“We never hire women”: how the National Park Service kept women out of naturalist jobs

In 1948 a woman who had just finished the Yosemite field school said she wanted to be a park naturalist, and the National Park Service's chief naturalist asked whether she realized the Service never hired women. This National Park Service history article explains why such a thing could be said in an agency whose nature programs women had helped build, and this page paraphrases it.

Trained for jobs they would not get

In 1920 the Service launched its education program with the Free Nature Guide Service at Yosemite, led by Harold C. Bryant and Loye Holmes Miller, while Ranger Isabel Bassett Wasson arrived at Yellowstone. Bryant described the program in 1923 as lectures and campfire talks, field excursions, an office hour for questions, wildflower shows and special trips for children. Women could do all of it as well as men, the article says, and sometimes better.

Instruction at the Yosemite Field School of Natural History, 1937. Yosemite National Park photo.

Other parks copied the guide service. In 1925 Bryant began the Yosemite School of Field Natural History to train guides, camp leaders, teachers and naturalists. Women were up to 65 percent of the students in each of its first four years. From 1929 the number of women admitted to the seven-week course was capped, and by 1939 they were only 20 percent. Applicants were rejected for jobs because they "couldn't fight fires, rescue injured rock climbers, bury dead animals, or carry out police duties," none of which were naturalist duties. The Service hired men who finished the school and rarely women. One early exception worked the 1925 summer at Yosemite, probably because the job involved guiding children.

Excuses

Ruth Ashton, a graduate of the school, was actively discouraged from taking the naturalist exam. In 1928 the chief naturalist blamed "administrative reasons imposed upon us by Washington," and that year the ranger-naturalist title was created to solve the problem of hiring women as park rangers. A second excuse was lack of suitable housing, which hardly applied to Ashton, who already worked seasonally as an information clerk at Rocky Mountain National Park. Its superintendent offered her that job again instead of the naturalist post she wanted, and said he felt a man was preferable for the position, though he had only one permanent and one seasonal naturalist position that year. Ashton's book Plants of Rocky Mountain National Park, the first comprehensive plant list of the park, was published by the Government Printing Office in 1933, and in 1946 she got a very brief appointment as a naturalist to work on a second edition. A 2000 update by other authors keeps her work useful.

Public opinion as a pretext

At the 1929 First Naturalists' Conference, Glacier's park naturalist George C. Ruhle said the public preferred male guides, even for a woman with great knowledge. The article says he gave no support for this, and that it is easily contradicted by the popularity of the early women naturalists and the acclaim from Service management and the press for early women rangers doing similar work since the 1920s.

Visitors at Grand Canyon in 1931 listen to a woman ranger give a talk. Grand Canyon National Park photo.

In 1939 the field school's assistant director and Yosemite's chief naturalist told a woman and three others in her class that there were no jobs for them in the Service. She got a seasonal naturalist position at Yellowstone only after World War II, with credentials that included directing Minnesota's state park nature guide service in the early 1940s.

The Yosemite School of Field Natural History, 1939. Yosemite National Park photo.

One who got through

The woman of 1948 was Beatrice Willard. A western region naturalist overheard the remark, surveyed superintendents and found four willing to hire her, leading to temporary ranger-naturalist jobs at Crater Lake and Lava Beds. In 1958 she began an alpine tundra research project at Rocky Mountain National Park that lasted 40 years, earned a PhD in botany in 1963 and became a world-renowned tundra ecologist. Her plots are the oldest permanent plots in the National Park System, and in 2007 they were added to the National Register of Historic Places. She helped lead the campaign to create Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument and was a key advisor to presidents Nixon and Ford and the first woman on the President's Council for Environmental Quality, according to the article.

A botanist at work in an alpine tundra plot, Rocky Mountain National Park, 1961. Rocky Mountain National Park photo.

A job made masculine

Even as the Service refused women naturalist jobs, the field was associated with women, and men resented that. A 1940 conference noted that training temporary rangers with the naturalists cut down ridicule of the naturalists, who were mocked with a gendered insult the article quotes and this page does not repeat. Ruhle recalled in a 1977 interview that seven of the 11 naturalists hired at Glacier in the 1930s were football players, hired on purpose to counter the "effeminate stigma." By redefining naturalists as manly men, the Service shut women out of another career path.

Region Four Naturalist Conference at Yosemite, April 1948. Three women in the back row were secretaries who attended only to take notes. Yosemite National Park photo.

No good reason

In 1930, a Service research and education branch reported six women in ranger-naturalist and museum jobs in four parks, even excluding seven vacancies, there were ten times that number of men. A 1945 letter from a Service official to the Mesa Verde superintendent, who had asked to hire a woman, sums up the reasoning: there was no good reason women should not hold park naturalist jobs, but the Service had arbitrarily decided not to favor placing them there, and as a general rule he thought it was right. Most women had to wait until the 1960s to be considered again for uniformed jobs in education and interpretation.

Sources

• National Park Service, Did You Know We Never Hire Women?, an NPS history article; photographs from Yosemite, Grand Canyon and Rocky Mountain National Parks; the quotations from the Service's officials of the period are federal records; rewritten in hubnx's own words.