Alice Carter Cook

Alice Carter Cook (April 8, 1868 – June 14, 1943), born Alice Carter, was an American botanist, who in 1888 received from Syracuse University the first PhD in botany granted to a woman by any American university. Carter was born in New York City on 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 fellow botanist Orator Fuller Cook, and later accompanied him on expeditions to Africa and the Canary Islands.

Alice Carter Cook
Born
Alice Carter

(1868-04-08)April 8, 1868
New York City
DiedJune 14, 1943(1943-06-14) (aged 75)
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater
Spouse(s)Orator Fuller Cook
Children4, including Robert C. Cook
Scientific career
FieldsBotany

Cook was a colleague and fellow graduate student with Henrietta Hooker, and in addition to botanical publications 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.
  6. Cook, Joan (January 9, 1991). "Robert C. Cook, 92, A Longtime Scholar Of Human Genetics". The New York Times.


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