Botany, sexuality and women's writing, 1760–1830: From modest shoot to forward plant

by Sam George

In this fascinating study, Samantha George explores the cultivation of the female mind and the feminised discourse of botanical literature in eighteenth-century Britain. In particular, she discusses British women’s engagement with the Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, and his unsettling discovery of plant sexuality.

Previously ignored primary texts of an extraordinary nature are rescued from obscurity and assigned a proper place in the histories of science, eighteenth-century literature, and women’s writing. The result is the author explores nationality and sexuality debates in relation to botany and charts the appearance of a new literary stereotype, the sexually precocious female botanist. She uncovers an anonymous poem on Linnaean botany, handwritten in the eighteenth century, and subsequently traces the development of a new genre of women’s writing ― the botanical poem with scientific notes.

The book is indispensable reading for all scholars of the eighteenth century, especially those interested in Romantic women’s writing, or the relationship between literature and science.

272 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 2008

Reviews

[Ladyknightstar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was excellent in its scholarship and the bibliography is amazing and worth owning for that alone if you’re interested in botany and women scientists and women writing about botany and science from the 1700s to the 1800s in England and Britain because that’s what this book focuses on you will not find any writings by American or other women botanists of the time. That being said it’s also worth reading if you enjoy reading about the metaphors and discourse of public uses of botany as a way of making as the author writes a dialectic between instructing middle to upper-class young women and children in the social order of the time and how the classes of people should be and also in nationalism in the United Kingdom and how that was reflected even in the science of Britain and England at the time. Then of course the author also delves into the trials and tribulations of what she calls for precocious women in botany and their sexuality.She mentions anarchic sexuality but doesn’t delves much into that as I had hoped at the time as another dialectic between classes but she does compare and contrast between intellectual giants at the time Mary Wollstonecraft and Rousseau.
It’s intriguing how Rousseau, despite being prominent as a founder of freer thinking and Romanticism and a deep advocate for struggles between the classes and a naturalist is to this day the epitome of a liberal mind of a man who still wants women in what for them is a suitable place.
Wollstonecraft wanted boldness and independence for women, freedom to exercise our minds and not be seen as mere feminine delights and flowery tropes and resisted the pedantic thought of the day and lived her life unconventionally in ways the majority of botanists did not, even the men.
Either way, arguably despite the class tropes for society prominent in ladies magazines and instructions for young women, the discourse of Linnaean theories on plant sexuality opened up new ways of thinking for people as well, as people were of the mindset God created all plants so they followed a perfect natural order.
Even Darwin got in on the action.
I enjoyed the quotes from original source material as well as analysis of it. I hope to find books like this on women in Botany in America as well as other countries, as there were many women scientists in Botany and the New York Botanical Gardens have a long rich history.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting sociology / cultural history of women in science (esp. botany)