Ann Shteir (ed.), Flora’s Fieldworkers: Women and Botany in Nineteenth-Century Canada Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2022. Pp. 488. ISBN 978-0-2280-1112-5. CA$70.00 (cloth).
Year: 2026
Type: book-review
Abstract: The historiography of nineteenth-century botany is replete with the names of influential men.Women naturalists, for their part, were systematically denied resources, education and career opportunities.As Ann Shteir explains in her introduction to Flora's Fieldworker, leading botanical men routinely disparaged their efforts as 'mere collecting' or 'amusement for ladies' (pp.4, 6).Women nonetheless collected plants, wrote about them, or pursued botanical interests via other means.Contributors to the book discuss these activities under five headings.The first, 'Approaching Lady Dalhousie: new resources, new perspectives', considers the botanical work of Christian Ramsay, who accompanied her husband, the Marquess of Dalhousie, in his governorships of Nova Scotia (1816-20) and British North America (1820-8).Wide reading and gardening experience afforded Lady Dalhousie the know-how to collect for William Jackson Hooker at Kew, enabling her to become one of only four women cited in his Flora Boreali-Americana (1829-40).Deborah Reid's opening chapter relates how the marquess generally supported these endeavours, even as motherhood and official duties restrained her.The next essay, by Jacques Cayouette and Faye-Yin Khoo, scours herbarium sheets and other sources to illuminate Lady Dalhousie's skill in identifying plants and the impressive geographical scope of her efforts.Despite these accomplishments, as Virginia Vandenberg's chapter illustrates, Lady Dalhousie and other women naturalists frequently downplayed their expertise as mere 'dabblers' (p.112).The next section, 'Collecting and its contexts', opens with Shteir's own chapter on Mary Brenton, who contributed to the Flora Boreali-Americana from Newfoundland.Driven by a self-declared 'love for flowers' rather than an abstractly 'botanical' interest, Brenton held what Shteir calls an 'emotive' rather than 'scientific' attachment to plants (p.145).Sara Maroske's chapter -the only non-Canada-focused entry -then turns to the collecting network centered on Ferdinand von Mueller, government botanist of Victoria, Australia.Defined in opposition to both Kew and First Nations knowledges, this work, which involved a large number of women and girls, fed into the development of a distinctive Australian settler identity.Alice Hollingworth, from a modest background in rural Muskoka, Ontario, forms the subject of James Pringle's chapter.In addition to collecting and illustrating plants, Hollingworth advocated for various causes, including women's education and suffrage.Opening Part 3 on 'Natural history "old" and "new"' is Michael Peterman's chapter on the botanical work of the famous writer Catherine Parr Traill.Although Traill faced prejudice in
Author: Geoff Bil
Institution: University of Victoria
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7125393104
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