Linney, Verna

Canadian Woman Studies / les cahiers de la femme (E-Journal, York University)

I-you) also suggests liquid identities, becoming others, impersonation ("But what of a woman who tells another woman's story and believes herself to be her?"). A similar purpose is served by doubling and repetition (for example, images such as mirrors, skin o n  skin, echoes, eyelI- conflating desire and writing), or the way her name is inscribed on top of every other page: "nencenathalie." Interestingly, the idea of flow is par- alleled by the format of her poems which are not discrete units but a narrative continuum of poems. Voyeurism as a metaphor of writ- ing is only one aspect of self-mirror- ing that characterizes her poems. Another related trope of self-reflexiv- ity is the bodyltext metaphor, where reading the body equals reading a book of poems and skinlpage be- come interchangeable, as in: "her body is covered in words i cannot read. of a language i do not understand." The images of the tongue as both an in- strument of love making and the maker ofpoems underscore the eroti- cism of this poetry. The poem is a route to erotic pleasure, to amorous conquest: I have imagined myself to be the words they read aloud from a book that they cherish. Wet under their tongues. But to be spo- ken by them. She celebrates both lust and poetry- sexual and creative passions, "bend- ing her body elaborately to create interesting sounds to wrap around her lover's tongue." At the same time, writing can be worn like a layer of skin ("all that separates my flesh from the windn); it can be a means of controlling madness and pain-her "demons" and "flies." For Stephens, poetry exists in the repeatedly performed acts of transla- tion-from the body into language and back into the body-binding the poet to the poem to the reader: I know the translation into words to be dangerous in telling of the pressure of her need not be gendered male, we can hand on my arm. And what ofher lover who would have seen everything and surely had some- thing to say. The adaptation imperfect from mouth to ear I am sure. The reader and the speaker are both haunted by the unbridgeable gap between seeing and telling, the inadequacy of words, the impossible "entanglement of interpretation and truth," and the "what if' of a failure to translate experience into words. Stephens rewrites in the lesbian imaginary the classic dilemma of life versus poetry, legitimizing the les- bian gaze in the process. Poetry and life are entwined in the title of This ImaginedPermanrnceand again, when the speaker dreams of carving her lover's ini- tials into her leg this imagined permanence noth- ing but a string of knotted contradictions.. . Semantic substitutions of skinlpa- per, carvinglwriting, painlcontradic- tion, orwords/scars clearly signal that Stephens practices writing on the body, "one of ink on skin." Ulti- mately, her poetry is "this imagined permanence," as opposed to "the impermanence of trust engraved in promises and park benches." CULTIVATING WOMEN, CULTIVATING SCIENCE: FLORA'S DAUGHTERS AND BOTANY IN ENGLAND, 1760-1860 rejoice to find support for our posi- tion within the historical record. In Cultivating Women, Cultivating Sci- ence: Flora 3 Daughters and Botany in England 1760-1860, Ann B. Shteir richly offers such support. Shteir has applied the lens of gender analysis to a detailed examination of women's place and contributions within the developing science of botany, indica- ting howwomen were able, quite suc- cessfully, to "edgen into early sci- ence-and then how the increasing professionalization of science in the nineteenth century edged them out. Women's extensive involvement in the early years of natural science has largely been missing from the record. As Shteir states in her prologue: "Con- ventional histories of botany, in line with traditional disciplinary assump- tions, report on heroic (male) indi- viduals and scientific advances; it is a historiographicstyle that excludes the kinds of botanical work women did and could do in earlier periods." Shteir's purpose is to remedy this omission, and her extensively re- searched and exciting exploration of- fers us the pleasure of discovering the lives and work of the many women who contributed to the development and dissemination of botany, both those who worked within gendered space, and those who pushed against its boundaries. The eighteenth century saw the establishment of a firm linkage of - women and femininity with nature andgardens. Botanical study and prac- tice came to be associated with women, and encouraged as desirable activity. After 1760, the simplicity and clarity of the newly-accepted Lin- naean system of botanical classifica- tion encouraged women's participa- tion in scientific botany. Shteir's ac- count skillfully interweaves theory Ann B. Shteir. Baltimore and Lon- and explanation with extensive detail don: Johns Hopkins University Press, and anecdote, bringing us into the 1996. living space of many women whose involvement with science was very by V m u ~  Linney much an integral part of lives lived as women. O f  necessity, these women As we attempt to convince both our- combined creativity and accommo- selves and our daughters that science dation: they were practitioners, writ- CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIESILES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME ers, artists, and collectors, and their stories show us who they were, why and how theyworked, and the adjust- ments they had to make in order to pursue their scientific interests. Throughout, Shteir's emphasis is on their agenc; what they were able to do and the choices they made as they pursued their botanical interests. The idea that men and women were essentially different came to dominate