Constructing the Global Irish Woman Traveller: Cynthia Longfield’s Scientific Researches in South America, 1921-27

Angela Byrne

doi:10.37389/abei.v21i2.3812

Abstract

Irish-born Cynthia Longfield (1896-1991) became a leading entomologist after participating in three expeditions to South America in the 1920s. Working unpaid in the British Museum for 30 years, she catalogued Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies) from all over the world, published scientific papers, and collaborated with British, Irish and international scientists. While she made several other collecting expeditions to Africa and South-East Asia in the 1920s and 1930s, her early experiences of South American natural history are a crucial aspect of her formation as an internationally renowned scientist, and are an interesting chapter in the long history of Irish connections with the region. She was a migrant, a traveller, and a scientist, and was a person at once privileged by her class and denied basic equalities due to her gender. This article firstly considers her scientific career in the context of Irish women’s migration in the first half of the twentieth century, before focusing on her three voyages to South America in 1921-7 and, finally, examining the ways in which her participation in the St George expedition– as one of just three women aboard ship – was reported in the Anglophone press.

Highlights

Irish-born Cynthia Longfield (1896-1991) became a leading entomologist after participating in three expeditions to South America in the 1920s
Her South American expeditions in particular formed the basis for a lifetime of scientific enquiry into global insect life and quickly shaped her as an internationally renowned entomologist; they are an interesting chapter in the long history of Irish connections with the region
A traveller, and a scientist, a person at once privileged by her class and denied basic equalities due to her gender, and one of just three women participants in the high-profile St George expedition of 1924-5. This article considers her scientific career in the context of Irish women’s migration in the first half of the twentieth century, before focusing on her three voyages to South America in 1921-7, and the ways in which her participation in the St George expedition was reported in the Anglophone press

Summary

Longfield as migrant

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century there was, more or less, gender parity among Irish migrants – in other words, Irish women were as likely to migrate as Irish men – a pattern not repeated among any other ethnic diaspora group. Attention was for long diverted from women who pioneered in various fields of work, but whose contributions were not memorialised after their death or retirement, whose legacies did not fit within the dominant narratives of twentieth-century Irish historiography, or were not packaged for general readership and public consumption Despite her long and successful career as an entomologist, Longfield has never been the subject of serious study. The expedition resulted in her first scientific publication – a paper read to the Entomological Society in May 1929, in which she collated all of the Odonata recorded to date in the Mato Grosso, including those that had appeared in scientific literature from the 1880s, all of those found in the British Museum collection, and the specimens she herself she had collected in April–June 1927 (Longfield 1929) She thereby positioned herself within a tradition of entomological research in Brazil, and to the forefront of developments in the field. While she is best remembered for her contributions to entomology, she maintained a keen interest in ornithology and in conservation until her death, as a member of the Committee on Bird Sanctuaries in Royal Parks and a life member of the Botanical Society

Print media and women participants in the St George expedition

Conclusions

Works Cited