ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

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

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Histories of collection labour are often attached to histories of heroic adventures of manipulating big whales or surviving danger. While the history of masculinity in collecting has been studied (Haraway 1984), modern museum studies has been interrogating practices of care in museums (Morse 2021; 2022), or has ethnographed museum work in storage areas (Beltrame and Kreplak 2024), invisible work has been shed light on, especially in colonial context (Murphy 2023), less has been written about the everyday work of preparing, keeping, maintaining and caring for collections and how these processes interact with matters of gender.
In this panel, we bring together several cases of women collecting things across two centuries and several scientific disciplines. All cases deal with non-museum collections, considered as such from the type of work around objects that threads them together – rather than an institutional context.
This panel aims to interrogate and and examine gender and collections by focussing on the following questions about the professional milieu of collections and how it interacts with matters of gender: did gender affect the work that make collections emerge? How did gender influence the type of operations connected with collection preparations or keeping, for instance, in the practice of standardised, repetitive gestures? Did gender hierarchies or gendering principles impact the order, interpretation, and the scientific / status of collections? Our panel will re-examine the issue of gendered work in the sciences (Rossiter 1980 among many others), looking away from histories of amateurs or volunteering work, to reframe the history of women’s work in the scientific economy of collections.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Jenna Tonn, Boston College

Individual Presentations

• “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) - Elaina Foley, University of Southern California

• Women, Marine Botany and the Family Enterprise of Natural History - Laurence Talairach, Alexandre-Koyré Center/University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès

• Glassworkers: women making microscope slides (late 19th c.-late 20th c.) - Déborah Sarah Dubald, University of Strasbourg

• The Labourious Opportunity: Female Scientific Labour and the Origins of the Molecularization of the Botanical World - Nuala Caomhanach, New York University/American Museum of Natural History

Session Organizer

• Déborah Sarah Dubald, University of Strasbourg