Rosa Smith Eigenmann

Biographical Background

Rosa Smith was the last of nine children.  In a sort of opposite migration, her family had moved from California to Illinois where they got into the newspaper business.  Due to health reasons (tuberculosis) affecting her, her family returned to California.  She completed her secondary education at the Point Loma Seminary.  From the beginning she showed a great deal of interest in natural history and joined the San Diego Society of Natural History.  From the beginning she was an avid collector of plants and animals.

In 1879 she met in San Diego the famous American ichthyologist David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) who was impressed by her abilities.  Jordan urged her to went on with her education at Indiana university where he had just joined the faculty.  Before moving to Indiana, Rosa spent the summer of 1880 in Europe, with Jordan and his students in a natural history tour.  She spent the two years at Indiana University in Bloomington, but never graduated because she had to return to California due health problems in her family.  However, while in Bloomington she met a Ph.D. student and a Jordan's protégée, Carl H. Eigenmann.

While in San Diego she worked on various species fish, including the blind goby Othonops eos (formerly Typhologobius californiensis) of the San Diego's Point Loma Peninsula.  She published  many papers, while keeping an intense correspondence (scientific and personal) with Eigenmann.  They married on 20 August 1887.  From then on they worked closely.  The Eigenmanns traveled to Harvard University, where they studied the Thayer Expedition collections of Louis Agassiz and Hassler Expedition collections of Franz Steindachner.  As a result of that collaboration they published a series of seminal works that included Preliminary Notes on South American Nematognathi (1888), A revision of The South American Nematognathi (1890), and Catalogue of the Fresh-water Fishes of South America (1891).  

In 1891 she and her husband returned to Indiana.  Carl returned as faculty of the University; he was later named Chair of the Zoology Department and Dean of the Graduate School after the departure of Jordan who was named Chancellor of Stanford University.  Rosa and Carl had five children, two of them with serious disabilities.  Despite, Rosa managed to continue working with her husband and making important contributions to ichthyology.

Carl had a stroke in 1927 and both returned to San Diego, where he died on 24 April of that year.  She was not only the first professional woman ichthyologist but also a feminist; she once wrote, 'in science as everywhere else in the domain of thought woman should be judged by the same standard as her brother. Her work must not simply be well done for a woman.'