Abstract
During the early twentieth century, the Bermuda Biological Station for Research (BBSR) functioned as a multipurpose scientific site. Jointly founded by New York University, Harvard University, and the Bermuda Natural History Society, the BBSR created opportunities for a mostly US-based set of practitioners to study animal biology in the field. I argue that mixed gender field stations like the BBSR supported professional advancement in science, while also operating as important places for women and men to experiment with the social and cultural work of identity formation, courtship and marriage, and social critique. Between 1903 and 1930, the BBSR functioned as a laboratory of domesticity, a temporary scientific household in British Bermuda where women and men interacted with established colonial ideologies about science, sex difference, and racial hierarchy in their public and private accounts of doing biology and socializing in the field. Viewing field stations as generative of multiple forms of labor offers a corrective to narratives within the history of biology, in which scientific practices are considered to be the principal forms of output produced by practitioners in the field. Understanding how women and men at the BBSR engaged with (and at times critiqued) the politics of gender and race from the periphery of U.S. networks of biology suggests that we might view field stations as shaping not only academic science but also domestic life and fields as disparate as fiction and the law.
Keywords
Introduction
In June of 1915, newly married scientists Blanche and William Crozier set sail for Bermuda to take on positions running the Bermuda Biological Station for Research (BBSR) at Agar’s Island. The BBSR played an outsized role in the Croziers’ personal and professional lives. 1 They met and courted there as students, returned as employees, and used their adventures in the Bermudian field to advance divergent intellectual projects. 2 William Crozier produced a career-defining body of research: over sixty articles in journals ranging from the American Naturalist to the American Journal of Physiology. 3 Blanche Crozier published her preliminary investigations into Bermudian sponges in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History and then set her scientific work aside after taking on the role of faculty wife. 4 In the 1920s, however, she began to think about Bermuda from a place of social critique: first, by translating her time at the BBSR into the 1928 domestic novel, Smiley’s Haven, a sharp commentary about the stultifying consequences of marriage for white women in a colonial society; and second, by applying this feminist perspective to a series of path-breaking law review articles challenging the constitutionality of sex discrimination in the United States. 5
The example of the Croziers at the US-led BBSR illustrates how biological research stations functioned as multipurpose sites of social and cultural work outside of academic science. Field stations like the BBSR both structured knowledge production in biology and contributed to other forms of labor, including identity formation, marriage and family life, and social critique. Between 1903 and 1930, BBSR practitioners lived and worked in close quarters in British Bermuda, where established colonial ideologies about class, sex difference, and racial hierarchy shaped their scientific and personal experiences. In particular, I argue that the BBSR operated as a laboratory of domesticity, a temporary scientific household where biologists experimented with new ideas and practices related to science, gender, and race. By following the BBSR’s delegations of mostly US-based practitioners after their return from the field, including a significant number of white women scientists like Blanche Crozier, I demonstrate how field stations influenced academic science and motivated modes of inquiry outside of science, including feminist fiction and the law.
The BBSR’s location outside the United States offered fresh possibilities for research in the marine environment and a new set of ideological tools for understanding race and gender. Situated in the subtropical Atlantic seas, about 650 miles off the east coast of North Carolina, Bermuda was (and still is) a British territory and gateway to the British West Indies. Bermuda’s colonial society centered on the British Royal Navy, whose culture celebrated white officers and their families against the backdrop of a predominately Black, or Afro-Bermudian, population of Bermudians. 6 BBSR practitioners responded to this racialized social order in their public and private accounts by casting their presence on the islands and the significance of their scientific work as evidence of white superiority.
During the early twentieth century, racial hierarchies intersected with changing gender relations in ways that amplified notions of sex difference in the British empire. 7 White, middle-class British women migrated to colonial places as missionaries and wives in increasing numbers, and in response, imperial societies sharpened their attention to white domesticity, glorifying an “idealized vision of women guarding the hearth” in locales outside the metropole. 8 White women scientists at the BBSR benefited from and were constrained by these racialized gender ideologies. Bermuda’s embracement of white, middle-class femininity enabled the participation of women scientists, many from elite social backgrounds. At the same time, the emphasis in sex differences between men and women raised questions about the fitness and propriety of white women’s bodies socializing and performing scientific work in the field. 9
The politics of white domesticity proved to be a central concern for the BBSR as a residential biological research station. Although domesticity has often been interpreted in opposition to science, recent scholarship by Don Opitz, Staffan Bergwik, and Brigitte Van Tiggelen reminds us that in modern science the “domestic sphere is not external to knowledge making, but rather a condition for and a consequence of research.” 10 Domesticity is a highly flexible concept with multiple meanings. It refers to the spatial thresholds between public and private domains, the social significance of households and domestic matters to everyday life, and the cultural ideologies associating women and normative notions of femininity with the home. 11 The BBSR navigated domestic politics as a mixed gender institution occupying a series of middle-class tourist hotels. BBSR administrators struggled to balance the private, familial intimacies of colonial vacationland with the public ambitions of a research institution. Women and men in Bermuda, many of them used to gender-segregated laboratories at home, fell into domestic patterns as they dined together, performed scientific work in close proximity, and found opportunities for courtship and marriage. 12
Fully conceptualizing the influence of field stations like the BBSR requires tracking knowledge production in the life sciences as well as in adjacent fields including fiction and the law. Radcliffe College’s Blanche Crozier, for instance, was one of a number of white women scientists at work at the BBSR. 13 Although Crozier initially profited from colonial power structures, over time she started to reinterpret her experiences. Her novel Smiley’s Haven critiqued the politics of white domesticity in Bermuda. It follows the life of British aristocrat Alicia Winwood and her troubled marriage to Smiley, a Peter Pan-like man whose disinterest in family life leaves her trapped and discontent. 14 Crozier’s social criticism intensified in her subsequent, highly celebrated legal scholarship, which posited that women as a sex-based class, like African-Americans as a race-based class, faced undue discrimination under U.S. law. 15 Thus, reading Crozier’s work alongside the more traditional archival records related to the history of biological field stations illustrates the multiple ways that scientific sites intervene in notions of gender and race long after the initial fieldwork is over.
