In 1903, just one year after Carnegie Science’s founding, the Desert Laboratory was established on Tumamoc Hill outside Tucson, Arizona. This boundary pushing, interdisciplinary facility was devoted to the study of desert plants and how they tolerate, adapt to, and interact with their environment. Over its 37 years of active research, more than 60 investigators would visit the lab, producing over 350 papers and books. Among these researchers were several women, whose stories provide insight into the challenges faced by women pursuing scientific careers during a time when opportunities were limited. This Women’s History Month, we highlight the lives of three such women who contributed to the work of Carnegie’s Desert Laboratory.
### **Early Struggles of Women in Science**
In the early 1900s, women who wished to pursue scientific careers faced significant barriers. While education was becoming more accessible for women, societal norms relegated women to lower-paying, lower-prestige roles as assistants, technicians, or [computers](https://carnegiescience.edu/news/women-computers-mount-wilson-observatory). For many, marriage marked the end of their careers. Anti-nepotism policies, combined with societal expectations about women’s roles as wives and mothers, often restricted them to working on the margins of their fields in unpaid research positions.
Without formal employment, these women relied heavily on the support of their male counterparts for the opportunity to work in the laboratory or field—without the expectation of recognition or career advancement. Some married women continued to pursue science in this way, contributing to their husband’s work or carving out research programs of their own with the limited resources available to them.
At Carnegie Science’s Desert Laboratory, in the pioneer atmosphere of Tucson, some wives of early staff members seized the opportunity to work alongside their husbands, contributing in the laboratory and joining field expeditions through the desert, first on horseback and later by car. Though their research was published in the annual Carnegie Science Year Books and Carnegie Monograph Series, they were never formerly employed by Carnegie Science. As a result, they lacked the financial, administrative, and professional support that could have furthered their careers and made their scientific reputations more widely recognized.
Effie Southworth Spalding joined the Desert Laboratory in 1904, accompanying her husband Volney Morgan Spalding, the lab's first visiting investigator. She had already forged an impressive scientific career before arriving in Tucson and took advantage of opportunities at the Desert Laboratory.
Effie Southworth earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan in 1885 and went on to a biology fellowship at Bryn Mawr College. In 1887, she became the first woman hired as a scientist by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where she worked as an assistant mycologist. During her five years at the USDA, Effie published 12 works on parasitic fungi, notably identifying a fungus that was devastating cotton crops and suggesting control measures.
In 1895, Effie married Volney Morgan Spalding, who was the head of the Botany Department at the University of Michigan and a leading scientist in the field. She spent the next nine years conducting research and assisting her husband. In 1904, the couple relocated to the Desert Laboratory, where Volney had been offered a visiting investigator position.
In Tucson, Effie adjusted her research to study the physiology of the desert Saguaro cacti, carefully measuring the cactus' ribs to show how it swelled and shrank to accommodate water uptake and tracking Saguaro heights over time. Her research resulted in several noteworthy publications, including a Carnegie-published monograph in collaboration with the Desert Laboratory’s director Daniel T. MacDougal: _The Water Balance of Succulent Plants_. She also assisted her husband, who established 19 permanent plots for the ecological study of plant associations and their habitats.
In 1909 Volney’s ill health forced the couple’s departure from the Desert Laboratory. After her husband’s death in 1918, Effie continued her scientific career, joining the botany faculty of the University of Southern California. At the age of 62, she completed her M.S. in botany, with a thesis on cactus growth.
The Spaldings were succeeded at Carnegie Science’s Desert Laboratory by another scientific couple, Edith and Forrest Shreve, who would work at the lab until its closure in 1940. Like Effie Southworth Spalding, Edith Bellamy Shreve was a scientist in her own right, who established her own experimental research program at the lab.
Edith Bellamy earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and physics from the University of Chicago in 1902. In 1909 she married Forrest Shreve and moved with him to Tucson, where he had recently been appointed to the Desert Laboratory staff.
In Tucson, Edith took up studies in plant physiology, a field distinct from her husband’s work in desert ecology. The Shreves never published together. But Forrest, an equality-minded Quaker with a college-educated mother, was a strong supporter of Edith’s work, who encouraged Edith and did the cooking. As the Shreves’ biographer Janice E. Bowers noted, “Edith must have been relieved to find a husband who would take her as seriously as she took herself.”
At the Desert Laboratory Edith found a scientific mentor in MacDougal, a plant physiologist and the lab’s director who gave her leftover funds for equipment and materials. Over her career, Edith would publish 10 papers based on her plant transpiration research. It was she who discovered that desert plants lose water at night and take it in during the day–a result that was in direct opposition to the conventional wisdom of the time.
