She is the recipient of several awards, including the American Society for Environmental History's George Perkins Marsh Prize. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
McNeur applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science, and reported the following:
Mischievous Creatures uncovers the lives and work of the forgotten nineteenth-century American scientists Margaretta Hare Morris and Elizabeth Carrington Morris. Though these sisters made significant discoveries, wrote popular science articles, won recognition, and were in conversation with major naturalists—including Charles Darwin, Asa Gray, and Louis Agassiz—few have ever heard their names. My book recovers their story while also investigating how they were erased from the history of science.Visit Catherine McNeur's website.
The story on page 99 gets at one of the first erasures. At this point in the book, Margaretta had just presented her discovery that the wheat flies she studied in 1830s Philadelphia were behaving differently than entomologists generally understood them to behave. She had been reluctant to share this publicly, knowing that as a woman she’d face an uphill battle to be taken seriously. However, she was driven to speak out since so many American farmers and consumers were suffering from failing harvests and rising prices for flour in the middle of the Panic of 1837.
This excerpt from page 99 shows how fellow entomologists tried to discredit her and her work, no matter its importance:Meanwhile, Thaddeus William Harris finished writing his Report on the Insects of Massachusetts in the summer of 1841, feeling all the more confident about his section on Hessian flies now that Herrick’s supporting research had been published in a prestigious journal…. In addition to quoting Herrick extensively, he celebrated him as a leading expert and “careful observer.” Harris, throughout his entire volume and even casually in his letters to fellow entomologists, was fastidious in giving credit to others and including all possible citations. This practice highlights his subtle disdain for Margaretta Morris when he mentioned her in his book. Gone are his typical offerings of praise, gratitude, and respect. Like earlier critics in the Farmers’ Cabinet, Harris described Margaretta as reviving an “old discussion,” implying that it had long ago been settled and discredited. After describing her intervention briefly, he dismissed it, writing, “The fact that the Hessian fly does ordinarily lay her eggs on the young leaves of wheat, barley, and rye, both in the spring and in the autumn, is too well authenticated to admit of any doubt.”The Page 99 Test is great at getting at the kinds of scientific attacks the Morris sisters faced. However, Mischievous Creatures is about more than the skepticism of male scientists. It centers Margaretta and Elizabeth in the narrative by revealing the ways they persisted and the strategies they developed to be taken seriously. It’s also about their collaboration. Working together, the sisters supported each other as they sought solutions to botanical and entomological puzzles. No matter the obstacles they faced professionally, they found immense joy outside learning about their environment and sharing their discoveries with others.
--Marshal Zeringue
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