"Good Observers of Nature": American Women and the Scientific Study of the Natural World, 1820–1885 (review)

The year 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, yet Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection still strikes some as being as revolutionary as it must have seemed a century and a half ago. Among the more interesting attempts to come to terms with Origin's nineteenth-century context of publication and reception is Tina Gianquitto's "Good Observers of Nature": American Women and the Scientific Study of the Natural World, 1820–1885. The volume presents the transition from natural theology to a post-Darwinian naturalism as fraught with peril for American women writers. If, as Gianquitto argues, early nineteenth-century women writers "pictured the natural world as a moral space designed by a benevolent deity and given to humans as a paradigm of ideal behavior" (1), what would happen to their moral authority if the grounds for it were removed? This question is only one among several Gianquitto seeks to answer, and both the strengths and weaknesses of her book can be traced to such ambitious goals.

The volume spans the sixty-five years from 1820 to 1885, looking—as its subtitle indicates—at the relationship between American women and the scientific study of the natural world. The nature of the relationship is complex, and the bulk of the book explores this complexity through case studies of four texts: Almira Phelps's Familiar Lectures on Botany, Practical, Elementary and Physiological, Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, Susan Fenimore Cooper's Rural Hours, and Mary Treat's Home Studies in Nature. Gianquitto draws these cases together by framing them with an introduction and short epilogue as well as by referencing each of the cases within the others. She also attempts to show how each of these authors was influenced by the work of male scientists working in related areas: Phelps by the botany of Carl Linnaeus, Fuller by the color theory of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Cooper by the natural philosophy of Alexander von Humboldt, and Treat by the evolutionary biology of Charles Darwin.

Given the diversity of ways American women interacted with science and the natural world in the nineteenth century, Gianquitto does not offer a single, unifying explanation for their actions but rather explores several key questions she believes these writers addressed, including what should constitute an "accurate" perception of nature, what roles reason and emotion should play in that perception, and how that perception should be represented both linguistically and systematically. What makes someone a "good observer of nature," in other words, is both the book's title and its principal subject.

However, this book also has at least two other aims. One of these is to expand readers' critical vision beyond the "flower language books" (2), with which nineteenth-century women nature writers traditionally have been associated, to a much broader range of nature writing. The volume illustrates women's relationships with plant catalogs, botanical textbooks, travel narratives, seasonal journals, and scientific essays. Another of the book's goals is to examine how women variously resisted and embraced the language of science through these different forms of writing. Indeed, the book's greatest strength is its observation that not only were many women "quite willing to grapple with the interpretive shifts in the meaning of nature" that accompanied the development of science generally (2), but they were also willing to embrace the new ways of seeing offered by Darwin in particular. Rather than surrender their moral authority as a result of Darwin's theories, Gianquitto argues, "[w]omen made room for morality . . . by focusing on the construction and maintenance of the homes of the natural world" (12), eventually extending the notion of domestic space to encompass the entire biosphere.

Gianquitto is strongest in her four case studies, especially when she is immersed in the analysis of a...