“One cannot be said to know any part of the earth’s surface until one realises how it appears in the eyes of its inhabitants.”

For a woman who wanted to be something more than a housewife, the late 19th century was not a great time to be born.   A good education, an independent life, an academic career... if a woman wanted any of these, she was gently discouraged on the grounds that it wasn’t quite ‘the thing’.  And if she pushed any harder, she risked being ridiculed or ostracised - or both.

But Marion Newbigin was one of the women who broke the mould.  The daughter of a pharmacist in Alnwick, Northumberland, she was blessed with forward-thinking parents who encouraged her appetite for learning and were prepared to give her the best education they could afford.  Few universities at that time would accept female students, so Marion attended lectures at the Edinburgh Association for the University Education of Women.   Her first and abiding passion was science.

Aberystwyth University was one of the first institutions to open its doors to women, so in 1891, aged 22, Marion enrolled there on a course of study that included chemistry, physics, biology and mathematics.  She also attended the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women, where she became an assistant to the eminent zoologist J Arthur Thomson. 

When the Challenger expedition returned to Britain in 1876, it brought back thousands of natural history specimens, the majority of which were held in Edinburgh;  the task of sorting and cataloguing them took many decades.  Marion was one of a large team of specialists with the daunting but exciting job of identifying the specimens and analysing the wealth of information brought back from the world’s oceans. 

By 1898, Marion Newbigin had risen to become one of the best qualified women of her day.  She had achieved both a BSc and a DSc, and began lecturing at the School of Medicine for Women, while acting as an external examiner at the University of Aberdeen.  She also taught at Patrick Geddes’ summer schools, held at the Edinburgh Outlook Tower. 

“Man is man and master of his fate;  the world is his, for he has largely made it what it is.”

With her strongly independent nature and her passion for learning, Marion was a lifelong supporter of the women’s suffrage movement.  How ironic was the twist of fate when, in 1916, the University of Edinburgh finally yielded to pressure and granted female students full access to its courses in medicine.  Marion would have been torn between delight and regret, because her work at the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women now disappeared. 

What distinguished Marion Newbigin from her peers - both male and female - was an ability to grasp the principles of many diverse sciences, from botany to zoology, and present them in clear, unambiguous language that had a structure and a purpose.  She was a natural teacher, able to foresee the questions that students would ask, and by all accounts she was a popular lecturer. 

‘Newbigin hated the concept of ‘Empire’ and considered it largely a product of chance...” 

Marion had the clear-sightedness to step back from the political scene of the early 20th century, where the British Empire was still distorting people’s thinking on politics and race.   She preferred to take a more objective view of geography, and challenged the accepted idea that racial characteristics were fixed and hereditary, reflecting the environment in which they had arisen.  Physical differences in race, she argued, were “of little importance under modern conditions”, and she daringly suggested that ‘race’ was being used as a political tool.   In the  austere and smoky chambers of gentlemen’s clubs this must have been about as welcome as an overdose of snuff. 

“A keen gardener and a great lover of alpine plants, many of which she brought home from abroad, Miss Newbigin was president of the Ladies’ Scottish Climbing Club for several years and was a great lover of the mountains...”

In 1902, encouraged by the geologist James Geikie, Marion Newbigin accepted a post as editor of the Scottish Geographical Magazine, the journal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society.   With characteristic dedication, over the next 32 years Marion helped to establish the journal as one of the finest publications of its kind in the world.  When she died in 1934 - tragically, on the same day that the RSGS began celebrating its 50th anniversary - Marion was ranked among ‘the parents of modern British geography.’ 

Marion Newbigin was honoured with the Livingstone Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in 1924 “for her numerous contributions to geographical science, based largely on her own observations.”

 

“Dr Newbigin... was one of the pioneer workers who helped to raise geography from a mere school subject to one of the most important sciences bearing on human social life.”

 

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Article by Jo Woolf for the RSGS, March 2015

Quotes from:  

‘Complex Locations:  Women’s Geographical Work in the UK 1850-1970’ by Avril Maddrell

‘Man and his Conquest of Nature’ by Marion Newbigin

Press Cuttings in RSGS Collection:  Scotsman, 21st July 1924;