Nineteenth-century women were rarely able to participate in professional scientific communities or contribute to natural history museums. (This trend even applied to such figures as Jane Kilby Welsh, who published a popular textbook on geology, and Orra White Hitchcock, who illustrated her husband’s geology textbooks and produced enormous classroom drawings for his Amherst College lectures.) Instead, most women found alternative ways to study science, creating collections at home or participating in informal networks centered on obtaining and exchanging objects.
Osgood became interested in geology as a teenager. At the age of 13, she began attending the Roxbury Female Academy in Massachusetts, where she studied a wide range of subjects, from Latin and German to geography, natural history, astronomy and chemistry. This curriculum was common for middle- and upper-class women at the time. While young men often received a classical education, young women were more likely to receive basic training in science; then considered a “girl’s subject,” according to historian Kim Tolley, these educational practices would shift a few decades later to make science a more male-dominated field, much like STEM today. In letters to her parents,now housed at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, Osgood shared her growing enthusiasm for her scientific studies. Taught by Benjamin Kent, a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School, she studied astronomy with “magic lantern” projectors—a popular form of entertainment in Victorian parlors. Osgood described “a very pleasant and quite instructive evening” spent viewing slides of lunar and solar eclipses and the transit of Venus. She also wrote enthusiastically about the “interesting experiments” she’d observed in her chemistry class.
It was natural history, however, that especially interested Osgood. Like many other young girls of her generation, including the poet Emily Dickinson, she began keeping a collection of dried and pressed flowers known as a herbarium. Osgood delighted in both the outdoor excursions to find plants and the careful process of pressing flowers, telling her mother, “[W]e place paper between the leaves of the book and the flower, to prevent the flowers staining the book.”
In addition to making her own collection, Osgood spent hours browsing the academy’s cabinet of geological, botanical and zoological specimens. (Precursors to modern museums, cabinets of curiosities displayed eclectic artifacts and wonders of natural history.) Much like the Philosophy Chamber at Harvard, where Kent had studied, the school’s “philosophical room” functioned as the academy’s museum: a teaching collection that allowed students to work directly with specimens. The cabinet exhibited both the process and product of preservation. Osgood noted with anticipation that Kent was “very busy cleaning and preparing” a taxidermied skeleton of a horse to display during their lessons—an eerie example of the tangible methods of assembling a collection.