We are excited to present our first guest expert Fire Brigade blog! It’s all about Charlotte Angas Scott, who studied at Girton in the same year as Hertha Ayrton (née Marks) before going on to carve out her own international career in Mathematics. In our musical, Charlotte starts out at Cambridge as a rule-following, mathematics-obsessed bookworm, but her experiences in the Fire Brigade help her discover a more fiery side of her personality…
We’re very grateful to this blog’s author, Professor Jemma Lorenat of Pitzer College, California, who has also written a wonderful biography of Charlotte Scott and Bryn Mawr College: “Instructing the Mathematical Imagination”.
Charlotte Scott in 1876, sitting for her Girton College Cambridge matriculation photo.
Gingerly paging through Sylvia Scudder’s scrapbook in the Bryn Mawr College Archives I was astonished and delighted to find a full-page newspaper illustration headlined ‘GIRLS OF BRYN MAWR FIGHT A FIRE IN PROF. SCOTT’S HOME’. The print by Canadian artist John Wilson Bengough shows firefighters with scarves and long dresses smilingly aiming their hoses at an enflamed second story, while a few helmeted professionals stand in the far background.
On that night in February 1901, the ‘fire burned fiercely, and for a time it appeared as if the flames would devour everything of value in the house.’ The young women worked hard, ‘proved themselves brave and heroic,’ and with ‘two streams of water on the flames’ managed to prevent destruction. The drama of the occasion stood out against the ‘coolness and discipline’ of the fire fighters.[1] The students of Bryn Mawr had spent half a decade preparing for just such occasions. Working in organized fire brigades, each resident practiced the weekly drills under the supervision of their captains. Each student knew how to command axes, water buckets, hoses, and chemical fire-retardants.
Almost a year later a fire in an academic building at the college destroyed the minutes and records of the Graduate Club ‘founded for the purpose of advancing work and the social and intellectual interests of the graduate students.’ As the fire continued, it threatened doctoral theses, notes on work in progress, experiment designs, and expensive source material. Graduate students, valuing ‘theses above jewels,’ rushed to save their research.[2] In the end, all but one was rescued.[3]
Illustrating this fire, then-student Frances Eleanor Mason captured a curving line of hats and braids patiently facing billowing clouds of smoke and flames. The women in front direct their hoses upward while three cartoonish girls in knee length patterned dresses with black stockings and hair ribbons seem to dance with their buckets. Again they are smiling. A silhouette of top-hatted onlookers observes the scene.[4]
Illustration of Bryn Mawr Fire Brigade, as pictured in Fortnightly Philistine, 1902.
With thanks to Special Collections, Bryn Mawr College Libraries
What was newsworthy about the fires at Bryn Mawr College was less the inferno than the girls. Bryn Mawr College opened in 1885 with the ‘aim to give a thorough and generous intellectual culture; to develop womanly character; to fit its students to enjoy life more fully, and to fulfill better any service to which they may be called.’ There were men as administrators, faculty, trustees, and staff at the College, but in the day-to-day they were mostly peripheral. That is, the most efficient student captain (a young woman) ‘was made captain also of the men’s squad, or outdoor brigade.’[5]
I found these pieces of fire paraphernalia researching the first decades of the Bryn Mawr mathematics department as led by the Girton College educated mathematician, Charlotte Angas Scott. Scott became one of the most significant American mathematicians of her generation. Her research cultivated geometrical understanding, often reinterpreting symbolic results in more meaningful and vivid contexts. She trained students as algebraic geometers and introduced them to the burgeoning new field of topology. Commenting on the usual practice of using points as elements, Scott advised ‘a judicious misuse of conventions is frequently essential to progress’[6] – a statement that might as well apply to her academic trajectory.
Despite this range of accomplishments, I was so excited by this fire news that I wanted to begin my book with the scene of women as fire fighters and, somehow, circumlocute to the topic of women as mathematicians. This did not work. I also soon found that the Scott whose home the student’s saved was not Professor Charlotte Angas Scott, but some other Dr. Scott (perhaps a medical professional?) who lived two miles from the campus.
Professor Scott, the subject of this blog post, lived at Bryn Mawr from 1885 when the College began. In 1886 the Girton College Review published a short piece by a former student about the new American college for women. Though the piece is anonymous, I am fairly confident in asserting that this author must be Scott. Among differences in coursework, requirements, and the academic calendar, the author is most struck by the absence of clubs.
I do not think the American woman is less gregarious than the English woman; yet, though Bryn Mawr has been open for eight months with forty-five students, not a single society has been started. Apparently students find that the variety of mental food provided obviates al necessity for catering for themselves as a body.[7]
Scott’s attention to the social side of academics is noteworthy as she had spent her first years at Girton College studying for the Tripos Examination, and, according to her peers, did not have time for other activities. This changed almost immediately after Scott completed the Tripos Exam on January 23, 1880. Though she did not know it, Scott would soon place equal to eighth wrangler, creating shockwaves through the Cambridge establishment. But this future triumph does not seem to have been on her mind. That very same day, Scott took a survey on mental imagery that had been written by Francis Galton and apparently sent to students in Cambridge. In her survey, Scott described her ability to visualize figures, symbols, and ellipsoids from the inside, but also her fondness for chess where she could look forward for ‘15 or 16 moves’, and her tendency to recall musical notation as a curve that smoothly rose and fell with the notes.[8]
A short while later, Scott began to study higher mathematics with Arthur Cayley and tutor at Girton. This kept her busy. Even so, once relieved of the pressure of the Tripos and the associated responsibility of proving whether or not women can do mathematics, Scott also had some fun. She had already co-founded a mathematics club, and in the next four years served as president of the debate society, participated in a ‘Monster Show’ in which students judged gruesome figurine collectibles, helped to organize annual ‘Old students’ dinners’, edited the Girton Review, performed (in Greek) as a member of the chorus in Elektra, and cofounded the Bookworms Society in order to acquire a better library for students.