In 1918, Edith gave birth to the Shreves’ only child, Margaret. Though Edith published two papers the following year and the Desert Laboratory handyman set up a “corral” for Margaret outside her office so that she could watch her daughter while working, Edith paused her research to raise and homeschool her daughter. But her interest in plant physiology didn’t wane, and she worked intermittently at the Desert Laboratory in the years that followed. In November 1938 the lab’s chemistry building, which housed decades of Edith’s research notes, burned to the ground. Her husband wrote in his diary “It is a sad spectacle and a heavy blow to Edith.” Within a couple years she would retire from plant physiology for good.
In 1917, ecologist Frederic Clements was hired by Carnegie Science, bringing with him his wife Edith Schwartz Clements. Like Effie Southworth Spalding and Edith Bellamy Shreve, Edith Schwartz Clements was a trained scientist. But instead of developing her own research program, Edith collaborated closely with her husband for their entire careers.
Edith and Frederic Clements met at the University of Nebraska, where, with his encouragement, she switched her major from German to botanical studies. She earned her Ph.D. in 1907, becoming the first woman at the university to do so. Early in their marriage, the couple established an Alpine Laboratory at Pikes Peak, Colorado, and once Frederic was hired by Carnegie Science, they would split their time between the Alpine Laboratory, which became an outpost of the institution, and the Desert Laboratory, with many fieldwork trips and excursions by car. During the 1930s, the Clements travelled throughout the Great Plains and Southwest, studying the destructive effects of the Dust Bowl and working to implement land management and conservation measures.
Frederic Clements, was the best-known ecologist of his time and developed a controversial theory of belligerent succession of species. While some of his ideas have not withstood scientific scrutiny, his commanding presence and rigorous approach formed the backbone of American ecology in the early twentieth century.
Edith’s contribution to this work is difficult to pin down. Some historians suggest that Edith served largely as a facilitator for her husband, while others emphasize that her role in their extraordinary partnership should not be undervalued. What’s clear is that the couple was inseparable, travelling, working, and publishing together with Edith filling the role of field assistant, illustrator, photographer, secretary, editor, translator, and chauffeur. She ran the lab and taught botany at the Alpine Laboratory and earned renown for her botanical illustrations, publishing four popular books on the flowers of western America. At the age of 86, Edith published A_dventures in Ecology: Half a Million Miles: From Mud to Macadam_, a memoir that chronicled the couple’s decades-long partnership in plant ecology.
The stories of Effie Southworth Spalding, Edith Bellamy Shreve, and Edith Schwartz Clements illuminate the often-overlooked experiences and contributions of early women scientists. These women persevered in the face of systemic barriers that denied them formal positions, contributing to the fields of plant biology and ecology, and paving the way for future generations of women scientists.
Their contributions have seldom been acknowledged in the annals of scientific history. Nevertheless, these women grasped the opportunities available to them to advance our understanding of the natural world. We’ll never know the full extent of what they could have accomplished if given the same institutional support as their male counterparts, but we do know this: They went to work, and they made an indelible impact.
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* Bonta, Marcia. _American Women Afield: Writings by Pioneering Women Naturalists_.Texas A&M University Press, 1995.
* Bowers, Janice E. “A Career of Her Own: Edith Shreve at the Desert Laboratory.” _Desert Plants_, vol. 8, no. 1, 1986.
* Bowers, Janice E. _A Sense of Place: The Life and Work of Forrest Shreve_. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1988
* Bowers, Janice E. “A Debt to the Future: Scientific Achievements of the Desert Laboratory, Tumamoc Hill, Tucson, Arizona.” _Desert Plants_, vol. 10, no. 1, 1990.
* Clements, Edith. _Adventures in Ecology: Half a Million Miles: From Mud to Macadam_. New York: Pageant Press, 1960.
* Craig, Patricia. _Centennial History of the Carnegie Institution of Washington: The Department of Plant Biology_. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
* Creese, Mary R S. _Ladies in the Laboratory?: American and British Women in Science, 1800-1900: A Survey of Their Contributions to Research_. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1998.
* MacDougal, D. T., and Effie S. Spalding. _The Water Balance of Succulent Plants_. Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1910.
* Ristaino, Jean, and Paul Peterson. “Pioneering Women in Plant Pathology, Part I: Effie A. Southworth, First Woman Plant Pathologist Hired at USDA.” _The Plant Health Instructor_, vol 1, 2001.
* Rossiter, Margaret W. _Women Scientists in America. Volume One, Struggles and Strategies to 194_0\. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.
* Trefil, James and Margaret Hindle Hazen. _Good Seeing: A Century of Science at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1902- 2002_. Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 2002.