Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora's Daughters and Botany in England, 1760-1860

Maria 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.