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"She was really a tremendous individual."
-Cornelia Marschall Smith, Interview
"She seemed to know where she was and where she was going. That was her contribution to her students. . . . Indeed Truth was so much a part of her that others could see what Spenser called glory in her."
-Irene Marschall King, "Dr. Lula Pace"
The epigraphs above, offered by two sisters, recall a professor from their time as undergraduates at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, during the first quarter of the twentieth century. When Smith and King took classes with Lula Pace (1868-1925), she served as chair of the department of botany and geology, a post she held for eighteen years. Newspapers during her life and after her death echo the sentiments expressed above. In addition to standing out in the memories of her students and in local press pages, Pace moved within the ranks of elite scientists: obtaining a PhD in botany from the University of Chicago, publishing in the leading botany journal of her time, receiving a sabbatical year to study at the University of Bonn, and standing for election as a 1912 fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Jordynn Jack observed that litanies like the one above frequently contributed to a discourse of exceptionalism that historically accompanied accounts of highly accomplished women in the sciences; this discourse worked simultaneously to circumscribe professional options for women by illustrating the rarity of such achievements and to expand those options by marking possible pathways ("'Exceptional'" 224). While Risa Applegarth documented how professional women during the interwar period worked to normalize their presence and eschewed discourses of exceptionalism ("Personal"), she also linked the early twentiethcentury rise of professionalization, the escalation of scientific credentialing, and the difficulties women faced finding secure positions within academic institutions (Rhetoric 2-4). Margaret Rossiter observed that even among elite women scientists in the first half of the twentieth century, most went underemployed or unemployed (272). While Pace's primary discipline of botany was perceived as more welcoming to women (Shteir) and had a voluminous record of research contributions from women (Creese 3), the discourse of professionalism worked to narrow the scope of public participation in science and ultimately contributed to a re-masculinization of the sciences...