Cultivating women, cultivating science

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.