Alice Carter Cook

Alice Carter Cook
Born	Alice Carter April 8, 1868 New York City
Died	April 23, 1943 (aged 75)
Nationality	American
Fields	Botany
Alma mater	Syracuse University Cornell University Mount Holyoke Seminary
Spouse	Orator Fuller Cook

Alice Carter Cook (1868-1943), born Alice Carter, was an American botanist, who received the first PhD in botany granted to a woman by an American university, from Syracuse University in 1888.

Early life and education

Alice Carter was born in New York City on April 8, 1868 to parents Samuel Thompson Carter and Alantha Carter (née Pratt). Her father was a clergyman of nearby Huntington, New York.^[1] She studied at Mount Holyoke Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) before enrolling at Syracuse for her doctorate. She subsequently taught at Mount Holyoke for three years before attending Cornell University where she earned a second graduate degree, an M.S. in botany, in 1892. That same year she married Orator Fuller Cook, also a botanist, and would later accompany him on expeditions to Africa and the Canary Islands.

Career

Cook was a colleague and fellow graduate student with Henrietta Hooker, and in addition to botanical publications she contributed several articles to Popular Science Monthly and Ladies' Home Journal. Her collections of plants are deposited in the Smithsonian Institution and Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.^[2][3][4][5] Cook also wrote an anthropological profile of native people of the Canary Islands, and later published poems, short stories, and two plays.^[2]

Cook had two sons and two daughters; her son Robert Carter Cook became a noted geneticist and demographer.^[6]

References

1. "Cook, Orator Fuller". National Cyclopedia of American Biography 38. Clifton, NJ: J. T. White. 1953. pp. 369–370.
2. Mary R.S. Creese (2000). Ladies in the Laboratory? American and British Women in Science, 1800-1900: A Survey of Their Contributions to Research. Scarecrow Press. pp. 9–10. ISBN 978-0-585-27684-7.
3. Rossiter, Margaret W. (1984). Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Johns Hopkins paperbacks ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 343–344. ISBN 9780801825095. There were by 1892 also two American women Ph.D.s in botany, Alice Carter Cook (1888) and Henrietta Hooker (1889), both from Syracuse University…
4. Leonard, John William (1914). "Cook, Alice Carter". Woman's Who's who of America: A Biographical Dictionary of Contemporary Women of the United States and Canada 1. American Commonwealth Company. p. 201.
5. Mears, James A. (1981). "Guide to Plant Collectors Represented in the Herbarium of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia". Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 133: 141–165. JSTOR 4064771 – via JSTOR. (subscription required (help)).
6. Cook, Joan (January 9, 1991). "Robert C. Cook, 92, A Longtime Scholar Of Human Genetics". The New York Times.

External links

• Works by or about Alice Carter Cook in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Works by or about Alice Carter Cook at Internet Archive
• Alice Carter Cook Field Notes, 1893-1897 in the Smithsonian Institution Archives
• Cook, Alice. Index of Botanists. Harvard University Herbaria
• Cook, Alice Carter. Global Plants, JSTOR