Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Charles P. Daly's Gendered Geography, 1860–1890

2008; American Association of Geographers; Volume: 98; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00045600802262299

1467-8306

Karen M. Morin,

History of Science and Natural History

Abstract The American Geographical Society (AGS) serves as a case study for considering the nature of “gendered geography” in the nineteenth-century United States. This article links the ideals and programmatic interests of the society—which were fundamentally commercial in nature—with the personal subjectivity of its chief protagonist, Charles P. Daly, AGS president from 1864 until his death in 1899. Daly is presented as an “armchair explorer” who shifted the focus of the society away from statistical representations of the world toward the action-packed narrative descriptions of the world supplied by embodied explorers in the field. The gender dynamics associated with the center versus the field provide a useful way to contrast both sides of Daly's persona—as a scholar performing detached, careful study yet someone who also derived a great deal of personal authority by staging popular and dramatic spectacles in New York City, speechifying and presenting himself on stage at geographical society meetings with returning heroic explorers. Daly not only served as New York's most influential access point to the Arctic at the time, he also served as an important node in the reproduction of masculine culture in promotion of a particularly masculinist commercial geography. La Sociedad Americana de Geografía (American Geographical Society, AGS) sirve como un caso práctico para analizar la naturaleza de la “geografía basada en el género” del Siglo XIX en Estados Unidos. En este artículo se relacionan los ideales y los intereses programáticos de la sociedad, cuya naturaleza era fundamentalmente comercial, con la subjetividad personal de su principal protagonista, Charles P. Daly, presidente de la AGS desde 1864 hasta su fallecimiento en 1899. Daly es presentado como un “explorador de sillón” que desvió el enfoque de la sociedad en las representaciones estadísticas del mundo hacia descripciones narrativas llenas de acción presentadas por exploradores integrados en el campo. La dinámica del género asociada con el centro, a diferencia del campo, proporciona una manera útil de contrastar ambos aspectos de la persona de Daly, un estudioso que realizaba investigaciones minuciosas pero distanciadas, que a la vez obtenía una autoridad personal significativa poniendo en escena espectáculos populares y dramáticos en la Ciudad de Nueva York, haciendo peroratas prolijas y presentándose él mismo en el estrado de reuniones de la sociedad geográfica con heroicos exploradores de regreso de sus viajes. Daly no sólo fue el punto de acceso al Ártico más influyente de Nueva York en esa época, sino que también sirvió como un núcleo importante en la reproducción de la cultura masculina para la promoción de una geografía comercial particularmente masculina. Key Words: American Geographical SocietyCharles Patrick Dalygender and geographyhistory of geographymasculinity关键词: 美国地理协会查尔斯.达利性别和地理学地理学史男性化Palabras clave: Sociedad Americana de GeografíaCharles Patrick Dalygénero y geografíahistoria de la geografíamasculinidad Acknowledgments This article is part of a book-length project that I have been waltzing around for many years, with the help of many individuals and institutions. My sincerest thanks to Matt Hannah (see Note 6), Felix Driver, Susan Schulten, Cheryl McEwan, and Jeanne Kay Guelke for commenting on an earlier draft of the article, and to Audrey Kobayashi and three anonymous referees who helped me further sharpen my analysis. This research was funded by two grants from the National Science Foundation, a Senior Scholar Fellowship from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and Bucknell University's Provost's Office and Geography Department. Many supported the research through archival know-how, especially Candice Hinckley of Bucknell's interlibrary loan department; my terrific teaching assistant Liz Marut, who patiently muddled through so much boring microfilm; and the gracious staff at the New York Public Library's Manuscripts and Archives Division. I also want to warmly thank AGS staff members Mary Lynne Bird and Peter Lewis, and former AGS cartographer Miklos Pinther, who generously shared their time, space, and knowledge during the early stages of the project. Notes 1. Very few scholarly works are available on the AGS, for reasons beyond the purview of this research. They include Wright's (1952) Wright, J. K. 1952. Geography in the making: The American Geographical Society 1851–1951., New York: American Geographical Society. [Google Scholar] institutional history, which tracks the AGS up to 1951, and Ruiz's (1975) Ruiz, E. 1975. “Geography and diplomacy: The American Geographical Society and the “geopolitical” background of American foreign policy, 1848–1861. dissertation Ph.D.”