This article begins by situating the BBSR within the history of U.S. experiments with colonial science during the late nineteenth century. I demonstrate how the BBSR shared characteristics with other biological research stations in the Greater Caribbean that operated on limited budgets and offered visiting scientists easy access to the natural environment. 16 Next, I argue that hierarchies of gender and race in British Bermuda contributed to the ways in which women and men experienced their time at the BBSR. Cultural ideologies of white domesticity created rationales for white women scientists like Blanche Crozier to pursue biological research as long as they adhered to traditional forms of femininity in the field. As I show, the politics of whiteness at the BBSR functioned in tandem with practices of racial demarcation. Most notably, BBSR biologists circulated racist stereotypes of Black Bermudians to an imagined transnational community of U.S. and European white elites. I then document how the intersecting politics of gender and race in Bermuda intensified relationships between men and women at the BBSR. Close physical quarters blurred the usually gender-segregated worlds of public and private life in science. In addition, white male scientists amplified the research station’s domestic politics by daydreaming about sentimental matters and recording their experiences with (and expectations for) courtship and romance in the field. This article concludes by examining how Blanche Crozier’s marriage and post-BBSR scholarship repackaged Bermuda’s landscape of science, gender, and race as a series of critical interventions in fiction and the law, revealing the multiple forms of work field stations produced across disciplinary boundaries.
Colonial science at the Bermuda Biological Station for Research
The BBSR was one of a number of U.S. field stations founded to support academic interests in experimental biology during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1903, Charles L. Bristol of New York University, Edward L. Mark of Harvard University, and the Bermuda Natural History Society jointly established the BBSR. They designed the research station to promote science in Bermuda, generate enthusiasm for a future public aquarium, and offer U.S. zoologists (animal biologists) a laboratory in subtropical waters. 17 The BBSR held its first summer season during a period of biological research station building. As Samantha Muka and Raf de Bont have demonstrated, beginning in the 1870s a series of ‘liquid laboratories’ sprang up in the United States and Europe. 18 By 1930 over two-dozen permanent and temporary research stations lined the U.S. coast, fostered by an interest in fisheries and the need for fresh supplies of living organisms in embryological and physiological investigations. 19
The creation of the BBSR fits with broader patterns of what Megan Raby has described as early twentieth-century U.S. experiments with colonial science. After the Spanish–American War, U.S. botanists and zoologists looked to the Caribbean as a site newly open for scientific study and as “a haven of ‘civilization’ in the American tropics.” 20 Over the next three decades, U.S. practitioners established tropical research stations in U.S. territories including Cuba and the Panama Canal Zone, British colonies such as Jamaica and Guiana, and alongside U.S. corporate interests in places like Honduras. 21 Historically, Bermuda functioned as a major naval base and gateway to the British West Indies, but beginning in 1895 the British Royal Navy started to reallocate its sea power away from Bermuda and nearby Caribbean depots to European waters. 22 The Bermuda station’s founding, therefore, occurred within a colonial society in transition, one navigating the financial and political costs of military retrenchment and wary of the increasingly aggressive ambitions of an imperial United States.
Research stations at the periphery of U.S. networks, such as the BBSR, developed a range of gendered scientific cultures during a time when resistance to coeducation in U.S. universities turned many major laboratories into political minefields. The BBSR’s main competitor, the Tortugas Marine Biological Laboratory (est. 1904 by the Carnegie Institution of Washington), produced an exclusively masculine research community. 23 Isolated in the remote hurricane-prone Florida Keys, the Tortugas Laboratory refused to provide accommodation for women and families, which turned summers into a male-dominated “stag party.” 24 By contrast, Phillip Pauly has described the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole as a “genteel summer resort.” 25 Biologists and their families flocked to the Massachusetts coast for what the MBL director Frank Lillie called “vocation, and vacation.” 26 The BBSR’s scientific culture combined the coeducational retreat-like atmosphere of the MBL with the colonial racial politics of the Cinchona Botanical Station in Jamaica. At Cinchona, U.S. botanists leveraged British infrastructures of leisure in the tropics (which relied heavily on Afro-Jamaican labor) to provide white women and men with an accessible site to do science. 27 In the case of the MBL, Cinchona, and the BBSR, women and men lived and worked in close proximity, a striking social difference compared to gender-segregated field stations like the Tortugas and gender exclusive university laboratories, such as the Harvard and Radcliffe Zoological Laboratories. 28
The BBSR founders were unable to build a long-term site in Bermuda, a factor that shaped the field station’s early history. While colonial regulations made it difficult for foreigners to own property, contentious colonial politics and the financial consequences of military retrenchment mired the Biological Station Act (which would have allowed for a permanent BBSR laboratory) in endless delays. 29 Therefore Mark, Bristol, and the Bermuda Natural History Society decided to commandeer Hotel Frascati, a guesthouse a short carriage ride away from the busy tourist port in Hamilton, as their headquarters. 30 The hotel provided room and board and converted one of its small stone buildings into “Laboratory Frascati.” This supposedly temporary arrangement embedded the BBSR within the built environment of British vacationland and to many practitioners raised serious questions about what kind of biology would be done there. 31
Practitioners experienced Hotel Frascati as an informal scientific household in which touristic traditions of leisured natural history came up against the intensive demands of experimental biology. Located by Harrington Sound, Hotel Frascati provided women and men with easy access to the marine environment. Zoologists could stand on the porch and look down into Flatt’s Inlet, the channel between the Atlantic and the Sound (Figure 1). “With each change of the tide,” Mark reported, “the waters of the Inlet flow past the verandah of the hotel.” 32 From this vantage point, one could see shoals of brilliantly colored fish, sergeant major and angelfish, blue fry and white grunt. Sea urchins, sand dollars, and sea cucumbers (vernacularly called sea puddings) lived fifteen to twenty feet below in the sand. Joining other nature-goers, practitioners borrowed rowboats and “water-glasses” to watch the tides and collect from the swiftly moving water. 33 The Harvard zoologist George H. Parker recalled that one of the great “pleasures in going to Bermuda” (rather than the MBL) was that his wife liked this genteel style of science. “She was as much transported by the beauty of the island as I was,” Parker wrote in his memoir, “and the work we were all doing then, rather of the old-fashioned, natural history kind, was more agreeable to her than what she had seen at Woods Hole where large quantities of fishes and other animals alive or semi-alive were to be seen everywhere.” 34
Hotel Frascati overlooking the bridge to Harrington Sound, ca 1905. (Mark, “The Bermuda Islands and the Bermuda Biological Station for Research,” 501). (note 33).
While BBSR practitioners could sign up for daily excursions to collecting grounds across the islands, they also had access to experimental facilities at Laboratory Frascati. Mark, the longtime director of Harvard’s Department of Zoology, envisioned the BBSR as an exclusive research outpost like the MBL or the Naples Zoological Station. Accordingly, he attempted to reproduce his Harvard laboratory in Bermuda. Mark partitioned Laboratory Frascati into several rooms, lined them with “substantial work tables,” and filled them with reference books, microtomes, microscopes, chemical reagents, glassware, and darkroom equipment that he had shipped over from Cambridge. 35 The stone building, however, turned out to be so cramped and poorly lit that laboratory work proved difficult. Biologists had to annex nearby guest rooms to do their research. The hotel proprietor, Alonzo Peniston, was appalled, writing to Mark: “I do not care to have any of it [laboratory work] done in the bedrooms.” He offered in the future to turn his dining room into a well-lit experimental space “provided they [the investigators] would be careful & not get the walls & floor mussed up too much.” 36 Conducting scientific work at the BBSR, therefore, entailed navigating spatial boundaries between public science and private leisure as well as epistemological borders between natural history and experimental zoology.
The BBSR remained on tenuous footing until its reincorporation as an international oceanographic institution in the 1930s. In 1907, co-founders Mark and Bristol severed their working relationship – partially due to Bristol’s embrace of popular science and Mark’s attempts to turn the BBSR into a small-scale version of the MBL – leaving Harvard in charge of the laboratory. In 1907, the BBSR also undertook the first of several moves by relocating to a decommissioned military garrison on Agar’s Island in Hamilton Harbor. 37 Although Mark regularly invented plans to construct a permanent station, he filed them away in the face of waning U.S. interest in funding joint field stations and a Bermuda Natural History Society enthusiastically devoted to expanding its successful public aquarium. Mark had hoped that the Agar’s Island Laboratory might transform into a year-round research site, especially with the arrival of the Croziers in 1915 as full-time managers 38 (Figure 2). This vision never came to fruition. Damaging hurricanes, the exorbitant cost of providing room and board on a small island, and the popularity of other field stations kept the BBSR a modest endeavor. As I show below, the BBSR’s institutional precariousness inadvertently opened up the research site to a wider variety of summer researchers than originally intended, most significantly white women. 39
Interior of Agar’s Island Laboratory, undated (BBSR Photo Archives, BBSR-BA).
Women and gender in the Bermudian field
The BBSR’s situatedness within British vacationland created a rationale for admitting white women scientists. Ideologies of domesticity – grounded in assumptions about sex difference and the moralizing presence of white women in colonial society – facilitated women scientists’ participation as long as they adhered to narrow codes of propriety and respectability associated with middle-class white Bermudians. 40 Working within these gender politics, white women scientists from a range of backgrounds eagerly signed up to do research and collect in Bermuda’s subtropical coral reef environment.
Bristol and Mark did not organize the BBSR with women practitioners in mind. By 1900, New Yorkers knew Bristol as a sought-after popular science lecturer and tropical fish supplier for the New York Aquarium, and Bermudians viewed him as an important link between local natural history tourism and the prestigious U.S. scientific community.
41
In 1903, Bristol argued that the Bermuda station should be open to a range of scientists. A scientific populist, he wanted to admit anyone with an undergraduate science degree even if they did not have a clear research agenda. At the outset, therefore, Bristol rejected Mark’s plan to recycle application questions from Harvard’s zoology graduate program for their initial circular.
