Women's History Month: Geneva Stratton-Porter

Gene Stratton-Porter. Source: Indiana State Museum ID: 71.2006.105.0034

This March, COS celebrates women in the region who have led the way for conservation and environmental justice.

by David Hoyt

Like many of the early advocates of conservation, Geneva Stratton-Porter grew up in rural circumstances on Midwestern land that had only recently been converted to agriculture. From her earliest childhood, she was fascinated by her still-wild surroundings, and especially by the birds and moths that abounded in the Wabash River Valley and in the wetlands of Northeast Indiana.

Writing in the 1910s, she reflected that, wherever today she saw one bird, in her youth she would have seen fifteen, and that even the vegetation—both wild and cultivated—did not grow as rankly as it once did. Sensitive to this loss, she agitated in support of the preservation of Indiana’s remaining wetlands, though unsuccessfully at the time. Today, a bird sanctuary and state park guard restored fragments of the original, 13,000 acre Limberlost Swamp known by Stratton-Porter.

Her love of the natural world framed her fiction writing, through which she gained fame and wealth, while also highlighting the moral value of attunement to nature. Her literary success also helped to finance her pursuits and publications as an amateur naturalist. A fortunate marriage to a local pharmacist provided her the means to engage in close study of the birds of the Limberlost Swamp. From 1895, she began to experiment with the new technology of photography, and in 1904 produced one of the first works of bird photography: What I Have Done with Birds.

Image of a Belted Kingfisher, from Stratton-Porter’s What I Have Done with Birds, (1907)

Both Stratton-Porter’s nature writing and her photography were criticized by what she called the “old school” of ornithologists for being “unscientific.” While her writings and images did not employ any sort of disciplined methodology, they were based on exhaustive and talented observation. Above all, they asserted the legitimacy of training a moral perspective on scientific practice. Given the maturity of avian taxonomy by the early 20th century, there was no longer any excuse, she wrote, to shoot with a gun “fifty eight rose-breasted grosbeaks during the space of three weeks in the breeding season in order to make a record of the contents of their crops.”