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  • How It Developed that Botany Was the Science Thought Most Suitable for Victorian Young Ladies
  • Emanuel D. Rudolph (bio)

During the second quarter of the nineteenth century in the United States the notion that botany was the science especially suited to women became prevalent. "Botany is peculiarly fitted for introduction into a girls' school," one essay concludes. "It is admirably adapted to the tastes, feelings, and capacities of females, as is demonstrated by the fact that the majority of our botanists are females. Boys are less easily interested in it; more apt to be careless and harsh in their treatment of specimens, and too much attached to rude and boisterous sports. Girls, on the contrary, are apt to take delight in examining the most minute peculiarities of flowers, in pressing and preserving specimens, and in delineating the most remarkable with the lead pencil, or in water colours. Their enthusiasm, therefore, will generally be easily awakened."1 This notion is echoed by Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps, an important educator of the period, and a sister of Emma Willard, who was the founder of the first girls' school in the United States.2 In her Familiar Lectures on Botany of 1829 she states her case for girls' botany. The statement appeared unchanged in all editions as late as 1860: "The study of Botany seems peculiarly adapted to females; the objects of its investigation are beautiful and delicate; its pursuit leading to exercise in the open air is conducive to health and cheerfulness. Botany is not a sedentary study which can be acquired in the library; but the objects of the science are scattered over the surface of the earth, along the banks of the winding brooks, or the borders of precipices, the sides of mountains, and the depths of the forest."3

To discover the origins of these quaint notions one must venture backward toward France and England in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. At least part of the credit for the idea that ladies should best be botanists must be given to the famous author and philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. His 1771 Essais élémentaires sur la botanique was Englished six years later under the fateful title, Elements of Botany Addressed to a Lady.4 The English title is not altogether inappropriate, since Rousseau does address the volume to a lady who wishes her daughter to observe plants and determine their classification according to the then popular Linnaean system, He writes: "I think your idea of amusing the vivacity of your daughter a little, and exercising her attention upon such agreeable and varied objects as plants, is excellent: though I should not have ventured to play the pedant so far as to propose it of myself. Since however it comes from you, I approve it with my heart, and will even assist you in it; convinced that, at all times of life, the study of nature abates the taste for frivolous amusements, prevents the tumult of the passions, and provides the mind with a nourishment which is salutary, by filling it with an object most worthy of its contemplation."5 And later: "Since you continue, dear cousin, to pursue, with your [End Page 92] daughter, that peaceable and delightful study which fills up those voids in our time too often dedicated by others to idleness, or something worse, with interesting observations on nature; I will resume the interrupted thread of our vegetable tribes."6

Rousseau, however, would be surprised (not to say dismayed) to find laid to his charge the idea that lady scientists should be botanists, for neither in this work, nor in his educational philosophy in Emile, does he suggest that botany is the best or only science for girls. In fact, he says that exact science is not at all suitable for girls: "An inquiry into abstract and speculative truths, into the principles, and axioms of sciences and every thing that render our ideas more general, is not the province of women. Their studies ought to be all practical; it is their business to apply the principles discovered by man, and to make the observations by which our sex is induced to establish those principles. . . . With...

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