42
Bristol insisted on adding, “to your [Mark’s] clause […] something that would encourage the fellow who doesn’t know anything about what he can get.” Mark’s wording “all alone might discourage some who could not name a specific thing on which
Cost remained a barrier to entry for potential research station practitioners. With this in mind, Bristol promoted summer research at the BBSR like a seasoned tourism booster. He explained to the U.S. Consul to Bermuda that after negotiating subsidized transportation from the Quebec Steam Ship Company, Bermuda Natural History Society-sponsored entertainment, and discounted room and board, “we may offer to carry a man from and to New York, give him six weeks for examination of the reefs etc for an even $100.” This deal could “start the stream of indifferent or lukewarm men – a visit will send them home enthusiastic co-workers.” 45 Although Bristol used conventionally gendered language associating masculinity with the identity of the scientist, his overriding preference for numbers over gender opened the doors for white women who were able to pay the summer fees. Women scientists, as a result, were often the most socially prominent members of the BBSR’s delegations. In 1903, for instance, Bristol and Mark assigned the most desirable rooms on the steamer and at Hotel Frascati to the Radcliffe scientist Edith Nason Buckingham, the daughter of an affluent Boston physician. 46 Class proved to be more of a decisive factor in women’s access to the station than for men, many of whom were enrolled in Harvard’s graduate zoology program and received funding to cover their summer expenses. 47
White women scientists who had been excluded from other marine stations in the Atlantic or who wanted to investigate tropical specimens in a fashionable leisure environment took advantage of the opportunity to do research at the BBSR (Figure 3). Many of them were associated with the Seven Sisters colleges. The Mount Holyoke zoologist Cornelia Clapp wrote to Bristol, “I
Women scientists at the BBSR working in the field, ca. 1903 (Photographic Collection, BBSR-BA).
Women scientists working in museum education and secondary school science instruction applied to the BBSR with plans to obtain distinctive collections of marine specimens. The MIT-trained scientist Anna Gallup, an Assistant Curator at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, joined the first delegation after listening to one of Bristol’s public lectures in Brooklyn. 52 She returned to New York with troves of specimens including corals, seaweed, invertebrates, fish, and lizards. 53 Elizabeth H. Foss of Minnesota heard about Bermuda from her network of women scientists. 54 She had graduated from the University of Minnesota, where she had “specialized along biological lines, principally botany.” Perhaps intuiting that marine station communities fractured along natural historical and experimental lines, Foss noted, “As I want to collect material for class room work as well as for my own work in college, I shall want to be out of doors most of the time. So don’t count me out if your laboratory is crowded.” 55 Upon her arrival home, the Minneapolis Journal reported that Foss brought “home many jars filled with plants for the use of her pupils,” a collection that contributed to her local authority in marine botany. 56 The BBSR admitted a variety of women scientists interested in a range of intellectual questions, some focusing on experimental work and others engaging in more popular forms of science. 57
Although Mark and Bristol welcomed women practitioners as long as they were able to pay their own way, other scientists viewed the coeducational delegation with skepticism. One inquired about the balance between “professional naturalists” and the “company of amateurs.” 58 Another wondered if the BBSR was a “pleasure party” because of the presence of “the chaperonable sex.” 59 Even Hotel Frascati’s proprietor, Alonzo Peniston, had an opinion. In 1904, he wrote to Mark that in the future “I would rather leave the ladies out; I think in a party like this they make a bother.” 60 British officials and civic leaders associated with the Bermuda Natural History Society, however, eagerly extended social courtesies to the mixed company, perhaps used to hosting visiting groups of tourists from the United States and Britain. 61 The Royal Gazette cheerfully reported on the BBSR party’s activities, and the Committee of the Royal Yacht Club bestowed the BBSR with temporary membership, leaving Bristol “quite dumbstruck” in his feeling “that in this courtesy we have another evidence of the sentiment of the island toward us.” 62 In a summer society defined by access to the British military culture, this gesture solidified the BBSR’s connections with the white Bermudian elite.
White women scientists in Bermuda had to conform to rigid gender standards both for polite summer society events and for collecting in the field. In 1903, Mark sent sartorial guidelines to Radcliffe’s Edith Buckingham.
63
He explained that since “[t]he people of Bermuda are most hospitable, and often invite the members of the Biological Station to receptions in their gardens,” Buckingham should bring “muslin gowns,” preferably in white “because it looks cool, is less washed if few muslins are carried, and will not fade”
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(Figure 4). Mark also emphasized that Buckingham needed to remain modestly covered while conducting scientific work. He recommended protective gear for wading, sneakers for safely walking on coral and “other sharp things,” and a “washable duck hat” to ward off the sun. At the shore, Buckingham required a mohair bathing suit to be covered by “a very old skirt and shirt waist.” “It must be remembered, however,” Mark wrote, “that an
BBSR practitioners ready for a garden party with women in white gowns. Alfred O. Gross, far left, ca. 1910 (Unsigned small black photo album, Photographic Collection, BBSR-BA).
Arguments about women threatening the practice of science at the BBSR remained unexpectedly muted. Women entered into higher education in increasing numbers in the United States at the turn of the century. Some scientific departments expressed alarm at the feminization of their research communities and reacted by overturning existing coeducational policies or changing admittance requirements to exclude women. 68 Women at the BBSR did not spark a similar backlash, suggesting a striking normalization of women’s participation in peripheral research sites. 69 The BBSR’s desire for qualified participants outweighed the usual gendered gatekeeping methods at university laboratories, and its connections to the mixed gender world of British vacationland meant that women did not seem as out of place as they might have on male-dominated college campuses (Figure 5). However, as I show below, white women’s freedom to pursue science in Bermuda came at the expense of the lives of Black Bermudians, whose labor as collectors, guides, handymen, and servants supported the field station. Similar to other colonial environments, white women excluded from opportunities at home due to their gender benefited from a social order founded on ideologies of white supremacy.
