Scientists Don’t Know How to Deal With Botanical Sexuality, Part 2
Read the first part of this story here.
This wasn’t just some old white dudes debating in the halls of academia though (even though it kind of was), because it had some serious impacts on those who wanted to study botany, especially women.
Before this whole shenanigan, botany was considered an acceptably delicate pursuit for women, as long as they didn’t flaunt their knowledge too much. But now that plants had become sexualized (thanks for nothing, Linnaeus), some thought it was improper for women (or anyone) to study them. A more common approach was not to attempt to ban botany altogether, but to create a desexualized version that would be appropriate to study. If you remember William Withering from the first installment in this ongoing saga, that was his intention in publishing an English translation of Linnaeus’ Systema Vegabilium. His book was titled A Botanical Arrangement of all Vegetables Naturally Growing in Great Britain, and in its anglicizaton of Linnaeus’ work, it also omitted all references to sexuality, including the names of the reproductive organs and the metaphors comparing them to men and women.
You might be wondering: Why did people care so much about plant sex? Why was this such a big deal, or even any deal at all? Well, the natural world was seen as a reflection of human society. A neat, organized, hierarchical concept of nature served to reinforce the same ideals in society. However, if nature was actually disorderly and promiscuous, as the Linnaean system suggested, the stage was set for this conservative society to crumble under the force of botanical subversion.
This was a problem for women botanists, because they wanted to study plants, but also maintain propriety in a restrictive society. Omitting the sexual parts of Linnaeus’ system prevented a full understanding of its meaning, because the classification was explicitly based on the reproductive parts of flowers. There were some other classification systems floating around, but the Linnaean system was generally considered the most useful and complete one. Women could not go to university at this time, so by providing them only with censored translations, they were blocked from accessing a botanical education reflecting complete and current knowledge.
Of course, women botanists did not always do what they were told. Many studied the Litchfield translation of Linnaeus (the complete version), but they did not always include overt references to the sexual system in their own writing. Others wrote about the sexual system but published their works anonymously. My point here is that it was a difficult time to be a woman involved in science, but women botanists strove to overcome barriers to educating themselves and others in various ways. They may not have been “perfect” feminists (whatever that means) but I think they form an important part of botanical history nonetheless.
So there you have it: an incredibly condensed version of a sizable chunk of scientific history.