Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013. xv and 377 pp., illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $59.99 cloth (ISBN 978-1-55458-932-6).
In Map Worlds: A History of Women in Cartography, Will C. van den Hoonaard aims to reveal the role of women in the history of map-making and also to recount the experiences of women in contemporary cartography. He began this monumental task in 1993 and rewrote the original draft in 2008. He has divided the book into three “strands”: Women in the history of cartography, (near) contemporary women as pioneers and advancers, and contemporary experiences and social organizations of women's map worlds. I had looked forward to the publication of this book; a book on women in cartography is needed, even overdue, one might say. Map Worlds is seriously flawed, however, with three major types of mistakes in this work: errors of fact, poor editing and proofing, and problems with methodology.
The first strand deals with women in the history of cartography and consists of a summary of the subject focused on the Western world beginning about the thirteenth century. Van den Hoonaard includes not only women who acted as engravers and colorists, but also some nineteenth-century teachers and even schoolgirls who stitched map samplers. This is a somewhat uneven level of coverage, but the primary difficulty with this section is the large number of incorrect statements and quotes. Some of these are caused by an apparent misreading of source materials and some statements simply do not make sense. One example is the discussion of Sarah Sophia Cornell, well known for her geographies and atlases published in the nineteenth-century United States. Her dates are given as 1854–1870. The author states that she published twenty atlases and goes on to say, “from today's perspective, Cornell's achievements are astonishing given the fact that she lived for only sixteen years” (p. 61). It is especially astonishing given that some of her works were published in 1856 when she was only two years old! The author has apparently confused birth and death dates with the dates when she was active.
There are also numerous misspellings and other examples of slipshod proofreading. For example, John Spilsbury, the first commercial producer of dissected maps, is listed in both the text and index as John Spilburg, and Eliza Colles, an American engraver and daughter of Christopher Colles, becomes Eliza Coles in every reference. In the history section, at least one illustration is given the wrong caption.
In the second strand, van den Hoonaard looks at women of the twentieth century as pioneers and includes vignettes of twenty-eight women. This strand is divided into two parts: early twentieth century to World War II and mid- to late-twentieth-century pioneers and advancers. The early twentieth century describes five individual women plus a discussion of women who worked in cartography during World War II. One of the individuals is Ellen Churchill Semple, who has generally not been considered a cartographer. The second part views women pioneers and advancers in North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The living women had the opportunity to read their vignettes before publication; for those who are deceased, the author relied on obituaries, previous biographies, and input from former colleagues and students. The vignettes focus on what might be considered the first generation of women cartographers from the 1960s, especially academic cartographers and those with the PhD, thus some notable women of the “second generation” are deliberately not included.
The final strand, “Contemporary Experiences and Social Organization,” focuses on his primary interest as a sociologist and is where he explores the contemporary “map worlds” of women in cartography. In this strand his goal is to examine the experiences, problems, and obstacles contemporary women face in cartography. To accomplish this, he collected statements from thirty-eight women cartographers in answer to his questions about how they entered the world of cartography, how they achieved their identity as a cartographer and developed professional relations with colleagues, and what they thought their challenges and contributions might be. Appendix B consists of the questions he asked in interviews. In this third strand, there are some issues with methodology.
First, in the introductory chapters he attempts to define “map worlds” and asks “who is a cartographer?” Van den Hoonaard notes that map worlds are fluid and change through time and concludes that “it makes no sense to provide a narrow definition [of cartographer]” (p. 26). Although this might be true, the reader is left to try to determine the roles of his interviewees and what the author considers to be map worlds at the time of the writing. And here lies another problem. He has included geographic information systems specialists, university professors of cartography, executives in mapping companies, engineering surveyors, cartographic technicians, and map librarians; in short, any woman who has any contact with maps is considered a cartographer. The implication is that all have had the same experiences because they are female and work with maps. My experiences as a cartography professor are quite different from a colleague who was an executive with a large mapping firm or from another colleague who started her own mapping company. Our training might have been similar, but our work environment and activities are quite different. By the same token, a student who received her BA and worked in quality assurance for a mapping firm and another who worked for a government agency had quite different work environments. Although he does mention this diversity, in his discussion of his thirty-ewight interviewees, it is not really spelled out and the reader generally has no idea which map world the individual women belong to. A related problem is that the thirty-eight women represent twenty-four countries, but when the author discusses gender issues, there seems to be little recognition that the experiences of women in general in the different countries vary.
For this study, van den Hoonaard has estimated that there are 8,510 women “cartographers” worldwide by taking the distribution of a proposed International Cartographic Association (ICA) questionnaire to 2,000 women, quadrupling it by assuming that technical assistants and drafters were not included in the distribution list, and then adding 510, which he estimated is the number of map librarians and archivists worldwide. Given the number of assumptions involved here, I question the means of arriving at this number. His statistics and tables are based on this total and interviews of thirty-eight women at an ICA conference. Even assuming that 8,510 is an accurate number, thirty-eight women out of a total of over 8,000 would not seem to be a representative sample.
He describes his methodology in Appendix A, including the types of documents consulted. He identifies three journals, Imago Mundi, Cartographica, and Progress and Perspectives: Affirmative Action in Surveying and Mapping as the key journals. Imago Mundi is considered the primary journal in history of cartography, but it is not concerned with modern cartography; Cartographica is certainly a major, well-respected English language journal, but CaGIS, the journal of the Cartographic and Geographic Information Society in the United States, is conspicuous by its absence, as are other major journals in cartography. Progress and Perspectives was a bimonthly newsletter that was published from 1987 until 2000. Although it certainly is a useful resource, it is hardly a key journal.
Van den Hoonaard also seems unclear on the nature of various cartographic organizations. His field work was done largely at ICA biannual conferences and he considers this organization to be the best venue for interviewing women in cartography. The ICA is not an organization like the Association of American Geographers (AAG), however; individuals do not become members of the ICA. The membership is made up of countries (national members) and affiliate members, which are other organizations and corporations, such as the U.S. Geological Survey and Esri. The “rank and file” cartographer is unlikely to attend an ICA conference but rather would attend the AAG, North American Cartographic Information Society, Esri, or other national meeting. The author's apparent unfamiliarity with cartography journals and organizations makes me question his knowledge of map worlds in general.
Finally, much of the information in the third strand is dated. A table of gender makeup from 1991 with no updating does not tell the reader what the status is today, twenty-three years later. It would have been more valuable to bring this into the twenty-first century. There have been tremendous changes in cartography since 1991 both in technology and in women's roles in the field.
Van den Hoonaard set himself a daunting goal in writing Map Worlds. His aim was to trace the world of women mapmakers from the golden age of the sixteenth century to the present and to examine the current gender issues in that world. He has noted the difficulty of writing across disciplines, and unfortunately, that has resulted in many of the problems already detailed.
Given the many flaws in Map Worlds, I strongly considered not writing this review. It is never pleasant to fault another's work and it is especially painful when one is cited and complimented frequently in the book. Because this is the only book on women in cartography, however, I fear that it will be referenced often and taken as the true story of women and women's cartographic worlds; therefore, I felt it was necessary to alert potential readers to the many problems.