ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Labourious Opportunity: Female Scientific Labour and the Origins of the Molecularization of the Botanical World

• In Event: From the Household to the Lab: Tracing Gendered Labour of Collection (18th-20th centuries)

English Abstract

During the 1970s, botanical phylogenetics transitioned into a high-technology and laboratory based field. Collections of museum specimens and field-work sourced living plants were transformed into organic compounds through a series of laboratory techniques aimed to render genetic material visible. In the early development of these techniques, extraction and digitizing molecules was tedious, labour intensive prone to failure requiring patience and endurance. The nature of this work became implicitly gendered, akin to house-work, offering an opportunity for female scientists, driven by the intellectual desire to unlock the evolutionary history of botanical life on earth, to partake in this novel field. Phylogenetics is an ideal case study to explore the history of women’s scientific labour as few historians have written about phylogenetics, let alone female phylogeneticists. The existing literature is usually written by practitioners, predominantly male biologists describing their own field, and tending to be autobiographical or biographical in form. The lack of attention to this discipline, not only hides a potentially rich and vibrant history, but makes invisible a fascinating story of a scientific culture and community that encouraged women to not only labour for the field and laboratory but begin to shape the field. This paper will focus on members of the first generation of phylogenetics–Pamela Soltis, Vicki Funk, and Elizabeth Zimmerman–to examine how gender and labour shaped the “phylogenetic turn.” I argue that molecularization of the botanical world not only decontextualized plants from their environment but erased the labour of female scientists from the very field they helped create.

Author

• Nuala Caomhanach, New York University/American Museum of Natural History