---
title: "Timeline of women in science"
chunk: 5/16
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_women_in_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:04:23.558030+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

1854: Mary Horner Lyell was a conchologist and geologist. She is most well known for her scientific work in 1854, where she studied her collection of land snails from the Canary Islands. She was married to the notable British geologist Charles Lyell and assisted him in his scientific work. It is believed by historians that she likely made major contributions to her husband's work.
1854–1855: Florence Nightingale organized care for wounded soldiers during the Crimean War. She was an English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing. Her pie charts clearly showed that most deaths resulted from disease rather than battle wounds or "other causes," which led the general public to demand improved sanitation at field hospitals.
1855: Working with her father, Welsh astronomer and photographer Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn produced some of the earliest photographs of the moon.
1856: American atmospheric scientist Eunice Newton Foote presented her paper "Circumstances affecting the heat of the sun's rays" at an annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. She was an early researcher of the greenhouse effect.
1862: Belgian botanist Marie-Anne Libert became the first woman to join the Royal Botanical Society of Belgium. She was named an honorary member.
1863: German naturalist Amalie Dietrich arrived in Australia to collect plant, animal and anthropological specimens for the German Godeffroy Museum. She remained in Australia for the next decade, discovering a number of new plant and animal species in the process, but also became notorious in later years for her removal of Aboriginal skeletons – and the possible incitement of violence against Aboriginal people – for anthropological research purposes.
1865: English geologist Elizabeth Carne was elected the first female Fellow of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall.

=== 1870s ===
1869/1870: American beekeeper Ellen Smith Tupper became the first female editor of an entomological journal.
1870: Katharine Murray Lyell was a British botanist, author of an early book on the worldwide distribution of ferns, and editor of volumes of the correspondence of several of the era's notable scientists.
1870: Ellen Swallow Richards became the first American woman to earn a degree in chemistry.
1870: Russian chemist Anna Volkova became the first female member of the Russian Chemical Society.
1874: Julia Lermontova became the first Russian woman to receive a PhD in chemistry.
1875: Hungarian archaeologist Zsófia Torma excavated the site of Turdaș-Luncă in Hunedoara County, today in Romania. The site, which uncovered valuable prehistoric artifacts, became one of the most important archaeological discoveries in Europe.
1876–1878: American naturalist Mary Treat studied insectivorous plants in Florida. Her contributions to the scientific understanding of how these plants caught and digested prey were acknowledged by Charles Darwin and Asa Gray.
1878: English entomologist Eleanor Anne Ormerod became the first female Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society. A few years afterwards, she was appointed as Consulting Entomologist to the Royal Agricultural Society.

=== 1880s ===
1880: Self-taught German chemist Agnes Pockels began investigating surface tension, becoming a pioneering figure in the field of surface science. The measurement equipment she developed provided the basic foundation for modern quantitative analyses of surface films.
1883: American ethnologist Erminnie A. Smith, the first female field ethnographer, published her collection of Iroquois legends Myths of the Iroquois.
1884: English zoologist Alice Johnson's paper on newt embryos became the first paper authored by a woman to appear in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.
1885: British naturalist Marian Farquharson became the first female Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society.
1886: Botanist Emily Lovira Gregory became the first female member of the American Society of Naturalists.
1887: Rachel Lloyd became the first American woman to receive a PhD in chemistry, completing her research at the Swiss University of Zurich.
1888: Russian scientist Sofia Kovalevskaya discovered the Kovalevskaya top, one of a brief list of known rigid body motion examples that are tractable by manipulating equations by hand.
1888: American chemist Josephine Silone Yates was appointed head of the Department of Natural Sciences at Lincoln Institute (later Lincoln University), becoming the first black woman to head a college science department.
1889: Geologist Mary Emilie Holmes became the first female Fellow of the Geological Society of America.