ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

“She will draw them without an Expence and thank them for the Favour”: Gender, Nature and the Creation of Elizabeth Blackwell’s A Curious Herbal (1737-39)

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

English Abstract

From 1736-39, Elizabeth Blackwell moved to the edge of the Chelsea Physic Garden to create a 500-plate volume of plant etchings, the first successful herbal by a woman in Britain (McDowell 2023; Stiles Tyson 2021). She also integrated rare corals, exotic plants, and lichens from the collection of Sir Hans Sloane, as well as the shops of apothecaries Robert Nicholls and Joseph Miller. This paper considers the making of Blackwell’s herbal as a kind of collection, and looks at the type of labour the herbal implied as it compiled and arranged the results of British scientific, commercial, and colonial projects to collect.
Following the gendered conventions of the early 18th century, Elizabeth Blackwell did not purport to create any new knowledge from her herbal, rather to assemble and make accessible these plants which learned men of physic had studied (Easterby-Smith 2017). Indeed, in one of the book’s front dedications, she decries herself as having no skill in botany. Yet this paper insists on considering Blackwell’s work from two angles: first, and foremost, its function as a collection, and the woman’s work, strategically editing and organizing knowledge and materials according to her means and intentions. Secondarily, it considers how gendered nature of Blackwell’s work aided in the ‘domestication’ of non-European plants included in her volume. With 134 of Blackwell’s 500 plant etchings coming from outside of Europe, this paper considers her herbal’s role in the “operations and transformations” constructing colonial plants’ identities in 18th century Britain (Spary 2005; Hong 2020).

Author

• Elaina Foley, University of Southern California