Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora's Daughters and Botany in England, 1760-1860Maria Elizabeth Jacson's popular textbooks introduced a generation of young men and women to the science of botany. Agnes Ibbetson published more than fifty articles about plant physiology in science journals of the nineteenth century. The writings of Elizabeth Kent were admired and praised by Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Shelley. Yet the names of these three women have almost completely disappeared from histories of botany and science culture. In Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science, Ann B. Shteir explores the contributions of women to the field of botany before and after the dawn of the Victorian Age. She shows how early ideas about botany as a leisure activity and "feminine" pursuit gave women unprecedented opportunities to publish their views and findings in both scientific and amateur periodicals. Women were encouraged to study botany as a fashionable area of natural history linked to self-improvement. Some established themselves as important authors and teachers in the field. By the 1830s, however, botany came to be regarded as a professional activity for specialists and experts - and women's contributions to the field of botany were viewed as problematic. Shteir focuses on John Lindley, the anti-Linnaean and first professor of botany at the University of London, one of the early modernizers and professionalizers of the science. Lindley's determination to form distinctions between polite botany - what he called "amusement for the ladies" - and botanical science"an occupation for the serious thoughts of man" - illustrates how the contributions of women were minimized in the social history of science. At a time of great current interest in the role of women inscience, this rich and absorbing book provides a new perspective on gender issues in the history of science. Drawing on archival materials, Shteir provides detailed biographical sketches that illustrate how important botany was in the lives of daughters, mothers, and wives from the Enlightenment to the Victorian Era. Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science rediscovers the resourceful women who used their pens for their own social, economic, and intellectual purposes. |
Contents
PROLOGUE Botanical Conversations | 1 |
TWO Women in the Polite Culture of Botany | 33 |
THREE Floras Daughters as Writers during | 59 |
Copyright | |
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Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora's Daughters and Botany in ... Ann B. Shteir No preview available - 1996 |
Common terms and phrases
Agnes Ibbetson Anna Anne Pratt Botanic Garden botanical culture Botanical Dialogues botanical knowledge botanical science botanists botany books British Cambridge Charlotte Smith collected daughters drawing early Edgeworth edition eighteenth Eighteenth-Century Elizabeth Kent England English Erasmus Darwin essays example familiar format female ferns Flora Domestica flowers fungi girls herbal horticultural illustrated interest Introduction to Botany introductory James Edward Smith Jane Colden Jane Loudon Jane Marcet John Claudius Loudon John Lindley Journal of Botany Lady Latin Linnaean botany Linnaean system Linnaeus Linnaeus's Linnean Society London Lydia Becker male Maria Edgeworth Maria Jacson Mary Delany microscopes moral mother narrative natural history natural system Naturalist nineteenth century Oxford Philosophy plant sexuality poem polite popular science Priscilla Wakefield published readers Rowden Royal Literary Fund Sarah science culture science writing scientific social specimens stamens tanical teaching vegetable verse Victorian William Hooker woman women writers wrote young