Born: 18 July 1905, United States
Died: 2 September 1997
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
In the case of American oceanographer Mary Sears, a “no girls allowed” rule didn’t prevent her from having her job—it just made it a lot harder for her to do it. When the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) was founded in 1930, Sears was one of the first staff members, working under her mentor, WHOI director Henry Bryant Bigelow. While Bigelow supported Sears in many ways, such as making sure she met prominent scientists from around the world, he hobbled her with one major restriction: she was not allowed to sail on the organisation’s research vessel, the Atlantis, because she was a woman. This was a holdover from a long-held superstition among sailors that women were bad luck, though officially the lack of a women’s bathroom was given as the reason for excluding women (there was no explaining why a woman could not use the men’s bathroom). As Sears was organising collections of plankton, jellyfish, and other marine animals, she was dependent on what her male colleagues brought back from their expeditions. This meant relying on sometimes faulty information, as the men often did not correctly label and preserve the specimens they collected. Bigelow clearly knew the importance of expedition work—while the women were grounded, all male oceanographers at WHOI were required to go to sea at least once a year.
It was more than ten years before Sears finally got to go on her own expedition, and it wasn’t for WHOI. In 1941, ornithologist William Vogt requested her help analysing why birds in Peru—which fed on anchovies from the ocean—were dying. Her work from the trip was later published in Deep Sea Research.
When Sears joined the Navy in 1943, where her work would later save countless lives, it was the result of a sexist attitude that her work wasn’t important. Roger Revelle wanted to leave his administrative position at the Navy’s Hydrographic Office for more exciting work, but he needed to find a replacement before he could escape. He went to WHOI, where Bigelow’s successor identified Sears, the only female scientist on staff, as the only non-essential oceanographer at WHOI, to do a job a man didn’t want. Sears later wrote, “I was palmed off on him.” As the office originally sought to only hire men, it is also likely she would have been disregarded were it not for the shortage of available men due to World War II—they were given leave to rehire civilians fired because they were suspected of committing fraud before considering women. Her work on tidal patterns would help the Navy locate hundreds of survivors stranded in the ocean after attacks or malfunctions, as well as more effectively planning strategies, as actions like landings were highly impacted by the tides.
The following is republished from the US Naval History and Heritage Command. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
Oceanographic survey ship USNS Mary Sears (T-AGS-65) proudly bears the name of legendary oceanographer Commander Mary Sears.
Sears was born on 18 July 1905 in Wayland, Massachusetts. During World War II, Sears left a job she loved as a research assistant at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) to join the war effort in 1943. As a Navy lieutenant in the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES), she was appointed head of the Navy Hydrographic Office’s new Oceanographic Unit where her research proved critical to the survivability of U.S. submarines. Her intelligence reports, “Submarine Supplements to the Sailing Directions,” predicted thermoclines—areas of rapid water temperature change. Submarines could hide in thermoclines to escape enemy detection by surface sonar.
Following the war, the Navy Hydrographic Office established a Division of Oceanography and Sears was appointed the first officer-in-charge. She transferred to the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1947 and returned to WHOI where she was designated senior scientist in their biology department. She retired from the reserves as a commander in 1963, and retired from WHOI in 1970 as the senior scientist.
Sears was a member of nine scientific and honorary societies and was a longtime member of the WHOI governing board. Throughout her career, she provided leadership across many oceanographic disciplines and mentored generations of young scientists. She passed away in September 1997 at the age of 92.