page_title: Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, 1852
context_page_description: Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz was an American educator, naturalist, writer, and the co-founder and first president of Radcliffe College. A researcher of natural history, she was an author and illustrator of natural history texts as well as a co-author of natural history texts with her husband, Louis Agassiz, and her stepson Alexander Agassiz.
  Agassiz accompanied her husband on his journey to Brazil in 1865-6 and on the Hassler expedition in 1871-2; of the second, she wrote an account for the Atlantic Monthly. She published A First Lesson in Natural History and edited Geological Sketches.
context_section_description: She traveled with her husband and family to Charleston, South Carolina for his professorship in the medical school throughout the winters of 1851-1852 and 1852–1853. She also visited Europe with him in 1859. She worked closely with her husband in his scientific research. Specifically, she accompanied him as the main writer and record keeper for the Thayer Expedition to Brazil, from April 1865 to August 1866, and the Hassler Expedition through the Strait of Magellan, from December 1871 to August 1872.
  In 1856, in their home in Cambridge, Agassiz founded a school for girls from Boston. Her husband supported her by giving courses as well as arranging for courses from other Harvard professors. After the closure of the school in 1863 she helped organize and manage The Thayer Expedition with her husband, who she accompanied to Brazil (1865–1866). This expedition, occurring from 1865–1866, came at the end of the American Civil War, its maiden voyage from New York to Rio de Janeiro beginning in the war's final week. In 1867, she began a correspondence with Arnold Guyot, a geologist and meteorologist. She also helped organize and manage the next expedition (the Hassler Expedition in 1871-1872), which was the first important U.S. government marine exploration, and made transcripts. After her husband's death in 1873, she published several books on natural history for which she had conducted research for many years.
  Agassiz contributed to the founding of the coeducational Anderson School of Natural History. She was (from 1869) one of the first women members of the American Philosophical Society (with Mary Fairfax Somerville and Maria Mitchell); she became a member on October 15.
caption: Portrait of Agassiz, 1852
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