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List of women mapmakers cartographica5/21/2023 ![]() ![]() Long after her husband, John Roque, died in 1762, she carried on his prominent London map business, printing and selling maps of the world that he had drawn. Mary Ann Roque-who was among the first women Hudson discovered in her research-was one of these mapmakers. ![]() Women were involved in mapmaking during this time, though they almost invariably learned the trade through the men in their lives. European explorers and settlers were competing for conquests and territory in the Americas, and navigational tools of all kinds proliferated and evolved in support of them. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library / CityLab)Ĭartography exploded in 17th- and 18th-century Europe, a period sometimes called the Age of Discovery. Marie Catherine Haussard engraved the cartouche on Partie de l'Amérique septent? qui Comprend la Nouvelle France ou le Canada, by Gilles Robert de Vaugondy, 1755. Within this “small” range is a diversity of stories, styles, and approaches that, collected together, should provoke curiosity about the many more ways women have mapped the world. I’ve narrowed my selection to works by women mapping North America over the past 300 years. A complete history of women in cartography would require many volumes of pages, and possibly a graduate degree. Which women, and when? Mapmaking spans genders, centuries, cultures, and technologies. And they continue to, as this century’s geospatial revolution turns. ![]() In other words, women have made maps, period. Women have made maps to chart territories, educate students, sell propaganda, convey data, argue policy, and make art. But really, they’ve been involved in mapmaking about as long as any man has. Reading mainstream history books, or coverage of old maps, you might never know that women historically had much of a role at all in cartography. By the late ‘90s, she’d found over a thousand names of women who had drawn, published, printed, engraved, sold, or traded maps prior to 1900 alone. “I thought I might find 10,” she tells CityLab.īut over the years, as she combed through maps, censuses, newspapers, and tips from colleagues, she was amazed by how many women there were in the early days of mapmaking. With few other women in her chosen field, she wondered how many had come before her. In the 1970s, early in her career as map librarian at the New York Public Library, Alice Hudson started researching women mapmakers throughout history. ![]()
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