Marriage to William Ingraham Chase

On 22 May 1903, Mary Agnes Meara married William Ingraham Chase, becoming Mary Agnes Chase.[5] The marriage, which took place during her early professional years in Chicago and Washington, D.C., was tragically short-lived: William died later that same year, leaving her a widow and reinforcing the financial and emotional precarity that had characterized her youth.[5]

This personal event had lasting professional ramifications. As a widow without children, Chase increasingly poured her energy into botanical illustration and research. Her new surname became the name under which she built her scientific reputation, published influential monographs on grasses, and signed more than seventy papers—"Chase" eventually serving as her formal botanical author abbreviation.[1][7][10] In an era when marriage often curtailed women’s scientific ambitions, her brief union, followed by widowhood, paradoxically opened space for sustained work in agrostology.

The marriage also underscores the social context of the early twentieth century: women were expected to prioritize domestic roles over professional ones, and widowed women often faced economic strain. Chase responded by deepening her commitment to science and later to suffrage activism, turning personal loss into renewed resolve. The date therefore marks not only a change of name but a pivot in her life toward the extraordinary independent career that would make her one of the twentieth century’s most respected grass taxonomists.[2][5][8]