IMAGINE you are a young woman scientist reaching pre-eminence in your field and then along come several interruptions in the form of a husband and four children. These days women can usually combine motherhood with a career, though even a mere man like me knows how difficult that can be. But at the start of the 20th century most women with jobs had to give them up if they got married.

Not so Dame Maria Gordon, and her determination to carry on her sciences of geology and palaeontology during marriage and motherhood makes her an appealing example to women and girls of today. As we shall see, she did eventually cut back on her geology but only to take up huge causes – women’s rights and international peace.

Readers will be aware that this Saturday we will be celebrating the 8th International Day of Women and Girls in Science. It will be marked across Scotland and the growing role of women in STEM fields – Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics – will be highlighted.

As I have explained, I have taken STEM in its broadest sense, particularly science, and in the run up to Saturday, promised to do my bit for Scottish women in science by presenting the stories from history about extraordinary female Scots and their achievements that you may possibly have never heard about.

I believe I have kept my promise. I began with Victoria Drummond, the UK’s first certificated female marine engineer, and continued with astronomer Williamina Fleming before telling the story last week of Elizabeth Fulhame, a pioneer of chemistry.

My intention leading up to the International Day of Women and Girls in Science was to mention inspirational Scottish women scientists who have not had the fame accorded to them which I believe they are due and today I complete my task with Gordon.

As always, I emphasise that my writings are hopefully a stimulus for readers to make their own further inquiries about Scottish history.

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Born Maria Matilda Ogilvie at Monymusk in what was then Aberdeenshire on April 30, 1864, she was the eldest daughter of eight children of the Rev. Alexander Ogilvie and his wife Maria Matilda nee Nichol. Ogilvie was a teacher who later became headmaster of Robert Gordon’s College in Aberdeen.

He was determined that all his children would have a good education and at the age of nine he sent May, as Maria was always known, to Edinburgh Merchant Company’s Queen Street School, later Edinburgh Ladies College and now the Mary Erskine School.

Summer holidays were spent in joining her eldest brother Francis on treks in the Grampians, where she first developed her love of geology and fieldwork. Francis Grant Ogilvie would later become director of London’s Science Museum and was knighted in 1920.

May Ogilvie was a real “lass o’ pairts” who was proficient in a number of subjects – she was both head girl and top of the class at 18 -– and was also a promising pianist who spent a year at London’s Royal Academy of Music before committing herself to science.

She was one of the first women to gain a Bachelor of Science degree from Heriot-Watt College, now University, back in Edinburgh before going to the research-based University of London to study geology, botany and zoology. In 1890 she was the first woman at the university to graduate with a degree in those subjects.

The following year, Ogilvie applied to the University of Berlin, famed for its geology studies, but was rejected outright on the grounds that she was a woman. She was accepted, however, by the University of Munich, with famed geologist Baron Ferdinand Von Richthofen – uncle of the First World War fighter ace Manfred Von Richthofen – becoming her mentor.

Even there, however, she had to suffer from bias against women – she was not allowed in lecture rooms but had to listen through open doors from a side room.

Von Richthofen’s speciality was the geology of the Dolomites, the mountain range in Northern Italy, and in July 1891, he invited the Scottish student on a field trip in those Italian Alps. Ogilvie was hooked and from the start she was determined to take an entirely scientific approach to her fieldwork.

She complained: “There was no-one to include me in his official round of visits among the young geologists in the field, and to subject my maps and sections to tough criticism on the ground. The lack of supervision at the outset was undoubtedly a serious handicap.”

Not enough to stop her making rapid progress, however, and it was Von Richthofen who recommended that she make further trips to the Dolomites to study the geology of the area, particularly the fossils which indicated that the mountains had once been under the sea.

By 1893 she had completed her first publication, Contributions to the Geology of the Wengen and St Cassian Strata in Southern Tyrol.

It was ground-breaking stuff that described 345 fossilised species of molluscs and corals, and Ogilvie’s thesis saw her become the first woman awarded the Doctor of Science degree by the University of London.

She would later earn the first Doctorate of Science awarded to a woman by the University of Munich in 1900 where she studied palaeontology under Karl Von Zittel, translating his work into English.

May Ogilvie returned home to Scotland in 1895 and married a long-time admirer, Dr John Gordon. They would have four children together, one of their sons dying in infancy. Dr Gordon encouraged his wife’s research and they took their children on the field trips to the Dolomites that she continued to make for years, becoming the pre-eminent expert on the geology of the region after Ferdinand Von Richthofen’s death in 1905.

