like The Toast for wannabe Victorian lady naturalists

Welcome, ladyfriends. 

19th Century Lady Naturalist aims high to be The Toast and somehow also The New Yorker and Vogue for wannabe 19th-century lady naturalists, those of us like myself inspired to citizen science by the contributions of early #womeninscience #womeninSTEM before stretch fabric. 

See above, my personal muse, Florence Merriam Bailey, early ornithologist, rocking the smocking and throat-brooch. I added a costume chemise that's similar to FMB's to my Amazon wish list entitled FORWHEN I AM A VICTORIAN NATURALIST: 

Ready will I be.

Florence Merriam Bailey (hitherwith and forthwith known as FMB) is the inspiration for this blog in which I will tell the stories of and emulate the lives of my lady heroes of 19th century natural history, in dress, and in enthusiastic hand-written #sciart  field note #sketchnote taking and curiosity about the natural world's cabinets of curiosities, which were the precursors to the modern museum of natural history.  

I am qualified to do this. I was destined to be a wannabe Victorian lady naturalist. I grew up inside the Industrial Revolution robber baron City of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Natural History, by the dioramas of the Cretaceous. I have a Master's in Museum Studies. And now I'm a Maryland Master Naturalist in training.  

At Smith years ago, with an egregiously vague multidisciplinary #scicomm special study into early natural history societies in the United States I got in to FMB, organizer of the fledgling Audubon society. I opened Her Letters at the Sophia Smith Collection and read Her 1890 book, Birds Through an Opera-Glass.  (That brunchy title alone FMB earns the ultimate Lady Card stamp of The Three Ros-ays, don't you think?)

Stay tuned, ladyfriends, and tell me of your adventures in steam punk Victoriana and citizen science (lurv that Venn diagram) while I locate a Field Notes journal aaaaaand my waist -- so I can wear this beautiful mud-colored silk day-dress: 

For THERE WILL BE MUCH TRAIPSING, I swear it; TRAIPSING THERE SHALL BE.