IV. Women, CIties, and Spatial Analysis

The Hull House (founded in 1889) set a foundation for social work in the United States through the investigative efforts demonstrated by the Hull House Maps & Papers. Holbrook states, "merely to state symptoms and go no farther would be idle; but to state symptoms in order to ascertain the nature of disease, and apply, it may be, its cure, is not only scientific, but in the highest sense humanitarian." The HHM&P were a constructive effort to address systemic problems such as income inequality and unjust labor conditions rampant under laissez faire economics. Agnes Holbrook's detailed thematic maps use color and statistics to present social facts about immigrant population and the wage distribution of slum sections of Chicago immediately East of the house. Very modern in design, the statistical data were placed on base maps provided by Chicago surveyor Samuel Greeley. The maps are heavily influenced by earlier statistical maps by Charles Booth, in his Life and Labour of the People in London (1889); Booth had used thematic maps to graphically illustrate income inequalities and the spread of disease.

An investigation into the conditions of child labor was of great concern for Florence Kelley, Chief Factory Inspector for the state of Illinois and resident of Hull House. These charts compare the physical development of child factory workers to that of their peers as evidence of the harm that factory work had on children. Kelley struggled for reform that would get the children out of the sweatshops and factories and into the schools.  Her investigations and advocacy would come to influence the passage of child labor laws in the United States.

Paula Scher's cartographic humor artistically plays with familiar geography, and presents it beautifully and uniquely. This world trade map highlights the various air and shipping lines, major trade routes the world with all those possible connections literally weaving across the earth.

This outstanding atlas won the American Association of Geographers' Media Achievement Award, and has been published in French, German, Japanese and Spanish. Professor Seager is a feminist geographer and professor at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

The mapping of the Indian Ocean was part of a larger effort by the International Indian Ocean Expedition (IIOE) and sponsored by UNESCO, to increase international scientific relations as well as to discover the unknown seafloor in this region. Marie produced this map from sounding data she received from forty-five representatives from seven countries, while Bruce (Heezen) would later communicate their findings. Partners in oceanographic research and publications, Heezen was credited solely for their work for years, and only recently has Marie gained rightful credit for her extraordinary cartography.

These early editions of the Heezen-Tharp maps of the ocean floors have an informal, almost sketch-like style, with iconic representations of particular features in the depths. Numbers all over the map tell us the depth of the ocean floor, and elevations of individual undersea mountains.

Later versions of the ocean floor maps were more sophisticated physical maps using color and shading to show the dramatic mid-ocean canyons that revealed the divisions between the earth's continental plates.