Discourses of white domesticity and women’s leisure abroad promoted and sustained Bermuda’s tourist industry (Bermuda: Nature’s Fairyland (Bermuda: Bermuda Trade Development Board, 1915)).
Narratives about race and science in Bermuda
Although it is difficult to locate traces of Black Bermudians in the BBSR archives, Blanche Crozier’s novel Smiley’s Haven depicts Bermuda as a racialized colonial space and serves as a reminder of the presence of Black Bermudians in the daily life of the station. Smiley’s Haven begins with Smiley landing on a small island to find “the figure of a woman sitting on the rock at the edge of the water,” motionless “like the bronze statue of an Indian woman, perhaps, or of some inscrutable race of antiquity.” 70 Smiley determines that she is “a negress” and realizes as he meets her family that he “had never seen so many negroes.” 71 As Smiley makes his way to town, he sees Black Bermudians at work everywhere. 72 Framed in this way, Smiley’s Haven constructs an image of Bermuda as a place where racial difference operates relentlessly in public and private life. 73 More broadly, Crozier’s fictional work helps to make sense of the racial narratives scattered at the margins of BBSR publications and records.
Similar to Crozier’s descriptions, Bristol and Mark viewed Bermuda as a colonial space defined by racial demarcation. When addressing scientific audiences, they reinforced Bermuda’s existing social order as a way of associating the BBSR with an imagined transnational community of white elites inside and outside of the laboratory. Bristol explained in the Bulletin of the American Geographical Society that two-thirds of Bermudians had Native American or African roots. He aligned U.S. scientists with the small population of white British inhabitants: “The whites are nearly all of English descent, a large number of the families carrying their ancestry back to the first or very early comers. The Coloured population are descendants of the North American Indians (Pequods largely), who were first used on the plantations as slaves, and of African negroes, who were imported later.” 74 Bristol described Bermuda’s society as a continuation of the racialized power structures of slavery. Mark echoed this point in an address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, reassuring listeners that the local “property qualification for voting” meant that the Bermudian citizenry was “the reverse of the ratio in population.” 75
Bristol’s initial campaign to advertise Bermuda as a scientific destination to U.S. audiences drew pointedly on racist stereotypes about Black laborers. 76 In the 1890s, the New-York Tribune reported on the tanks of tropical fish Bristol sold to the New York Aquarium. Articles spun tall tales about the rarities Bristol unearthed from the sea: a 1,000-pound “coral brainstone”; a wily “devil fish” (or octopus) touted to be the first living specimen exhibited in the United States; and “the devil’s terror,” a fifty-pound green moray eel. 77 Most sensationally, Bristol found a “real sea serpent” from deep water with the head of a reptile, the body of an eel, and the tail of a fish. 78 Crucial to this discovery was the frame story. Three “Bermuda negro fishermen made the catch.” At the time they were “intoxicated,” did not realize that they had hooked a “sea serpent,” and dragged it fearfully into their boat. “One of the negroes,” the Tribune explained, “a very superstitious fellow, thought the thing was the devil, and cowered in the bottom of the boat praying and yelling for mercy. The other two almost swooned with fright.” Unaware of the value of their find, they sold the “strange catch” to the Bermudian naturalist Louis L. Mowbray, who delivered it to Bristol. 79 This narrative echoed caricatured depictions of Black laborers disseminated throughout the Greater Caribbean during this period. It also served to deemphasize the work local Black Bermudians performed for Bristol and the BBSR. 80
In 1910, the BBSR ornithologist Alfred O. Gross compiled a scrapbook that documented his yellow-billed tropicbird investigations as well as daily life in Bermuda. A keen photographer, he included snapshots of locals at work, including a self-portrait with Absolom Bean, one of the station’s Black guides and collectors (Figure 6). 81 Gross acknowledged in his diary the valuable expertise of “colored helper[s]” like Bean while in the field. 82 It is unclear what Bean’s history was with the station or how much he was paid for his services. As a point of comparison, in 1909, Mark told a colleague about a similar employee: “our man-of-all-work the colored man, Fred Simons of the [F]lats.” “His salary,” Mark wrote, “was last year raised to 4/~ per day, and he ‘finds himself.’” Simons did the “hard work” of the station, and Mark did not want to lose his services. 83 Despite Bean’s assistance in Gross’s research and Simons’ multi-year presence at the BBSR, Black Bermudians remained unsurprisingly marginalized in the scientific output of the station. In fact, Gross’s 1912 tropicbird paper indicts Black Bermudians for their treatment of birds. Writing in the Auk, he argued that the two “enemies” of the tropicbird were wood rats and “the colored natives, who molest the nests of the birds in spite of the stringent bird laws of the islands.” 84
Alfred O. Gross (right) and BBSR guide Absolom Bean, ca. 1910 or 1911 (Alfred O. Gross, “Scrapbook from the career of A. O. Gross,” AOG-BCL).
