The Unsung Heroines of the California Academy of Sciences

Initially trained as a medical doctor, Katharine Brandegee, MD, was unable to establish a practice due to sexism from potential patients. This led Brandegee to the California Academy of Sciences, where she developed her passion for botany and eventually rose to the rank of curator—the first woman at the time to hold that position in a scientific museum and at the Academy.

Read Katharine Brandegee’s full untold story.

One of the Academy’s first female curators of botany, Alice Eastwood is well known for her storied career describing hundreds of plant species. She was a self-taught botanist who dramatically expanded the Academy's collections.

Eastwood became a legend among Academy curators after she broke modern-day OSHA regulations in a daring bid to save dozens of Academy specimens from the 1906 earthquake.

See how Dr. Sarah Jacobs, Curator of Botany describes Eastwood’s legacy.

An avid arachnologist, Harriet Frizzell, PhD, discovered roughly 500 new species of spiders in her lifetime, publishing extensively on their behavior and the diet of black widow spiders. She married another scientist and worked for the Academy as an independent researcher who operated out of her Missouri home.

Frizzell was the first woman in the United States to obtain a doctorate in arachnology, but never held a fully paid position in arachnology for her entire life. Her scientific legacy is often overshadowed by her role as a housewife and homemaker. 

Read Harriet Frizzell’s full untold story.

Mollusk and shell specialist Myra Keen, PhD, first developed her passion for invertebrate paleontology as a volunteer researcher at Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey, California. Keen ascended to the rank of full professor of geology at Stanford University in 1965, but was not fully compensated for much of her career as a direct result of the sexism women faced in academia. 

Keen’s experiences spurred her to speak out against a variety of topics including fair pay, unfair beauty standards, the protection of marine ecosystems, and the U.S. government’s historic and ongoing harms against Indigenous people. Keen was so beloved as a professor and researcher that she curated an entire exhibit based on correspondences she had with fans and people who loved shells. 

Read Myra Keen’s full untold story.

Elizabeth McClintock, PhD, served as the Academy’s curator of botany from 1949 to 1977, specializing in ornamental plants such as hydrangeas, manzanitas, and sunflowers. Though McClintock was the first botany curator at the Academy to hold a PhD, her contributions were woefully undervalued by Academy staff, who wrote off her research, treated her like a secretary, and severely underpaid her.

McClintock was nevertheless passionate about environmental activism, protesting against the development of the Golden Gate Panhandle freeway and other new construction that threatened California's fragile ecological balance.

Read Elizabeth McClintock’s full untold story.

Before embarking on a career working for various natural history museums, Pearl Sonoda was one of thousands of Japanese Americans forced into incarceration camps during World War II. Sonoda’s interests in biology eventually became the cause for her release in 1943, when she joined Chicago’s Field Museum. Sonoda later came to the Academy in 1967 and served as senior curatorial assistant in the ichthyology department, managing thousands of fish specimens.

When male researchers reached out to inquire about Academy collections, they often addressed letters with “Dear Sirs” or “Dear Gentlemen.” Sonoda always responded by emphasizing the “Miss” title in front of her name. Sonoda’s colleagues in the ichthyology department remember her as both the “sweetest lady” and a “real strong person” who pushed boundaries in her nearly thirty years of Academy service.

Read Pearl Sonoda’s full untold story.