Florence Bascom (July 14, 1862 – June 18, 1945) was a pioneer American woman geologist and educator.

Receiving her PhD from Johns Hopkins University, this made her the first woman to earn a degree at the institution.

[1] The youngest of five children, Bascom came from a family who, unlike most at the time, encouraged women's entrance into society.

[2] Her mother, Emma Curtiss Bascom, was a women's rights activist involved in the suffrage movement.

One year later in 1875, the university began accepting women and Bascom Hill, within the Madison campus, was named after the family and their legacy.

After completing her master's, Bascom enrolled at Johns Hopkins University when it allowed women to attend graduate school and continued her studies in petrography there.

[7] After receiving her PhD, Bascom spent the next two years as an instructor and associate professor at Ohio State University teaching geology.

Bascom was appointed assistant on the U.S. Geological Survey and later was assigned that section of the Piedmont which lies in Maryland, Pennsylvania and part of New Jersey.

Bascom found this by compiling a stratigraphic record of Atlantic deposit in the province, listing the depth, unconformities, and different grain sizes (like sand, clay, or gravel).

Her role in the team was to study crystalline schists in a square degree of area along eastern Pennsylvania and Maryland, as well as a portion of northwest Delaware.

Over a two-year period, Bascom managed to develop a substantial collection of minerals, fossils, and rocks.

In the first third of the 20th century, Bascom's graduate program was considered to be one of the most rigorous in the country, with a strong focus on both lab and fieldwork.

It was a drive with her father who pointed out a landscape that she did not understand, which intrigued her enough to learn about the earth and its geologic processes.

[2] Bascom trained and mentored Louise Kingsley, Katharine Fowler-Billings, petrologist Anna Jonas Stose, petrologist Eleanora Bliss Knopf, crystallographer Mary Porter, paleontologist Julia Gardner, petroleum geologist Maria Stadnichenko, glacial geomorphologist Ida Ogilvie, Isabel Fothergill Smith, Dorothy Wyckoff, and Anna Heitonen.

Those featured were Ida Ogilvie, Eleanor Bliss (Knopf), Anna Jonas (Stose), Isabel Smith, and Julia Gardner.

[14] Florence Bascom published over 40 articles on genetic petrography, geomorphology (specifically the provenance of surficial deposits),[4] and gravel.

[1] Her own account of her youth in Madison may be found in the Wisconsin Magazine of History with the title "The University in 1874–1887", March 1925.