early industrial society, and by 1800, gender categories were sharply drawn. Woman's "different" nature assigned her firmly to domes- tic space, and female education was designed to make women betterwives and mothers: they were to learn basic science so that they could teach it to their oflipring. The need for books to help mothers teach science provided an opportunity for female authors, and Shteir introduces us to the many women writers who made maternal anddomesticideologyworkfor them: Frances Rowden combined botany with moral lessons, using science to teach domestic ideology; Priscilla Wakefield's Introduction to Botany (1796) provided a systematic intro- duction to botanical science, written for mothers and children. Works such as these helped to legitimize female involvement in science, while at the same time giving voice, authority, and an important role in scientific education to mothers and teachers. Eighteenth-century attitudes to- ward botanical culture had allowed women both authority and access at many levels; in the nineteenth cen- tury, a newly-professionalizing sci- ence would deny women entry. It is with this exclusion, and with a detail- ing of the areas of botany left open to women, that Shteir concerns herself in the second part of Cultivating Women. As male interest in botanical science increased, women's science, based in the home and shaped by available resources, was pushed to the margins. In 1 8 14, self-educated re- searcher Agnes Ibbetson found her serious experimental work virtually ignored by the Royal Society, despite an impressive publication record. In 1829, John Lindley's inaugural speech as first professor of botany at London University called for a new mascu- linized and professionalized botany for a new age: scientific botany would not include women. Shteir's use ofgender as an analytic tool reveals the process by which the masculine "culture of experts" re- moved botanical authority from wom- en's practice and female space, leav- ing them botany as sentimental, po- lite, or practical accomplishment. Popular texts by women authors, such as Jane Loudon's Botany for Ladies ( 1  842, reissued as Modern Botany in 1851) did provide basic botanical knowledge to a wide audience; other texts, floras, manuals, and children's books proliferated, but these works, however subtly, acknowledged gen- der as the pervasive factor shaping participation in nineteenth-century botany. presenting the history ofbotany from the perspective of gender, with such a wealth of supporting detail, Shteir opens this important area to our consideration, and at the same time offers a fascinating account of women in all the complexity of their botanical involvements. She also iliu- minates the pervasiveness of gender in shaping the scientist, science edu- cation, and science writing-and this is surely an area demanding our fir- ther and significant attention. Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science, by Ann B. (Rusty) Shteir is the 1796 winner of the American Histori- cal Association i Joan Kelly Memorial Prize for the best book in women i his- tory andorfeminist theory. WOMEN, WORK AND SEXUAL POLITICS IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND Bridget Hill. Montreal: McGill- Queen's University Press, 1994. by Miriam Jones This volume is a re-issue of the 1989 hard-cover edition published by Basil Blackwell. Since its original publica- tion, Women, Work and Smual Poli- ticsin Eighteenth-Century Englandhas become recognized as a major work on the social history ofwomen in the eighteenth century. The new paper- back edition is most welcome, par- ticularly for course lists. Social history of working women in the eighteenth century is still an under-researched area, and Hill's ini- tial literature survey indicates how much we need scholarly work on eighteenth-century women of the la- bouring classes. She begins by credit- ing lvy Pinchbeck1 for making visible the fact that working women did not spring into existence with industriali- zation; that women have always worked. She herselfdeals mainlywith rural women; she examines the shift in economic production, from cot- tage-based industry to factory pro- duction, and its effects on women and the family. Hill pays attention to women's patterns of work, as much of labour- ing women's work was not what we would consider "full-time" by cur- rent standards. This has made re- search difficult in the past, for if women did not fit into rigid occupa- tional roles then they were in danger of becoming invisible to scholarly investigation. Hill explores the ex- tent to which women worked, fre- quently at unwaged occupations. She highlights a narrowing of the occupa- tions open to women as the century progressed: for example, women were progressively shut out of most ap- prenticeship programs and pushed into the less skilled (and less well- paid) types ofagricultural work. Con- current with this trend, ofcourse, was the feminization of housework throughout the century. The text traces the important shift towards the sexual division of labour, for with the disintegration ofthe family economy, women and men were thrown into direct competition. There is an excel- lent chapter on domestic service, de- scribed by Hill as "by far and away the most important occupation for women after agriculture." Hill traces a process of "feminization" in this, VOLUME 17, NUMBER 2 

Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora's Daughters and Botany in England, 1760-1860

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Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora's Daughters and Botany in England, 1760-1860

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Canadian Woman Studies / les cahiers de la femme (E-Journal, York University)