Racist depictions of superstitious Black Bermudians proved central to how some BBSR scientists told stories about their scientific experiences after returning home. In his memoir The World Expands, George Howard Parker provided an elaborate retelling of his “adventures in biological research” in Bermuda, one of which ended in “sweet revenge.” In 1905 Parker and the Princeton biologist Edwin G. Conklin received daily supplies of Amphioxus from Black neighborhood children, each of whom earned a penny per fresh organism. Harrington Sound was a rich collecting ground for the West Indian Amphioxus (Branchiostoma caribbaeum Sundevall), a small eel-like lancelet that played a significant role in debates about the evolutionary origins of vertebrates. 85 Conklin persuaded the most successful Amphioxus collector, a child named Gilbert, that Parker was the devil by convincing Gilbert that Parker might have “cloven feet.” Frightened, Gilbert stopped delivering specimens. Parker figured out the prank and concluded that while Conklin “knew negro psychology better than I did,” “I had the laugh on him, for my specimens of amphioxus gave me very good sensory reactions.” 86 Not only did Conklin manipulate a young Black specimen collector as part of a friendly rivalry, Parker turned this incident into a comedic lesson about white superiority. BBSR narratives about Black Bermudians, found in novels, scientific publications, and popular texts, reinforced colonial racial hierarchies and served to associate the station and its U.S. practitioners with notions of what might be considered expressions of scientific whiteness.
Scientific romance in Bermuda an Ocean Paradise 87
The presence of white women scientists and narratives of scientific whiteness carried over into BBSR practitioners’ accounts of sentiment and family formation. Similar to many mixed gender field stations, the Bermuda station functioned as a site for women and men from similar backgrounds to interact outside of the gender-segregated world of middle-class friendship and without having to adhere to formalized courtship rituals. Scientific men at the BBSR used hyper-vivid language in their public and private accounts to describe both the romance of natural environment and their experiences of courtship with women in the field.
Male scientists at the Bermuda station absorbed affective language more common to tourist literature. In the United States, popular depictions of Bermuda as an exotic idyll were most often found in women’s writing. In 1875, for example, Jane Anthony Eames composed travel sketches to Bermuda for her New Hampshire paper. Leaving “the icebound hills of New England,” Eames arrived in “an earthly paradise.” 88 She found the marine environment extraordinary. While yachting, “[n]othing could exceed the loveliness of the scene, as we wound in and out among the islands, the water of the clearest, softest blue imaginable.” 89 Eames’ descriptions illustrate what Mary Louise Pratt has called “Victorian discovery rhetoric,” in which the natural landscape, like a work of art, carries a “density of meaning.” 90 The most repeated meaning-laden language about Bermuda described “the Bermuda sea,” whose coral reef “produces an indescribable effect of something unreal and fairylike.” 91
Similarly, Mark and his male colleagues returned again and again to Bermuda as an almost inexpressible site of sentiment. As Mark wrote to his wife in 1903, “Bermuda is beautiful[….] The oleanders are gorgeous, pinks & reds, & whites, great trees that make the landscape charming.” Like Eames, he marveled at the intensity of the landscape: “The water under my window is the clearest I ever saw and its colors are constantly changing with every change of tide & sky.” 92 Within the U.S. scientific community, Mark was so well known for his meticulous practices of observation under the microscope that his 1905 account of witnessing Bermudian nature seems out of character.
I recall with pleasure not only my own fascination, but also the expressions of delight which involuntarily came from the lips of all who, with water-glass in hand, peered down into the fairy-like gardens of the sea, as we slowly drifted with the tide, or lay anchor in the midst of one of the great coral patches that flourish over extensive areas of the north.
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Mark’s portrait of Bermuda as fairylike constructs the scientist not only as a truth-teller but also, like Eames, as a pleasure-seeker.
Alfred Gross wrote endlessly in his 1910 diary about the natural landscape’s “indescribable beauty.” “Bermuda indeed,” he penned, “is a paradise to the nature lover and I feel like a child away on a trip to Fairyland.” 94 His view of Bermuda as natural wilderness belied its long history as an inhabited and cultivated space. Bermuda’s vibrant diversions made Gross nostalgic for his family back in Illinois. Sailing at night through the moonlit water, Gross “thought of home and wished the loved ones there might be here to share in the pleasures I am enjoying so much this summer.” 95 It is fitting that on his return trip in 1911, Gross met his future wife Edna G. Gross (no relation), an amateur botanist who was “sensible, loves nature, and above all is natural.” 96
Gross meditated in his diary about the difference between the sexes and the puzzle of what might be considered the “nature” of womanhood. On the one hand, he condemned “the vile women” who were “very bold and solicit at every available opportunity” at fast establishments in urban Boston. 97 On the other hand, he noticed his mentor George H. Parker’s wife, Louise Merritt Stabler Parker, and tried to analyze her appeal. “Plain,” “very practical,” and “as good as gold,” Louise Parker’s lack of pretense and “utter disregard for formality” contributed to the “true and simple” life of the couple. 98 Edna Gross’s love of nature and her “naturalness” might have reflected what Alfred Gross found to be most compelling about Louise Parker – that “as you talk with her and become closer acquainted with her you discover the fine qualities of her nature and her personality.” 99 Louise Parker offered the example of an ideal companion for a scientific man: a woman with intellect and without artifice.
