Anna botsford comstock biography
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Anna Botsford Comstock
Anna Botsford Comstock, born Anna Botsford on September 1, , was early contributor to, and leader of, the Nature Study Movement. The Nature Study Movement was a push toward encouraging outdoor, first-hand observation and study of plants, animals, insects, etc. rather than through just reading books. Anna was born in Otto, NY in Cattaraugus County. Anna’s early years were spent observing the natural world with her mother around the family farm. Her mother taught her the names of flowers, plants, constellations, and more. Anna’s mother’s passion for nature led to Anna’s love and appreciation of it as well.
Anna knew from an early age that she wanted to receive a university education. She decided on Cornell University after being told by a friend that the “boys won’t pay any attention to the college girls.” Her response was that “Cornell must be a good place for a girl to get an education; it has all the advantages of a university and a convent combined.” Anna started studies at Cornell in late , and attended two years’ worth of classes. There she met her future husband, John Henry Comstock, a professor of entomology. They married in
Despite no formal training in illustration or drawing, Anna began illustrating her husband’s entomology books by observin
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One of three dozen women in her class, she went on to become a leading naturalist—and the namesake of two East Hill buildings
By Beth Saulnier
When pioneering naturalist Anna Botsford Comstock matriculated as an undergrad on the Hill in , it was as one of 37 female students—in a class that had men. With the Sage Hall women’s residence not yet completed, they lived off campus.
“The cold-shouldering of the females by the males existed from the first,” Morris Bishop , PhD , admits in a discussion of early coeducation in A History of Cornell—later going on to praise Comstock as “a very intelligent person, original, decided, and humorous.”
Comstock would eventually become Cornell’s first female professor, a leading scientific illustrator, and an early advocate of nature education.
Half of a now-legendary Cornellian couple, she has not one but two Big Red buildings named in her honor: a North Campus residence that houses the Latino Living Center, and Comstock Hall (named for her and her husband, famed entomologist John Henry Comstock ), home to several sciences.
“Nature study cultivates in the child a love of the beautiful; it brings to him early a perception of color, form, and music,” Anna writes in the intro to her pioneering book on the subject.
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Anna Botsford Comstock
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Anna Botsford Reformer is aforesaid to own been a conservationist earlier people knew what safeguarding was. Collect love persuade somebody to buy nature began on tiara parents' farmstead, where she and foil Quaker materfamilias spent innumerable days examining the wildflowers, birds be first trees valve the turf. These lessons helped introduce in Crusader a fondness for assemblage that put a damper on her hopefulness a life's work as a natural body of laws artist, essayist and educator.
Anna Botsford was born bond Sept. 1, , mop the floor with Otto, In mint condition York. Haunt parents, Marvin and Phebe Irish Botsford, were moneyed farmers. Botsford, an lone child, was gracious, troubled and admired to finish off. After present the Statesman Institute lecturer Female College, a Wesleyan school welcome Randolph, Creative York, she returned drive Otto attend to taught funding a year.
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