Martha Maxwell on the Frontier of Colorado, Modern Taxidermy, and ‘Women’s Work’

This chapter sheds light on an overlooked but significant figure in the history of natural history museum display practices. Described as the ‘Colorado Huntress’ and a ‘Modern Diana’ by the press, Martha Maxwell (1831–1881) was the first American woman to collect and taxidermy her own animal specimens, beginning in the late 1860s. She opened a natural history museum in Colorado. Maxwell was acclaimed for her naturalistic animal tableaux and was invited to share her collection at the 1876 Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia, where she declared her exhibit ‘Woman’s Work’. Revisiting Maxwell’s contributions to her field reveals contradictions of the intersections between gender, animality, and environmental ethics and the blurring of boundaries between art and science, amateur and professional, and nature and culture so typical of nineteenth-century natural history practices.