Two Remarkable Women Geologists of the 1920s: Emily Hahn (1905-1997) and Katharine Fowler (1902-1997)

Emily Hahn and Katharine Fowler challenged gender barriers decades ahead of modern feminism, and, together with other pioneering women geologists, they provide inspiration for all. They met at the University of Wisconsin in 1925. Hahn had chosen engineering because a professor said women can not be engineers. Rejecting an office-only mining career, she then found her ultimate calling as writer and world traveler, spending two years in the Belgian Congo (1931-33) and eight in China (1935-43). During the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, she had a daughter by a British officer, whom she married in 1945. Fowler came from Bryn Mawr College to Wisconsin to compete in a men's world. They forced acceptance as the first women to take a mining geology field trip and a topographic mapping field course. Later, in disguise, Fowler gained admission to a Black Hills mine and then did Ph.D. field work alone in Wyoming. After an African Geological Congress, she worked in the Sierra Leone bush (1931-33) and then began teaching at Wellesley College (1935). She attended a 1937 Soviet Union Geological Congress, taking harrowing field trips in the Caucusus Mountains and Siberia. From 1938, she and her new husband, Harvard geologist Marland Billings, collaborated in important New England research.