Flora's Fieldworkers: Women and Botany in Nineteenth-Century Canada - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0228011124 ISBN 13: 9780228011125

Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022

Synopsis

When Catharine Parr Traill came to Upper Canada in 1832 as a settler from England, she brought along with her ties to British botanical culture. Nonetheless, when she arrived she encountered a new natural landscape and, like other women chronicled in this book, set out to advance the botanical knowledge of the time from the Canadian field. Flora’s Fieldworkers employs biography, botanical data, herbaria specimens, archival sources, letters, institutional records, book history, and abundant artwork to reconstruct the ways in which women studied and understood plants in the nineteenth century. It features figures ranging from elite women involved in imperial botanical projects in British North America to settler-colonial women in Ontario and Australia – most of whom were scarcely visible in the historical record – who were active in “plant work” as collectors, writers, artists, craft workers, teachers, and organizers. Understood as an appropriate pastime for genteel ladies, botany offered women pathways to scientific education, financial autonomy, and self-expression. The call for more diverse voices in the present must look to the past as well. Bringing botany to historians and historians to botany, Flora’s Fieldworkers gathers compelling material about women in colonial and imperial Canada and Australia to take a new look at how we came to know what we know about plants.

About this title

About the Authors

Ann Shteir is professor emerita in gender, feminist, and women’s studies at York University.

Suzanne Zeller teaches history, history of science, and environmental history at Wilfrid Laurier University.

Edition details

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0228011124
• ISBN 13: 9780228011125
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 488
• Editor: Shteir Ann