Alfred Gross re-told the story of his summer courtship with Edna Gross in his autobiography, using Bermuda’s natural environment as a motivator and manifestation of their attachment. One night on a boat ride through the Great Sound with two friends, they rowed in the wrong direction so far away that “it was in the early hours of the morning before we finally reached [Hotel] Grasmere.” Luckily, the apparent “failure of the light” of a red channel marker “provided an excellent alibi” for their romantic outing. Later, on an excursion to Ireland Island, the Grosses walked up a hill overlooking the water: “The sunset was so remarkable we have always remembered it as the most gorgeous display of brilliant colors we have ever experienced. All about the knoll were masses of blooming oleanders which enchanted the beauty of the spot. I surrendered my college fraternity pin while there.” 100 Gross had actively participated in the Illinois chapter of the Gamma Alpha Graduate Scientific Fraternity. As was traditional for fraternity men, giving Edna Gross his gold and black diamond-shaped pin (or “pinning” her) signified his serious commitment. 101
Harvard’s William Crozier and Radcliffe’s Blanche Benjamin left records of their 1913 summer at the BBSR demonstrating how scientific practices generated opportunities for romance. Crozier’s scientific notebook described the station as an intimate community of zoologists working in cycles of intensive collecting, laboratory experimentation, and leisured recreation. He recorded stockpiling phosphorescent Pterophryne (or sargasso fish), which he used for research on the “glow response.” He sketched out shadow reaction experiments with Balanus (barnacles), conducted reaction observations on Holotheria (sea cucumbers), and tackled minor problems related to the regeneration of Actinians tentacles (sea anemone). In the evenings, Crozier participated in the communal ritual of searching for bioluminescent “fire worms” in Hamilton Bay.
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Interspersed between these lists and protocols are asides about a summer courtship. “Miss B. and I collected along bay,” Crozier wrote. We “collected along shore; several orange nemerteans found; Miss B. & I worked to-gether.” After finding sea cucumbers and sea anemones, he “[r]owed home with B. in the ‘Banshee’. Much fun.” Back in the laboratory, he “continued obs. begun yesterday with Miss B. on rhythmic opening etc in Actinia bern udensis” [sic]. They spent their nights unchaperoned – “In evening went for a walk to town (Hamilton). B & I walked back
The Croziers’ 1913 romance and 1915 marriage signified different things upon their return to Cambridge, which put into perspective the gendered career expectations for women and men in science. 104 For Radcliffe, their union symbolized how the institution successfully prepared highly educated women for their futures as wives and mothers, an important example during a time when critics accused women’s colleges of producing graduates uninterested in domestic life. 105 For Harvard, it confirmed the need to support William Crozier as head of the household. The Harvard Corporation formally appointed Crozier to the position of BBSR Resident Naturalist and offered him a prestigious US$1,000 Sheldon Fellowship to cover his salary. At the same time, it refused to formally appoint or pay Benjamin, who had accepted the job as BBSR’s Librarian and Recorder. 106 To combat Harvard’s parsimony, Radcliffe’s Dean, Bertha M. Boody, activated the college’s philanthropic network to cobble together US$300 for Benjamin’s salary. 107 Wealthy Bostonian women, enthralled by the “really exciting” and “interesting story” of a newly married “Radcliffe girl” destined for scientific horizons, opened up their checkbooks. 108 Even before they set sail for Bermuda, the Croziers’ marriage illustrated the limited career possibilities for scientific women.
Blanche Crozier’s novel Smiley’s Haven offers an important alternative perspective to the idealized narratives about sentiment, courtship, and marriage from BBSR men. Mary Procida has argued that fiction provided a space for the wives of twentieth-century colonial officials to either replay “formulaic romances” in “exotic” environments (in her case India) or to “explicitly engage with the pressing political issues of the day.” 109 Crozier used her book to do both. Crozier contrasts the veneration of romance and white domesticity in Bermuda with the lived experiences of women like Alicia Winwood, who found marriage to be a surprising trap. 110 Smiley is drawn to Alicia for her racial purity, for “the whiteness of her skin and of her garments,” but also for “a more general quality, a figurative whiteness.” 111 Her initial subservience appeals to him: “He thought of her as cool and spotless, living in a world of decorative leisure. To mention competence, or any other useful quality, in the same breath with her was a slur.” 112 After their wedding, however, Smiley reveals himself to be constitutionally disinterested in work. Alicia has to take a paid position managing Sunnimede, a guesthouse modeled after the Agar’s Island Laboratory. She supervises Sunnimede’s daily operations, raises their children, and Smiley, “invariably loafing, though ever so charmingly,” sparks her resentment. 113 Possibly like Crozier, Alicia turns out to be good at her job and her “awakening to her own powers made her expect more of him, made his mere existence no longer enough.” 114 Yet Crozier makes it clear that divorce disadvantages women even more than a bad marriage, leaving Alicia to realize that marriage is not about “perfect whole things” but a woman’s ability to willfully manage disappointment. 115
Alternative narratives like Blanche Crozier’s add a crucial viewpoint to the depictions of domestic matters in the field by BBSR men. While Crozier’s personal history suggests the extent to which academic institutions reified normative ideas about sex difference to avoid compensating women for their scientific labor, Smiley’s Haven goes a step further by identifying and challenging some of the unanticipated and deeply felt consequences of women’s subordination after marriage.
Rethinking science, gender, and race with Blanche Crozier
One route for assessing the BBSR’s significance to the wider scientific community involves tracking the publication history of the Contributions from the Bermuda Biological Station for Research, or over 160 research papers based on fieldwork in Bermuda. 116 Another route, which this article has taken, involves following the narratives about science, gender, and race that emerged from the BBSR: stories about women, whiteness, courtship, marriage, and domesticity in colonial vacationland. In terms of the latter, Blanche Crozier’s scientific experiences in Bermuda and her career as a social critic afterwards serve as a useful case study for the ways that field stations serve multiple roles as scientific sites and as places of social and cultural work outside of academic science.
