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Maria Wilman
Summary
Maria Wilman (29 April 1867 – 9 November 1957) was a South African geologist and botanist. She was the first Director of the McGregor Museum in Kimberley, South Africa and the second female South African to attend the University of Cambridge in England.
Born in Beaufort West on 29 April 1867, Wilman was the fifth of Herbert Wilman and Engela Johanna Neethling's nine daughters. Her father was an immigrant to South Africa from Yorkshire and served as an MP for Beaufort West in the Cape Parliament of Prime Minister John Molteno.
Wilman first matriculated at the Good Hope Seminary in Cape Town. Later, in 1885, she entered the University of Cambridge and was only the second South African woman to do so. She completed a natural science tripos in geology, mineralogy, and chemistry at Newnham College, Cambridge in 1888, and an MA in botany in 1895. However, women were not conferred formal degrees until the 1930s, so Wilman did not actually receive her MA from Cambridge until November 1931.
In 1939 she was granted an honorary doctorate in law from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
Wilman's museum career began when she returned to South Africa from England and worked as a volunteer in the Geology Department at the South African Museum in Cape Town. Because she did not have a formal degree and her father did not approve of her earning a salary, Wilman was unable to accept payment for her work at the museum. Nonetheless, she continued to work there in a volunteer capacity until 1902 when she was officially named an assistant in the Geology Department.
While at the South African Museum, Wilman worked with Louis Albert Péringuey. Péringuey's interest in the San people and culture allowed her to take several research trips to the Northern Cape and Zimbabwe.
In 1906 she undertook an important journey up to Kimberley, the Vryburg region and further north, collecting specimens, and amassing data on rock engravings which was the start of a project culminating nearly three decades later in her publication Rock engravings of Griqualand West and Bechuanaland (1933), published in Cambridge.
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