The Exclusionary Nature of Naming Nature: The Nineteenth-Century Botany Gender Divide

“Women have had the power of naming stolen from us,” claimed the late feminist Mary Daly. This statement seems especially true for nineteenth-century North American women who were interested in the natural world of plants. The societal values of the time privileged men, who were empowered to participate in botanical studies. Educated men learned the Latin that was used in labeling plants with their “scientific” names, and men with interests in botanical matters engaged in vast geographical explorations. Women were expected to remain within the sphere of domesticity in and around their homes. I analyze the feminine rhetorical space of nineteenth-century women as they developed alternative methods for the scientific naming of plants. These methods included continuation of the ancient herbal/medicinal tradition of naming plants by their common names and the creation of a symbolic and literary “flower language.” I use archival research methods to identify the contributions of several women who were not held to the “tyranny of the botanic taxonomy.” I begin with Catharine Parr Traill (1832), who considered herself free to become a “floral godmother and give them [flowers] names of my own choosing.” Those nineteenth-century women who published their observations became the foremothers of botanical educational materials for children, botanical handbooks for the general public, and ultimately the personal nature essay. These women demonstrate that their non-scientific naming of plants was not a practice that they had stolen from them, but was rather a circumvention of male-dominated science that connected women more directly with nature.