Once in the United States, Scott’s society involvement was restricted to professional groups. She was elected as a member of the London Mathematical Society, the Deutsche Mathematik Vereinigung, the Circolo Matematico di Palermo, and the American Mathematical Society where she served on the Council and then as vice president in 1906. From her leadership position, Scott ensured that her graduate students also became AMS members once they published their doctoral research and earned their degrees.
At a local level, Scott formed the Bryn Mawr Mathematics Journal Club to better connect current students to contemporary trends and potential topics of research. The group consisted of Scott, her fellow faculty member, mathematics graduate students, occasional recent alumnae, and overseas visitors. They met biweekly over nearly three decades. At each gathering, a club member would report on a recent article or mathematical topic and then write up their findings in the Bryn Mawr Mathematics Club Notebook. These notebooks were kept on the open shelves of the library and could be consulted by any curious student.
Scott was the first woman to direct doctoral research in mathematics and Bryn Mawr College offered the first graduate program where women were expected, not merely permitted as exceptions. By all accounts, Scott was a rigorous yet sympathetic mentor. This rare opportunity attracted prospective research mathematicians from across the United States, Canada, Northern Europe, and especially Girton College. Scott created an environment for focused and exploratory mathematical research that had not been available at her alma mater.
History would have been different if Girton had been willing to spend a little more money in 1884. When Scott received an offer of a professorship at Bryn Mawr, a not-yet-open women’s college just outside of Philadelphia, she wrote to the Girton College administration asking for improved hours and wages. Since she began tutoring her workload has increased each term with no reciprocal improvement in remuneration. Her request was denied and she resigned shortly afterward. In a letter of resignation, Scott argued that college teaching was only possible ‘when the teacher has leisure and energy to prosecute her own studies, to consolidate and extend her own knowledge, and to give such consideration to her pupils as may enable her to continually improve her methods of teaching’.[9] Scott did exactly this, but she had to cross an ocean first. In the Girton Review of December that year an anonymous editorial reported on Scott’s move, hoping, ‘. . . that the time is not too far distant when England may have appointments to offer the best among women’.[10]
Years after arriving at Bryn Mawr, Scott posed for a faculty portrait. She holds her face in her left hand, a book in the other, dressed in academic robes, and leaning against the back of a pew. The pose is deliberate and modeled after her father – Reverend Caleb Scott – who taught theology at Lancashire College for nonconformist ministers in Manchester. A quiet wink at Scott’s own role model and first teacher of mathematics.
Reverend Caleb Scott’s portrait, next to his daughter Charlotte Angas Scott’s portrait. Images courtesy of Joseph Thompson’s 1893 history of Lancashire Independent College, and the 1910 Yearbook of
Bryn Mawr College.
To end on a satisfying economic note, Scott’s early attempts at salary negotiation eventually bore fruit. In 1905 she successfully and confidentially brought her annual pay to $3000, which the college president alleged was the highest salary of any of the other professors.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jemma Lorenat is a historian of mathematics at Pitzer College in Southern California. She enjoys learning and writing about the long nineteenth century, visualization, quantification, and ordinary people becoming mathematicians. In 2025 she published her first book, Instructing the Mathematical Imagination, an intimate portrait of the creation and character of mathematical training at Bryn Mawr College between 1885 and 1926 under the leadership of Charlotte Angas Scott. Lorenat is at the beginning of a new project on interdisciplinary statistical literacies at the turn of the twentieth century (in which some Girton College students again feature!). More of her work can be found at jemmalorenat.com.
REFERENCES
[1] The first two quotes are from ‘Girls’ Fire Brigade at Work’, The New York Times, 28 February 1901; and the latter from ‘Heroic Girls Fight Fire’, Davenport Morning Star, 1 March 1901.
[2] ‘Theses Valued above Jewels’, The Evening Bulletin, 17 March 1902.
[3] ‘General Notes’, The British Friend, Fifth Month 1902. Vol. XI. Number 5.
[4] Frances Eleanor Mason Trowbridge, ‘Denbigh Hall fire (3/16/1902) bucket brigade (cartoon)’, Bryn Mawr College Archives.
[5] M. Carey Thomas, Annual Report of the President of Bryn Mawr College, 1894 – 1895, Philadelphia: Alfred J. Ferris, Printer, 1896.
[6] Charlotte Angas Scott. Plücker’s collected papers. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 4(3):121–126, 1897.
[7] Girton Review, July 1886, pp. 7 – 8.
[8] Charlotte Angas Scott. Returned Schedules from Women, S–W. The Galton Papers. Galton Box 86. GALTON/2/7/2/2/3, 1880.
[9] Charlotte Angas Scott. Letter to Girton College. August 11, 1884. Girton College Archives. GCRF9-1-10-prt13.
[10] Anonymous. December 1884 Notes. The Girton Review, 9:15, 1884.
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