Dr Gordon was also acutely aware that his wife was a woman in a man’s field. He once wrote to her: “It is a lonely furrow you are ploughing, May; for your own sake I wish you had chosen some other interest for your hard work.”

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May Gordon echoed that many years later, saying: “It was a lonely furrow that I ploughed in my fieldwork abroad. A Britisher – and a woman at that – strayed into a remote and mountainous frontier territory between Austria and Italy, a region destined afterwards to be fought over, inch by inch, in the Great War.”

Her breakthrough came when she realised, and proved, that the Dolomites had been created through movements in the Earth’s crust, a process she called crust-torsion.

In October 1900, she published The Origin of Land-forms Through Crust-torsion in the Geographical Journal. Her musical background came to the fore when she wrote: “This aspect of the structure of any great mountain crest or system presents a suggestive resemblance to a diagram of the condition of a medium transmitting a complex sound, such as that of a musical note with several harmonics.”

Again it was ground-breaking stuff, but her achievement was downplayed and even ignored in the UK. She later told the Royal Geological Society after it made her a fellow: “Another 15 years passed and the war had taken place before I received the visit of a British geologist – the late Dr John W Evans of this society, who came at the kind suggestion of Professor Watts in response to a request of mine.”

The war proved a tragedy for Gordon’s research career. She had compiled her master work under the aegis of Munich University and in 1914 she committed her manuscript and drawings to a German publisher only for the war to break out and the documents to be lost.

SHe started all over again, recreating her handbook from memory. The Royal Society in London was reluctant to publish it so she translated it into German and after its publication in Germany Austria in 1925, she could no longer be ignored. Geologists everywhere reacted with acclaim for her work.

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The death of her husband in 1919 caused May Gordon to move to London, and it was there that she began her political work. She had always been a strong supporter of the women’s suffrage movement and now she joined the Liberal Party and stood for Parliament, coming second in Hastings.

More importantly she was recognised as a leading campaigner for the rights of women and children. At one time or another she was honorary president of both the Associated Women’s Friendly Society and the National Women’s Citizens Association, having earlier been president of the National Council of Women of Great Britain and Ireland.

She was elected vice-president of the International Council of Women and took part in the negotiations for the representation of women in the League of Nations. As early as 1908 she had shown her concern for both boys and girls by publishing in Aberdeen her Handbook of Employments, a sort of career guidance project that was way ahead of its time. Elected a fellow of the Royal Geological Society and awarded its prestigious Lyell Medal in 1932, Gordon was at last getting the recognition she deserved. For both her scientific and political work she was created a dame by King George V in 1935.

One of the most gratifying awards for her was the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws conferred upon her by Sydney University. She was visiting Australia as the guest of the New South Wales Government to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the state and she was presented with her doctorate by university chancellor Justice Halse Rogers at a ceremony on February 2, 1938. It was the first time an honorary degree had been conferred on a woman by the university.

While in Sydney she was the keynote speaker at a Women’s Conference to celebrate the anniversary and delivered an address, International Aspects of Women’s Work.

The local Sydney Morning Herald reported that university vice-chancellor Dr RS Wallace said: “In Australia we have a great appreciation of those who break records. Dame Maria established a record when she became a Doctor of Philosophy at Munich, and she has established another record in Sydney today.”

In her reply, Gordon let slip some of her disappointment at previous treatment saying that when she first studied for entrance to a university, the only university which would enter her for her degree was the London university; her own university in Scotland would not hear of women students, and although in Germany she earned her degree, it was not conferred until 13 years later.

Humorously she referred to Dr Wallace (whose schoolmaster in Aberdeen had been Dr Alexander Ogilvie, Dame Maria’s father) as one of her father’s “most promising boys”.

She fondly remembered her time working in the field saying “the work was a joy and I look back on the days of expecting discovery at every corner as my happiest time”.

Returning to London, Gordon’s health declined and she died at her home near Regent’s Park on June 24, 1939. Her ashes were interred in the same grave as her husband and infant son in Allenvale Cemetery in Aberdeen.

She is remembered in the Dame May Ogilvie-Gordon Audio-Visualisation Centre at the Lyell Centre at Riccarton campus, while the Maria Ogilvie-Gordon Raum holds the geological map collections at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.

Nasa paid her a singular honour by naming a cliff on Mars after her – the Maria Gordon Notch.

Nasa’s Mars Rover Curiosity surveyed the site, the Agency stating: “While Curiosity might not find corals on her way up Mount Sharp, she will certainly strive to follow Maria Gordon’s example of careful, thorough and important geologic work!”