Even though Crozier left academic science, biological themes were foundational to her feminist critiques in Smiley’s Haven. Early twentieth-century notions of heredity explain Smiley’s indolent character and Alicia’s success in rebuilding her family’s wealth. Smiley, a “vagabond Yankee,” and Alicia’s brother, “an equally lazy aristocrat,” were varieties of the same male species: “creature[s] saved from extinction by nothing innate, but by the circumstance of having been born and reared within an artificial enclosure.” 117 Crozier suggests that natural selection no longer acts on groups of privileged men. It is up to Alicia to disrupt her family’s masculine degeneration. Crozier describes Alicia as a sport, a welcome De Vriesian mutation compared to her disappointing husband, unremarkable brother, and self-destructive nephew: “Alicia was not a characteristic Winwood; or at least she was a Winwood revolution and not one of their everyday manifestations.” 118 Crozier implies that the exaggerated division of labor between the sexes (grounded in biological ideas of sex difference) might in fact be animating society’s decline. Therefore, one viable solution to the evolutionary degeneration of man is woman taking on an active role in the economic life of the family. 119
Crozier’s critique of white domesticity foreshadowed the disintegration of her own marriage, a lesson about what happens long after field-based courtship is over.
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Crozier believed it was important for married women to have a career. As she reported to the Radcliffe Alumnae Office, “I think she
In the 1930s, Blanche Crozier’s observations about white domesticity and Black Bermudians in Smiley’s Haven took on more concrete forms as she started to think through how group-level designations – like sex or race – functioned in the context of discrimination. Most significantly, Crozier’s 1935 law review article “Constitutionality of Discrimination Based on Sex” offered a novel feminist interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. 125 Originally designed to prevent racial discrimination, Crozier argued that it should be extended to sex discrimination as well. In her view, race and sex were “large, permanent, unchangeable, natural classes.” Besides women and African-Americans, “[n]o other kind of class is susceptible to implications of innate inferiority,” allegations “which become attached to classes regardless of the actual qualities of the members of the class.” 126 Crozier’s analogy between race and sex became one of the central tactics late twentieth-century feminists used to advance women’s legal equality. 127
Three decades later, legal scholars Pauli Murray and Mary Eastwood looked back to Crozier’s insights in their efforts to link together the successes of civil rights legislation with a new legal approach to fighting for women’s rights. They compared Crozier’s “classification by sex” with “the now discredited doctrine of ‘separate but equal.’” “It could be argued,” Murray and Eastwood stated, “that, just as separate schools for Negro and white children by their very nature cannot be ‘equal,’ classification on the basis of sex is today inherently unreasonable and discriminatory.” 128 This analogy (although often wielded imperfectly) contributed to the decoupling of constitutional support for women with traditional sex roles in marriage by disassembling male breadwinner laws, the creation of antidiscrimination laws, and the growth of equal employment opportunities for women in the 1960s and 1970s. 129 Crozier’s ability not only to observe narratives of gender and race in Bermuda but to use them to critique the status quo proved to have a much broader impact than any of the traditional scientific research produced by BBSR practitioners.
Conclusion
In many ways, the BBSR serves as an early twentieth-century case study of the multiple lives and afterlives of a biological research site. Women and men arrived at the BBSR’s laboratories at Hotel Frascati and Agar’s Island with different academic motivations for their summer research, from conducting experimental investigations for doctoral programs in zoology to collecting marine specimens for museum exhibitions. They left weeks or months later with evidence of various forms of work conducted in the field. Some of this scientific labor was expected, such as the generation of raw data for scientific publications or the careful packaging of jars of preserved marine invertebrates to be used in college classrooms at home. Some of this social and cultural labor was less expected (but no less important), including the formation of new romantic attachments to socially appropriate partners, the rearticulation of scientific prowess as a sign of white supremacy, or, in the case of Blanche Crozier, an intellectual curiosity about how power operates in society.
While biological research stations have been rightly assessed as place-based sites for conducting short- and long-term investigations into the natural world, they also operated as laboratories of social relations. Research station administrators and practitioners carried pre-existing frameworks related to gender, race, and class into the field, but they also adapted them to a local environment marked by the politics of whiteness in the British empire. The inclusion of white women scientists within an elite summer research community proved to be one of the most significant consequences of this adaptation. White scientific women had the freedom to pursue advanced investigations at the periphery of U.S. biology during a time when men actively excluded highly educated women from postgraduate opportunities in science. It is important to underscore, however, that middle-class white women’s self-determination in the British empire was both constrained by a narrow set of gendered domestic expectations and enabled by a colonial power structure that conferred autonomy to white women at the expense of the lives of and opportunities for Black Bermudians. Strikingly, Blanche Crozier’s post-BBSR work identified this double-edged reality for women: how the romanticized ideals of white domesticity and the legal practices around heterosexual marriage often disadvantaged women whether they realized it or not. Following the perspective of marginalized scientific actors and marginalized forms of research station-based labor offers a new interpretation of the significance of field stations as sites where the personal, professional, and political intertwine. 130
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
For their insightful comments and suggestions, it is a pleasure to thank Janet Browne, Nancy Cott, Megan Formato, Isabel Gabel, Amy Kohout, Whitney Laemmli, Melissa Lo, Mary Mitchell, Linda Schlossberg, Meredith Reiches, Sarah Richardson, and Charles Rosenberg. I would also like to acknowledge the valuable contributions from members of the Boston College Department of History and two anonymous reviewers, whose feedback helped to greatly improve the article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research would not have been possible without the support of a Hiebert Fellowship from the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
