Alice Carter Cook

Alice Carter Cook
Born
Alice Carter

(1868-04-08)April 8, 1868
New York City
DiedJune 14, 1943(1943-06-14) (aged 75)
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater
SpouseOrator Fuller Cook
Children4, including Robert C. Cook
Scientific career
FieldsBotany

Alice Carter Cook (April 8, 1868 – June 14, 1943), (born Alice Carter), was an American botanist and author whose plant collections are now held by the Smithsonian Institution and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.

Cook was the first woman to receive a PhD in botany from an American university.

Biography

Carter was born in New York City on April 8, 1868 to Samuel Thompson Carter and Alantha Carter (née Pratt). Her father was a clergyman in Huntington, New York.[1]

Carter studied at Mount Holyoke Seminary before enrolling at Syracuse University for her doctorate. She graduated in 1888, receiving the first doctorate in botany for a woman from an American University.

Carter taught at Mount Holyoke for three years before attending Cornell University where she earned an M.S. in botany, in 1892. That same year, she married botanist Orator Fuller Cook. The couple later traveled on expeditions to Africa and the Canary Islands.

Cook worked with botanist Henrietta Hooker. Cook had two sons and two daughters; her son Robert Carter Cook became a geneticist and demographer.[2]

Cook died on June 14, 1943. Her plant collections were donated to the Smithsonian Institution and the Academy of Natural Sciences.

Publications

In addition to botanical publications, Cook contributed several articles to Popular Science Monthly and Ladies' Home Journal. .[3][4][5][6]

Cook also wrote an anthropological profile of the indigenous native people of the Canary Islands, and published poems, short stories, and two plays.[3]

References

  1. ^ "Cook, Orator Fuller". National Cyclopedia of American Biography. Vol. 38. Clifton, NJ: J. T. White. 1953. pp. 369–370.
  2. ^ Cook, Joan (January 9, 1991). "Robert C. Cook, 92, A Longtime Scholar Of Human Genetics". The New York Times.
  3. ^ a b Mary R.S. Creese (2000). Ladies in the Laboratory? American and British Women in Science, 1800-1900: A Survey of Their Contributions to Research. Scarecrow Press. pp. 9–10. ISBN 978-0-585-27684-7.
  4. ^ Rossiter, Margaret W. (1984). Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Johns Hopkins paperbacks ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 343–344. ISBN 9780801825095. There were by 1892 also two American women Ph.D.s in botany, Alice Carter Cook (1888) and Henrietta Hooker (1889), both from Syracuse University…
  5. ^ Leonard, John William (1914). "Cook, Alice Carter". Woman's Who's who of America: A Biographical Dictionary of Contemporary Women of the United States and Canada. Vol. 1. American Commonwealth Company. p. 201.
  6. ^ Mears, James A. (1981). "Guide to Plant Collectors Represented in the Herbarium of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia". Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. 133: 141–165. JSTOR 4064771.
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Alice Carter Cook