Bertha Stoneman (August 18, 1866 – April 30, 1943) was an American-born South African botanist. She was president of Huguenot College from 1921 to 1933, and founder of the South African Association of University Women.
Early life and education Bertha Stoneman was born on a farm near Jamestown, New York, the daughter of Byron Stoneman and Mary Jane Markaham Stoneman. Her aunt, Kate Stoneman,"Professor of Botany" Harrisburg Daily Independent (September 4, 1897): 7. via Newspapers.com was the first woman admitted to the New York State bar, and her uncle George Stoneman was a general in the American Civil War and later governor of California. Bertha Stoneman completed undergraduate and doctoral studies in botany at Cornell University in 1894 and 1896, respectively.Bertha Stoneman, PhD 1894, Botany, Cornell University Graduate School. Her dissertation research involved anthracnoses.Bertha Stoneman, "A Comparative Study of the Development of Some Anthracnoses" Botanical Gazette 26(2)(August 1898): 69-120.
Career
After graduate school, she accepted a position as head of the botany department at Huguenot College, a women's college in Wellington, South Africa.Emmanuel D. Rudolph, "Women in Nineteenth Century American Botany; A Generally Unrecognized Constituency" American Journal of Botany 69(8)(September 1982): 1352. She started Huguenot's herbarium developed its plant collection, and taught courses in psychology and logic as well as botany.Ruth C. Ellenwood, "Bertha Stoneman, CHI: College President" The Anchora of Delta Gamma (January 1934): 189. In 1923 she founded the South African Federation of University Women, and served as its first president. She became president of Huguenot University College in 1921,"A South African Presidency" Cornell Alumni News 23(August 1921): 512. and retired from that position in 1933.Mary R. Creese and Thomas M. Creese, Ladies in the Laboratory III: South African, Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian Women in Science: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Scarecrow Press 2010): 12-14. Stoneman's textbook, Plants and their Ways in South Africa (1906),Bertha M. Stoneman, Plants and their Ways in South Africa (Longman, Green 1915).Henry C. Cowles, "A South African Textbook in Botany" Botanical Gazette 43(2)(February 1907): 139-140. was a widely assigned text in South African schools, for several decades. Among her notable students were Olive Coates Palgrave and Ethel Doidge."Ethel Mary Doidge" JStor Global Plants.
Personal life Stoneman died at home in South Africa in 1943, aged 76 years."Native of Chautauqua Dies in South Africa" Dunkirk Evening Observer (May 1, 1943): 4. via Newspapers.com Her papers are archived at Cornell University.Guide to the Bertha Stoneman Papers, 1894-1945, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. There is a botany laboratory at the University of Pretoria named for Stoneman, and the South African Association of Women Graduates awards an annual fellowship in her name.South African Association of Women Graduates, National Fellowship Awards 2016.
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Biography