. Northern Illinois University. [Google Scholar] dissertation that covers similar material. Smith's (2003) Smith, N. 2003. American empire: Roosevelt's geographer and the prelude to globalization., Berkeley: University of California Press. [Google Scholar] study focuses on the influential twentieth-century director of the AGS, Isaiah Bowman, beginning around 1915; and several works detail women of the AGS, including Monk (2003) Monk, J. 2003. Women's worlds at the American Geographical Society.. Geographical Review, 93(2): 237–57. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar] and McMannis (1996) McMannis, D. 1996. Leading ladies at the AGS.. Geographical Review, 86: 270–77. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]. Other works make only brief mention of the AGS (e.g., Schulten 2001 Schulten, S. 2001. The geographical imagination in America, 1880–1950., Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]). 2. I develop themes surrounding Daly's Irish ethnicity in more specificity in a larger, book-length project. 3. Schulten (2001, 13, 52–62), in her study of the National Geographical Society, argues that American geography ca 1880 foregrounded resource development and economic expansion. Of course, there were other geographical societies, perhaps most notably in Brazil and in France, with a focus that was likewise commercial in nature. For discussion of the Commercial Geographical Society of Paris, for example, see Schneider (1982) Schneider, W. H. 1982. An empire for the masses: The French popular image of Africa, 1870–1900., Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. [Google Scholar]. 4. Driver (2001, 46–47) characterizes the RGS as an information exchange center, or “interest group,” because its concerns and membership were so large and diverse: “a site where competing visions of geography were debated and put into practice”; whereas work of the Linnean Society or Hooker Museum/Kew Gardens, by contrast, could be characterized as a “centre of calculation” (after Latour 1987 Latour, B. 1987. Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society., Milton Keynes, U.K.: Open University Press. [Google Scholar])—a highly centralized collecting and control center. 5. The amended charter of 1871 read: “The object of said Society shall be the advancement of geographical science; the collection, classification, and scientific arrangement of statistics and their results; the encouragement of explorations for the more thorough knowledge of all parts of the North American continent and of other parts of the world which may be imperfectly known; the collection and diffusion of geographical, statistical, and scientific knowledge, by lectures, printed publications, or other means.” 6. I thank Matt Hannah for his insightful comments on this section; they inspired the basic concept of this article. 7. At the same time, I thank Jeanne Kay Guelke for questioning whether female “school geographers” were less statistically inclined than men. She argues (personal letter correspondence August 2005) that “probably not—deploying statistics might have been a way in which female geography textbook authors such as Emma Willard could register some authority.” Felix Driver further points out (personal letter correspondence August 2005) that men as social scientists and women as social workers might be a starting proposition, but this relationship does not fully unlock the complexities of gender and social knowledge in the late nineteenth century. He notes that “social science” enabled as much as it restricted opportunities for middle-class British women to widen their role in the public sphere, in local government, education, medicine, and journalism. 8. For example, Wylie (2002) Wylie, J. 2002. “Earthly poles: The Antarctic voyages of Scott and Amundsen”. In Postcolonial geographies, Edited by: A., Blunt and McEwan, C. 169–83. New York: Continuum.. [Google Scholar] argues that narratives of competition to be first to reach the South Pole in the early twentieth century, between Norway (Roald Amundsen) and Britain (Robert Falcon Scott), reveal the manner in which gender and national identities worked together to produce different embodied experiences, landscape vision, and field methodologies (the Norwegian technical and militaristic mode versus the British imperial mode that emphasized strain and celebration). 9. These were categorized under the headings: “Introduction” (work of geographical societies); “General Geographical Work” (which included such topics as the Arc of the Meridian and unsurveyed coasts of the world); “Physical Geography” (covering such topics as meteorology and the severity of recent winters in Europe); and “Ethnological” (discoveries of prehistoric remains at several sites in Asia, Europe, and America); with another thirteen major categories listing work by location: the Arctic, British America, the United States, West Indies, Central and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Borneo, Java, Sumatra, New Guinea, and Australia. 10. Letters from du Chaillu (NYPL Archives, Box 12) depict an intimacy between the two friends that likely influenced Daly's views on exploration of Africa as well as his geopolitics. Daly wrote in defense of du Chaillu as discoverer of the diminutive people (“pygmies”) in the Congo, with the main intent to expose Henry Morton Stanley's claims to the same as fraudulent.