How Women Mapped the Upheaval of 19th Century America

As I wrote in the first installment of this series, women have been participating in cartography about as long as any man has. That means women have been using maps to convey ideas and agendas—for better or for worse, conscientiously or unwittingly. For a map is never neutral. Sometimes, it is plainly propaganda. Other times, its bias is subtle enough for it to pass as scientific artifact.

In the explosive 19th century, women produced maps (entire atlases, actually) that attempted to make sense of America’s relatively new nationhood, its boundaries and beliefs, and who belonged there. In the maps presented here, women cartographers conveyed both facts and fictions about a country in upheaval, and developed new visual techniques in the process.