page_title: Anna Botsford Comstock
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Anna Botsford Comstock / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Anna Botsford Comstock Nature Study Portrait
context_page_description: Anna Botsford Comstock was an American artist, educator, conservationist, and a leader of the nature study movement.
context_section_description: Throughout her life, Comstock illustrated her husband's lectures and publications on insects. She had no formal training in this illustration; she would study an insect under a microscope then draw it. While her husband was chief entomologist in the U.S. Department of Agriculture from 1879 to 1881, she prepared the drawings for his 1880 Report of the Entomologist on citrus scale insects. She then reentered Cornell and received a degree in natural history in 1885. She studied wood engraving at Cooper Union, New York City, so she could prepare illustrations for her husband's book Introduction to Entomology in 1888. Also in 1888, she was one of the first four women admitted to Sigma Xi, a national honor society for the sciences.
  Comstock made engravings for the more than 600 plates used in the Manual for the Study of Insects (1895), Insect Life (1897), and How to Know the Butterflies (1904), the first written by her husband and the latter two co-authored by them. Her engravings appeared in the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900, and in the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1900. She was a member of the Society of American Wood-Engravers, and has been recognized as its most prolific producer of original (as opposed to reproductive) images.
  Anna Botsford Comstock both wrote and illustrated several books, including Ways of the Six-Footed (1903), How to Keep Bees (1905), The Handbook of Nature Study (1911), The Pet Book (1914), and Trees at Leisure (1916). She also wrote the novel Confessions to a Heathen Idol (1906). The horticulturist Liberty Hyde Bailey and her husband both told her they expected The Handbook of Nature Study to lose money, but it became a standard textbook for teachers and was later translated into eight languages, with over twenty printings. It is still in print.
  Comstock is most famous for being one of the first to bring her students and other teachers out-of-doors to study nature. In 1895, she was appointed to the New York State Committee for the Promotion of Agriculture. In this position, she planned and implemented an experimental course of nature study for the public schools. The program was approved for statewide use through the extension service of Cornell. She then wrote and spoke on behalf of the program, helped train teachers, and prepared classroom materials. Starting in 1897, she taught nature study at Cornell. Comstock was the first female professor at Cornell. However, she was denied full professorship for twenty years until 1920. (In 1911, Martha Van Rensselaer and Flora Rose became the first women with full professorship at Cornell.)
  Comstock edited Nature-Study Review from 1917 to 1923, and she was on the staff of Country Life in America.
caption: Anna Botsford Comstock, ca. 1900
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