secretion" that she was able to separate from the membrane.

Works

* Clapp, Cornelia M. (1891)
"Some points in the development of the Toad-fish (Batrachus tau)"
Journal of Morphology. 5 (3): 494–501.

* Clapp, Cornelia M. (1898). "The lateral line system of Batrachus tau". Journal of Morphology. 15 (2): 223–264.

References

Further reading

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External links

Cornelia Clapp Papers (1868-1986)
from Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections

{{DEFAULTSORT:Clapp, Cornelia
1849 births
1934 deaths
Women zoologists
American women biologists
Mount Holyoke College alumni
Mount Holyoke College faculty
University of Chicago alumni
Syracuse University alumni
People from Montague, Massachusetts
19th-century American zoologists
20th-century American zoologists
20th-century American women scientists
19th-century American women scientists
American women academics