| Occupation: | botanist and university professor |
| Employer: | Huguenot College |
| Alma Mater: | Cornell University |
| Works: | Plants and their ways in South Africa |
Bertha Stoneman (August 18, 1866 – April 30, 1943) was an American-born South African botanist. She was president of Huguenot College from 1921 to 1933, and founder of the South African Association of University Women.
Bertha Stoneman was born on a farm near Jamestown, New York, the daughter of Byron Stoneman and Mary Jane Markaham Stoneman. Her aunt, Kate Stoneman,[1] was the first woman admitted to the New York State bar, and her uncle George Stoneman was a general in the American Civil War and later governor of California. Bertha Stoneman completed undergraduate and doctoral studies in botany at Cornell University in 1894 and 1896, respectively.[2] Her dissertation research involved anthracnoses.[3]
After graduate school, she accepted a position as head of the botany department at Huguenot College, a women's college in Wellington, South Africa.[4] She started Huguenot's herbarium developed its plant collection, and taught courses in psychology and logic as well as botany.[5] In 1923 she founded the South African Federation of University Women, and served as its first president. She became president of Huguenot University College in 1921,[6] and retired from that position in 1933.[7] Stoneman's textbook, Plants and their Ways in South Africa (1906),[8] [9] was a widely assigned text in South African schools, for several decades. Among her notable students were Olive Coates Palgrave and Ethel Doidge.[10]
Stoneman died at home in South Africa in 1943, aged 76 years.[11] Her papers are archived at Cornell University.[12] There is a botany laboratory at the University of Pretoria named for Stoneman, and the South African Association of Women Graduates awards an annual fellowship in her name.[13]