The Mother of Freshwater Ecology

While Kathleen Carpenter has largely been forgotten in the modern day, her work in higher education revolutionized many aspects of modern science. In a society that spurned professional women, Carpenter fought to receive a doctoral degree from the University of Wales in the 1920s and fought for the acceptance of women into graduate schools. In a field that neglected freshwater biology in favor of marine biology, Carpenter’s 1928 textbook Life in Inland Waters marked the first freshwater ecology textbook ever written in English; as a result of her studies and publications, Carpenter become known as “the mother of freshwater ecology.” And in a world that provided her research opportunities at countless institutions—the University of Wales in Cardiff, the British Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in London, and Harvard University in Cambridge—Carpenter’s desire to teach brought her to Washington College, where she was head of the Department of Biology from 1931 to 1936.

Kathleen Edithe Zimmermann was born in Gainsborough, England, on March 24, 1891. Her mother was Victoria Boor from Cambridgeshire and her father, Francis Zimmermann, was a successful businessman from Germany. Unlike many other fathers of his time, Zimmermann believed in the education of daughters, and Kathleen enrolled in the University College of Wales Aberystwyth, one of the first colleges in Britain to provide all-female accommodations, in 1907.

Kathleen earned her bachelor’s degree from Aberystwyth in 1910 and studied for her master’s and doctoral degrees, focusing on the impacts of lead and zinc mining in the area around her university. She produced the first detailed assessment of British running-water fauna and discovered that toxic salts from nearby mines had suffocated countless fish and caused the extinction of two species of mollusks. At the same time, however, tensions from the start of World War I began to rock the British community; after one German lecturer was run out of town by a mob in 1914, Kathleen changed her last name to Carpenter–the English translation of Zimmermann.

After receiving her master’s and doctoral degrees in the 1920s, Carpenter published Life in Inland Waters in 1928. The book’s publication provided her with countless research opportunities in the U.S., from further research in metal toxicity in fish while at Illinois State University, to performing physiological research work at Radcliffe College, the female equivalent of the all-male Harvard College. Yet Carpenter’s first official teaching role came in the fall of 1931, when she came to Washington College as the head of the biology department.