Crafting Disciplines interrogates the material dimensions of nineteenth-century scientific objects to reveal a network of craft processes—fancywork, stenography, and photography—that materially and technically supported the emergence of modern American scientific disciplines. Engaging with the histories of nineteenth-century American science, historical recovery projects of women in nineteenth-century American science, and science and technology studies (STS) scholarship on science as practice, this project demonstrates how craft shaped scientific domains through collegiate instruction, public popularization, and internal technical processes. I argue that women’s technical acuity with image and specimen creation, transcription, and notation of experimental procedures were integral to this key period in the development of modern American science. By tracking the material and sociocultural contexts of scientific craft objects made by three elite white women over the course of the century, I demonstrate how craftwork legitimated the burgeoning professional establishment by connecting it to white Christian ideologies associated with domestic production and, through its associations with the mechanical arts, ensured that descriptive and theoretical scientific methodologies remained connected to the social infrastructure of technical expertise required for technological progress.

Each chapter of this project is a case study examining a particular archival collection of crafted scientific objects made by white women embedded in the emerging professional scientific establishment of the nineteenth-century US. I emphasize the materiality of the archival craft objects to ground a discussion of how gendered craft practices shaped professional scientific disciplines and institutional formations. I begin in the college geology classroom, exploring how large visual aids made by Orra White Hitchcock for her husband’s lectures negotiated the unstable theoretical terrain of new geological concepts like deep time for audiences of Christian students. I then turn to the public lecture hall, where Elizabeth Agassiz sat day after day transcribing and later circulating her husband’s lectures on theories of polygenism for massive audiences across the New England and the South. I end in the astronomical observatory, delving into the world of solar photography at the Vassar College Observatory run by famed female astronomer Maria Mitchell as an experimental program in redefining women’s professional scientific work. A short coda explores the possibilities of a new scholarly craft practice—artists’ bookmaking—in researching the interdisciplinary histories of science and art. Situating artists’ bookmaking alongside the already established practices of historical reconstruction and studio art praxis, I discuss how my own engagement in making artists’ books alongside my research into the gendered histories of American scientific craft is exemplary of how we might approach archive-based craft research in the future.