The Women Who Found Liberation in Seaweed
On July 6, 1901, Natalie Karsakoff took a break from her busy schedule to write a letter to her mentor, the French botanist Édouard Bornet. Hoping he would join her on the northwest coast of France, she couldn’t help but boast a bit about where she was staying: the home of her good friend Anna Vickers.
Their lodging had everything a summer vacationer needed, she wrote: “a magnificent laboratory, well-lit, clean,” with “a stove to heat ones feet,” “blinds to sift the light,” and, of course, “tiled floor that could handle any liquid.” Right outside was the main attraction: a shore populated with what would eventually prove to be hundreds of species of algae, swaying underwater and waiting to be found.
Karsakoff and Vickers, whose story is detailed in a by science historian Emily S. Hutcheson, were devoted algologists. For 12 summers, from 1889 to 1901, they lived together at Vickers’ house in Roscoff, France, “revel[ing] among , , , , and ,” as Karsakoff wrote in another letter. They pushed of female seaweed experts to new levels. And they did all this within a stone’s skip of the Station Biologique De Roscoff, a research institute where other marine enthusiasts, mostly men, pursued similar interests in very different ways.
