Throughout her life, Comstock illustrated her husband's lectures and publications on insects. She had no formal training in this illustration; she would study an insect under a microscope then draw it. While her husband was chief entomologist in the U.S. Department of Agriculture from 1879 to 1881, she prepared the drawings for his 1880 Report of the Entomologist on citrus scale insects. She then reentered Cornell and received a degree in natural history in 1885. She studied wood engraving at Cooper Union, New York City, so she could prepare illustrations for her husband's book Introduction to Entomology in 1888. Also in 1888, she was one of the first four women admitted to Sigma Xi, a national honor society for the sciences. Comstock made engravings for the more than 600 plates used in the Manual for the Study of Insects, Insect Life, and How to Know the Butterflies, the first written by her husband and the latter two co-authored by them. Her engravings appeared in the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900, and in the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1900. She was a member of the Society of American Wood-Engravers, and has been recognized as its most prolific producer of original images. Anna Botsford Comstock both wrote and illustrated several books, including Ways of the Six-Footed, How to Keep Bees, The Handbook of Nature Study, The Pet Book, and Trees at Leisure. She also wrote the novelConfessions to a Heathen Idol. The horticulturist Liberty Hyde Bailey and her husband both told her they expected The Handbook of Nature Study to lose money, but it became a standard textbook for teachers and was later translated into eight languages, with over twenty printings. It is still in print. Comstock is most famous for being one of the first to bring her students and other teachers out-of-doors to study nature. In 1895, she was appointed to the New York State Committee for the Promotion of Agriculture. In this position, she planned and implemented an experimental course of nature study for the public schools. The program was approved for statewide use through the extension service of Cornell. She then wrote and spoke on behalf of the program, helped train teachers, and prepared classroom materials. Starting in 1897, she taught nature study at Cornell. Comstock was the first female professor at Cornell. However, she was denied full professorship for twenty years until 1920. Comstock edited Nature-Study Review from 1917 to 1923, and she was on the staff of Country Lifein America.
Later life and legacy
In 1922, Comstock retired from Cornell as professor emerita but continued to teach in the summer session. In 1923, the League of Women Voters chose Anna Botsford Comstock and her Cornell colleague, Martha Van Rensselaer, as two of the twelve greatest living American women to have "'contributed most in their respective fields for the betterment of the world.'" Comstock died in Ithaca, New York in 1930. In 1988, she was inducted into the National Wildlife Federation Conservation Hall of Fame.
Memoir
Comstock's memoir was posthumously published by heir and editor Glenn Herrick in 1953, titled The Comstocks of Cornell: John Henry Comstock and Anna Botsford Comstock. Herrick heavily edited the original manuscript, removing elements he considered irrelevant and removing suggestions of controversy; he also emphasized John Henry's accomplishments over Anna's. In 2020, a new edition of Comstock's memoir was published, based more closely on the 716 surviving pages of Comstock's original manuscript in the Cornell University Archives. The new edition, based on six years of research, attempts to convey "a better sense of what Anna was truly like" by presenting what survives of her actual writings, including accounts of her "marriage, travel, teaching, and scientific study". The new edition of The Comstocks of Cornell: John Henry Comstock and Anna Botsford Comstock; A Complete Biography was published in 2020 by Cornell University Press.
