ABSTRACT
In 1879, after prolonged efforts to guarantee women's equal education, Elizabeth Cabot-Agassiz, along with Arthur Gilman and Alice Longfellow, created Harvard's annex, which was formally incorporated as the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women. Although Cabot-Agassiz is famous—because of her family and her fight against women's discrimination and exclusion from higher institutions—her scientific endeavors were not well known. In this sense, this chapter focuses on her travel narrative as a way to bring to the forefront of academic discussions Elizabeth Cabot-Agassiz's voice as a writer and researcher. As a scientist, Louis Agassiz is portrayed as especially curious about her hair, because it represented miscegenation of races. Her mixed hair was an allusion to the notion of half-breeds so intensely studied by scientific discourse of the nineteenth century. Such mixtures of races were portrayed as undesirable, especially by the white race.
