Ann Shteir examines the history of botany in the early Victorian era to
discover how it was that so many women contributed to the field and were
accepted as botanists. Partly, it emerges in Cultivating Women, Cultivating
Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, £25, ISBN 0 8018 5141 6), because
men saw botany as a suitable topic for feminine minds, something to keep their
wives, sisters, aunts and daughters usefully occupied. The contribution of women
to the early days of modern science is here recognised—as well as their
contribution to fashions such as the language of flowers.
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