ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Women, Marine Botany and the Family Enterprise of Natural History

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

English Abstract

Marine botany was one of the natural history ‘crazes’ in nineteenth-century Britain, the field particularly attracting many women from various social backgrounds. Although generally self-educated, many of them developed an expertise which provided a crucial help to male professionals. As this paper will argue, their pursuit of natural history was generally carried out collectively in the household (Hill 2016). But as women and their children acquired skills and competences through collecting, preserving, displaying, or illustrating specimens, they also played a key part in standardising natural history practices (Endersby 2008). Focusing on the case of Horatia K.F. Gatty Eden (1846–1945), who specialized in Bryozoa and Hydrozoa and was trained by her mother, Margaret Scott Gatty (1809–1873), this paper will show how the natural history collecting family enterprise reflected significant patterns of collective labour which need to be reassessed. As will be shown, Eden provided George James Allman (1812–1898) (professor of botany at Trinity College Dublin and President of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh and of the Linnean Society) with a collection of undescribed Hydrozoa from around the world (Allman 1885). The new species he described involved the collaboration of several female practitioners and hinged upon exchanges of knowledge, specimens and skills which we will examine. By shifting the focus on women as marginalised agents of knowledge production, this paper will therefore highlight Eden’s collections, curation of her mother’s extensive algae collection and personal scientific contributions so as to offer new insights into the labour of natural history.

Author

• Laurence Talairach, Alexandre-Koyré Center/University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès