Femininity and The History of Womens Education Shifting The Frame 1St Edition Tim Allender Full Chapter

‘Femininity’ and the History of Women's
Education: Shifting the Frame 1st

Edition Tim Allender
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/femininity-and-the-history-of-womens-education-shifti
ng-the-frame-1st-edition-tim-allender/
‘Femininity’ and
the History of
Women’s Education
Shifting the Frame
Edited by
Tim Allender · Stephanie Spencer
‘Femininity’ and the History of Women’s Education
Tim Allender • Stephanie Spencer
Editors
‘Femininity’ and the

History of Women’s
Education
Shifting the Frame
Editors
Tim Allender Stephanie Spencer
University of Sydney University of Winchester
Sydney, NSW, Australia Winchester, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-54232-0 ISBN 978-3-030-54233-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54233-7
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: Westend61 / GettyImages Cover Caption: The image on the cover of the
book is used as a visual metaphor. It shows three young scholarly women of different cultural
backgrounds. They have walked through a non-Western historical gateway. We hope our
book will be read in this way, where the respective contributions, drawing on various cultural
histories and other analytical frames, help build a deeper understanding of women’s
education today.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
About This Book
This book explores the different theoretical and epistemological constitu-

encies that are engaged in the field of women’s history as these relate to
aspects of education within broader social settings. As our theme, shifting
conceptions of femininity are interrogated in a range of historical sites in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Chapter 1, written by Tim Allender and Stephanie Spencer, is divided
into three parts. Firstly, it briefly sets out the conceptual and theoretical
framework regarding femininity and women’s history as we see it, espe-
cially as these relate to education and the chapters in the book. It then
considers the necessary engagement any study of femininity needs to have
with the usually more dominant and distinctive boundaries created by dif-
ferent academic traditions of historical investigation, including transna-
tional approaches. And lastly there is a discussion of how shifting frames of
femininity take the researcher into more intimate domains of personal
experience, where studies about feminine bodies, their educative sur-
roundings, their ageing, their aesthetic and their religiosity provide fasci-
nating sites of study for scholars of women’s history.
Then follows eight chapters, each analysing shifting frames of feminin-
ity in some of the sub-fields, it might be argued, of histories of women’s
history.
Chapter 2, by Ruth Watts, examines the positionality of women who
engaged with the emerging discipline of science in the nineteenth century.
She argues that by their very participation, these women were subversive
in pressing against broader assumptions about their feminine psychology
and even rationality. Critically, though usually excluded from being
v
vi About This Book
scientists, this feminine agency led these women (including illustrator and
painter Marianne North, whose work this chapter focuses upon) to use
permitted feminine skills and occupations in new and shifting intellectual
fields of imaginative endeavour that had connection especially with bot-
any. It was permissible for them to be teachers, but in creating these rich
connections with other fields, they also established new ways to think
about science: including later scholarship that has revealed the limiting
gendered associations and language embedded in the discipline itself.
In Chap. 3, Linda M. Perkins takes the reader to the United States of
America and explores the shifting juxtapositions of race and femininity in
women’s physical education and sport in the early to mid-twentieth cen-
tury. The chapter sees strong precursors that relate to the emancipation of
slaves in the previous century where former female slaves were forced to
conform to White notions of morality and beauty. Sexual assaults by slave
owners against female slaves fed into widely held narratives that Black
women were promiscuous. Some are enduring constraints for many Black
sportswomen to this day. However, in the 1920s, when college-level phys-
ical education and sport began to see Black female participants participat-
ing with White women, some of these constraints were reconfigured,
revealing differing White attitudes on the issue of race, femininity and
sport. Key institutions in this period such as the YWCA, though encourag-
ing Black participation, reinforced racial segregation in sport. Yet, sport
also led to new marginalities around their putative femininity. Drawing on
the life stories of several key athletes and administrators, this chapter
explores an emerging distinction within sports, where basketball, in par-
ticular, was identified in US colleges as a masculine pursuit or one only for
the working-class and Black women. This stereotype was then replaced by
a stronger sporting relegation for them which was track and field. This
sport eroticised Black women athletes and conveyed new anxieties about
their possible homosexuality.
Chapter 4, by Joyce Goodman, focuses predominantly on the year
1931 in the life and career of feminist Suzanne Karpelès. From a wealthy
Hungarian Jewish family, and educated in Paris, Karpelès was an outstand-
ing linguist of Eastern languages. She was appointed the founding director
of the Royal Library and later also of the Buddhist Institute in Phnom
Penh, Cambodia, which was part of Indochina, then under French colo-
nial rule. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, including photographs,
personal letters, journal and newspaper articles, this chapter uses Karpelès’
fascinating travels to illustrate the fluidity of femininities within spaces of
ABOUT THIS BOOK vii
circulation: embracing the intimacies of empire and shifting international

mentalities of the era, including fascism. There are four levels of inquiry
that engage femininities as they related to Karpelès in her colonial locale
and in spaces of circulation in Europe: religion and colonialism; interna-
tionalism and emerging feminine expertise within international organisa-
tions; Karpelès’ countervailing configurations of the “native woman”
which were in tension with her views on indigenous schooling in empire;
and, finally, where Karpelès encountered new educational cinematography
in the context of fascism that re-shaped ascriptions of femininity in respect
of women. This chapter’s approach to the dynamic frames of femininity in
which both Karpelès and her world are engaged is brought together by
articulating processes of encounter and negotiation, underpinned by
Judith Butler’s performative account of gender and Karen Barad’s posthu-
manist extension of Butler’s performativity.
In Chap. 5, Kay Whitehead traces gender relations around the appoint-
ment of women in authority, most notably as female school inspectors in
post-suffrage South Australia in the 1890s. She analyses the career trajec-
tories of seven white-settler women teachers where their professional iden-
tity, authorised by men, entangled their femininity and relegated their
authority by gender-specific assignations around their ‘modest’ and ‘kind’
natures. Broader and rapid shifts in educational policy and offerings moved
women teachers into secular classrooms as the state tookover responsibil-
ity for educating many school children in the 1870s. The appointment of
Blanche McNamara as the first Lady Inspector two decades later in 1897
resulted in a new level of male anxiety about “petticoat government”,
prompting satirical cartoons that stereotyped women as inadequate disci-
plinarians, mannish and not worthy to hold authority over the teachers of
boys. However, upon McNamara’s premature death, her portrait in the
local press conveyed conventional white-settler femininity, yet also a
woman of intensity and intellect.
Chapter 6, by Stella Meng Wang, explores the dynamic that the Girl
Guide Movement created within both colonial and public spaces in inter-
war Hong Kong. The shifting frame of feminine identity, particularly in
urban English medium schools for middle-class girls (most of whom were
at least part-Chinese descent), revolved around the transformative agency
of Girl Guiding that directed these girls into sporting and philanthropic
spaces as they moved into higher education. Guiding promoted work in
prisons, teaching female inmates needlework and raffia work as well as
gardening and basic literacy. Guiding also engaged the feminine physique,
viii ABOUT THIS BOOK
encouraging drills, marching and sport while simultaneously emphasising

a cultured and theatre-going school girl. On both levels, Guiding pro-
vided an entrée into the upper echelons of Hong Kong colonial society.
Yet, the sponsors of this movement, to keep it strong, also provided
bridges into rural and working-class domains that embraced social service
but cut across the colonial class agendas of the British.
In Chap. 7, Stephanie Spencer reflects upon shifting frames of feminin-
ity created by the ageing process in mid-twentieth-century Britain, specifi-
cally in the 1960s, typically considered to be a decade when the old social
order relaxed. An analysis of fiction in three publications aimed at a teen-
age audience is informed by a symbolic interactionist approach that
explores the role that leisure reading played in the informal education of
girls into an age-appropriate performance of femininity. The closer the
reader came to adulthood, the more clearly the advantages of youth and
the problems of old age were articulated. In Honey, marriage, presented as
the ultimate goal in the numerous romance narratives, also heralded a
seismic shift of femininity towards the invisibility of middle and old ages.
Early teen readers of Diana, however, encountered a greater variety of
older role models, and the emphasis in the fiction for a younger audience
was not on the older girls’ teleological search for Mr Right but on a per-
formance of prepubescent femininity that was fearless, independent, and
girl centred.
Chapter 8, by Deirdre Raftery and Deirdre Bennett, frames femininity
within the habitus of religious life. Though dressed in habit and veil, there
was an underlying and distinctive professional feminine characteristic of
women religious (nuns), where they negotiated the traditional male spaces
of architecture and engineering. The chapter concerns the nineteenth cen-
tury, where Church femininity, as enshrined by nuns, could also be shifted
by them in practical and professional pursuits that encompassed both male
and female agency. Focusing mostly on one such sister, Honora (Nano)
Nagle, Foundress of the Presentation Sisters, the chapter analyses her
building of two convent houses with ambitions for further expansion. This
work reflected the expansion ambitions of several other orders, also based
in Ireland at this time. Though there is little evidence that any nuns were
trained in engineering and design, foundresses of nineteenth-century con-
vents were deeply concerned with the actual building of them. Sometimes
as wealthy women with the power of the purse, their views influenced
leading architects such as Augustus Welby Pugin and George Ashlin. This
chapter considers the shifts in the femininity of these women religious as
ABOUT THIS BOOK ix
they embraced these male domains to achieve their religious-building pro-

grams. And it reveals the critical place such women have in the fields of
women’s history and history of education.
In Chap. 9, Tim Allender examines shifting frames of femininity in
colonial India between 1785 and 1922. While making brief contrasts with
traditional Indian constructions of femininity and their intersection with
household and nationalist politics, the chapter’s main concern is the colo-
nial side of the ledger and those Indian females who interacted with it.
Passing through several key periods of variable interaction with colonial
state constructions of preferred feminine outcomes, the chapter looks at
the European female body in India. In the early British colonial era, femi-
ninity was connected to sex, emotional realms of domesticity and mascu-
line decrepitude. As the nineteenth century progressed and Western
demographers took hold, it was the femininity of mix-race females
(Eurasians) who became more formally the focus of emerging state agen-
das. In the 1870s feminine professional codas emerged for this same racial
grouping (and for some expatriate European females) in teaching and
nursing that, in turn, connected with transnational currents regarding
pedagogical innovation and tropical medicine protocols. In the early
twentieth century new geographies of female medical missionary interac-
tion with some Indian females (with publicly accountable statistical report-
age around treatment and cure) began contributing to the breakdown of
the rigid racial barriers of colonial India. This was well before the fierce
Nationalist struggles for Independence from the British of the later 1920s
and the1930s.
Chapter 10 explores the theoretical implications of the preceding chap-
ters in the book and interprets these implications through an established
academic approach of frame analysis. The chapter sees two dimensions
that are apparent across the book’s chapters: an analytical frame and a
metaphorical frame. Shifting femininities reveal new conceptual interac-
tions as well as newly identified, yet often unconscious, metaphorical iden-
tity formation.
The book is the product of a rich collaboration between chapter
authors. The project began its life as an all-day workshop where all chapter
authors and other scholar specialists participated. It was hosted by
Humboldt University, Berlin, and the International Standing Committee
of History of Education (ISCHE) in September 2018.
Contents
1 Shifting ‘Femininities’: Multifaceted Realms of Historical

Educational Inquiry 1
Tim Allender and Stephanie Spencer
2 ‘Unnatural’ Women and Natural Science: Changing

Femininity and Expanding Educational Sites Through
Women’s Pursuit of Natural Science 11
Ruth Watts
3 African American Women, Femininity and Their History

in Physical Education and Sports in American Higher
Education: From World War I Through the Mid-century 37
Linda M. Perkins
4 Suzanne Karpelès’ Encounters in Indochina and Europe

in 1931: Multiple Femininities, Colonial Relations and
Educative Sites 63
Joyce Goodman
5 Troubling Gender Relations with the Appointment of

‘That Lady Inspector’ in Post-suffrage South Australia 89
Kay Whitehead
xi
xii Contents
6 Shifting Spaces of Femininity: Everyday Life of Girl

Guides in Hong Kong 1921–1941119
Stella Meng Wang
7 ‘I turned into the boorish, stiff, unpleasant teenager…

That was what he expected, and that was what I
immediately therefore became’: Negotiating the ‘Risk’ of
Femininity in Teenage Girls’ Reading in 1960s’ Britain149
Stephanie Spencer
8 ‘A Great Builder’: Female Enterprise, Architectural

Ambition and the Construction of Convents175
Deirdre Raftery and Deirdre Bennett
9 Reconfiguring Women and Empire: Sex, Race and

Femininity in British India, 1785–1922201
Tim Allender
10 Histories of Women’s Education and Shifting Frames of

‘Femininity’231
Stephanie Spencer and Tim Allender
Index237
Notes on Contributors
Tim Allender is Professor and Chair of History and Curriculum at the

University of Sydney. He has published extensively on colonial India over
the past 20 years. His most recent monograph Learning Femininity in
Colonial India, 1820–1932, is part of ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series
published with Manchester University Press. This book won the Anne
Bloomfield Book Prize, awarded by the HES (UK), for the best history of
education book written in English and published between 2014 and 2017.
Allender has also since published edited works on History Didactics, and
he is co-editor of two book series specialising in transnational history and
in visual educational history. He is working on projects including Roman
Catholic religiosity in colonial and independent India, as well as studies
into the use of visual imagery in colonial settings. Allender has recently
held visiting professorships at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India; at
Birmingham University, UK; and at the Nanyang Technical University,
Singapore.
Deirdre Bennett is a PhD scholar at University College Dublin and a
second-level school teacher. Her doctoral work examines the economics of
convents in nineteenth-century Ireland, and she has carried out research
at convent archives all over the country. Her work has been published
in History of Education, and she has been awarded bursaries from the
International Standing Conference for the History of Education and
the History of Education Society (UK). Bennett has presented her
work in Germany, Portugal and the UK, and she has twice been the
recipient of a graduate research award from University College Dublin.
xiii
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Joyce Goodman is Professor of History of Education at the University of

Winchester and chercheure associée at CERLIS.eu. Her research explores
women’s work in and for education during the interwar period in relation
to internationalism, empire and comparative methodologies.
Goodman is an honorary member of ISCHE and of Network 17 of
EERA. Her books include Girls’ Secondary Education in the Western
World (Palgrave, 2014 pbk), with James Albisetti and Rebecca Rogers,
and Women and Education: Major Themes in Education (2011, 4 vol-
umes), with Jane Martin.
Linda M. Perkins is Associate University Professor and Director of
Applied Gender Studies at Claremont Graduate University, California
(USA). She holds an interdisciplinary university appointment in the
departments of Applied Gender Studies and Educational Studies. Her pri-
mary areas of research are on the history of African-American women’s
higher education, the education of African Americans in elite institutions,
and the history of talent identification programs for African-American stu-
dents. She has served as vice president of Division F (History and
Historiography) of the American Educational Research Association
(AERA) and has served as a member of the Executive Council of AERA.
Deirdre Raftery is a historian of education at University College Dublin.
She has thirteen book publications and most recently co-authored three
books on aspects of the history of nuns and education, published by
Routledge and Irish Academic Press. She is completing a book entitled
Irish Nuns and Transnational Education, 1800–1900 (Palgrave Macmillan),
and her new book of Teresa Ball and Loreto Education (Four Courts
Press) is to be published in 2021.
Stephanie Spencer is a professor of History of Women’s Education and
convenor of the Centre for the History of Women’s Education at the
University of Winchester. Her research focuses on the development of
both formal and informal education for girls in the twentieth century. She
has a particular interest in adolescent leisure reading, and her most recent
publication is co-authored with Nancy G. Rosoff, British and American
School Stories, 1910–1960: Fiction, Femininity, and Friendship
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
Stella Meng Wang is a PhD candidate at Sydney School of Education

and Social Work, University of Sydney. Her research explores the everyday
life of children in colonial Hong Kong. Meng’s research interests include
the architecture of childhood, gender and youth movements, and wom-
en’s education.
Ruth Watts is Emeritus Professor of History of Education at the
University of Birmingham. She has published much on the history of edu-
cation and gender, her books including Gender, Power and the Unitarians
in England, 1760–1860 (1997), and Women in Science: A Social and
Cultural History (2007) for which she won the History of Education
Society Book Prize in 2010. She is ex-president of the British History
of Education Society and an honorary life member of both the latter
and the International Standing Conference for the History of
Education. Recent publications include historical work on women
and environmental sciences.
Kay Whitehead is Adjunct Professor of History of Education at the
University of South Australia and a co-convenor of the Gender Standing
Working Group for the International Standing Conference in the History
of Education. She has published widely on the lives, work and transna-
tional travel of Australian, Canadian and British women educators
from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Her publica-
tions include Lillian de Lissa, Women Teachers and Teacher Education in
the Twentieth Century: A Transnational History (2016).
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Nepenthes northiana (Sarawak) plant collected by, painted by,
and named after Marianne North. Board of Trustees of the
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, reproduced with permission 21
Fig. 2.2 Marianne North Gallery, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Board of
Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, reproduced with
permission23
Fig. 2.3 Interdependence of plants, insects and animal life, ‘tangled’ and
carnivorous plants. Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic
Gardens, Kew, reproduced with permission 26
Fig. 3.1 Alice Coachman 57
Fig. 5.1 That Lady Inspector, Quiz and the Lantern, January 28 1897, 9 107
Fig. 5.2 The late Miss Blanche McNamara: First Lady Inspector of State
Schools, Herald, April 28, 1900, 3 113
Fig. 8.1 Mother John Byrne PBVM, Australia (By kind permission of
the Presentation Archives, George’s Hill, Dublin, Ireland) 178
Fig. 8.2 Floor plan by the nuns of the Benedictine Monastery, Ypres
(By kind permission of the Kylemore Abbey Archives, Ireland) 186
xvii
CHAPTER 1
Shifting ‘Femininities’: Multifaceted Realms

of Historical Educational Inquiry
Tim Allender and Stephanie Spencer
(i)
Recently, deconstructions around the notion of femininity have been
revealing in determining the diversity of educational spaces. These spaces
range from institutional contexts to family, to professional outlooks, to
racial identity, to defining community and religious groupings. For the
historian, each of these avenues opens up considerable scope for new aca-
demic research. This new research could explore some of the associated
historical contexts to examine the deeper question of the variable and
shifting interplay of feminine identity and its challenges within different
socio-cultural settings: particularly those occupied by educators and their
students. Driven by systematic archival research, this approach can give
rich and vivid insights about femininity. The approach can also provide
T. Allender (*)
University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
e-mail: tim.allender@sydney.edu.au
S. Spencer
University of Winchester, Winchester, UK
e-mail: Stephanie.Spencer@winchester.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2021 1

T. Allender, S. Spencer (eds.), ‘Femininity’ and the History of
Women’s Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54233-7_1
2 T. ALLENDER AND S. SPENCER
the reader with interesting accounts of how these historical contexts

shaped the agency of females and their identity. In doing this, new direc-
tions in feminist and gender history emerge that interrogate the dynamic
nature of femininity. This is ‘femininity’ as both a conceptual tool and as
part of the personal projects of actors immersed in their respective histori-
cal contexts.
New research suggests ‘femininity’ should not be seen as an analytical
category by itself, but rather being mostly determined within the academic
spaces created by the paradigms of race, feminism, gender and class. Much
academic travel about femininity is authorised by this phenomenon. And,
tantalisingly, the entanglement of feminine identity formation within these
broader paradigmatic categories creates a fluidity that reveals different
educational outcomes for those females who shared their respective learn-
ing spaces. Furthermore, there is also some perversity to notice as authors
seek to engage with this shifting frame to better understand how the ideal
of femininity was referenced by the practicalities of female agency. One
such circumstance was when women negotiated rather than disregarded
the constraints of their historical context by paradoxically continuing to
enshrine a time-specific ideal of femininity, even when their later circum-
stances demanded that they move away from it.
Additionally, there are new academic horizons to consider. Historians
of gender and feminism, in particular, are seeking alternatives to linear
analysis and they are resisting disciplinary boundaries around their
research. For example, Kathryn Gleadle, in her influential The Imagined
Communities of Women’s History, is responsive to the seeming slowing in
progress of women’s history in the last 15 years or so. She disagrees with
this view. Instead she sees an active field, still, but one that now cuts across
many traditional binaries of inquiry and occupies, rhizome-like, imagina-
tive intellectual alliances with other disciplinary fields. These create unex-
pected theoretical juxtapositions and complicated chronologies, while
maintaining women’s history’s edge in broader feminist politics.1 In
another direction, Mia Liinason and Claire Meijer argue that the mythol-
ogy of homogeneous societies obscures the marginalisation of women of
colour, as well as migrants and other ethnic minorities of women, where
the historicity of their femininity reveals deep roots of gender-based
1
Kathryn Gleadle. 2013. ‘The Imagined Communities of Women’s History: current
debates and emerging themes, a rhizomatic approach’ in Women’s History Review. 22: 4,
524–540.
1 SHIFTING ‘FEMININITIES’: MULTIFACETED REALMS OF HISTORICAL… 3
oppression.2 It is within these shifting intellectual frames, and others like

them, that new research locates its analysis around femininity using a
diverse range of historical contexts through which interesting individual
and collective personal stories are told.
(ii)
The book is also sensitive to the important relational aspects of key areas
of research that distinctively associate broader academic traditions with the
dominant paradigms of feminism, gender, race and class. This sensitivity is
important because these traditions have a direct impact on academic con-
structions of femininity within educational settings and contextualise fem-
ininity in quite different ways.
For example, in the colonial world, feminism was generally internal to
the colonial project, as shown by Antoinette Burton. She asserts that femi-
nist writers, in fact, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
created images of needy women in the non-white empire mostly only to
project their part in an imperial mission to their audiences ‘at home’ in
England.3 There is also a cross over between gender and feminism, pecu-
liar to empire. For example, Claire Midgely argues, women involved in the
anti-slavery movement not only located feminism within prevailing impe-
rial ideologies but also gendered these ideologies.4 While Raewyn Connell,
(largely taking the discussion outside the feminist discourse) sees colonial
masculinity and femininity in highly relational sociological terms.5 Central
to understanding the construction of femininity is the significance of its
relation to the construction of masculinity and the consequent recognition
of how power is dispersed, and gendered ideas disseminated, in formal and
informal education settings within any society.6 How then do European
hegemonic mentalities around femininity in the non-white colonial world
2
Mia Liinason and Clara Meijer. 2017. ‘Challenging constructions of nationhood and
nostalgia: exploring the role of gender, race and age in struggles for women’s rights in
Scandinavia’ in Women’s History Review. 27:5, 729–753.
3
Antoinette Burton. 1994. Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and
Imperial Culture, 1865–1915. Chapel Hill: North Carolina, 8, 82–3.
4
Claire Midgely. 1998. ‘Anti-slavery ang the Roots of “Imperial Feminism”’ in Claire
Midgely, (ed.), Gender and Imperialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 161–9.
5
Raewyn Connell. 2009. Gender in World Perspective, Cambridge: Polity.
6
Joan Scott. 1986. ‘Gender a Useful Category of Historical Analysis’ American Historical
Review, 91: 5, 1053–1075.
play out, notwithstanding the more visible clash of cultures that is usually
the dominant topic of postcolonial scrutiny?
On the other hand, in mostly white European contexts, the overarch-
ing category of feminism is dominant in the analysis in another way, where
other national and cultural determinants are in play. For example, Rebecca
Rodgers, drawing on the work of Jo Burr Margadant as well as that of
Isabelle Ernot, makes the case for strongly contrasting academic traditions
in the English-speaking world compared to those to be found in France.
In the former domain, feminist biographies have flourished and been
given new robustness by postmodern scholarship, while in France there
has been less of a commitment to creating a ‘pantheon of foremothers’.7
These variable legacies in feminist scholarship, then, naturally create a dif-
ferent set of academic lenses, within which ‘femininity’ can be scrutinised.
In the USA the interplay of race and gender has a different historicity.
Angel David Nieves’ work examines African American women educators
in the nineteenth century who helped to memorialise the struggle of Black
Americans. Using biography, Nieves examines how these educators con-
tributed by combining social and political ideology as these related to
racial uplift and gendered agency.8 Yet, mostly male-constructed para-
digms of racial separateness and female respectability could also intervene
to create newly marginalised and shifting spaces of feminine educational
interaction.
Transnational enquiry is also significant in the pursuit of new research
on this theme. This is where the likes of Joan Scott’s well-established
framework of gender as a useful category of historical analysis is extended
to embrace new theorisations that encapsulate the global transferral of
some feminine mentalities.9 More deeply, opportunities arise where trans-
national perspectives bring to history of education, research that
7
Jo Burr Margadant. 2000. ‘The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-
Century France’. Berkeley: University of California Press; Isabelle Ernot. 2007. ‘L’histoire
des femmes et ses premières historiennes (XIXe-debut XXe siècle)’, Revue D’Histoire de
Sciences Humanities 16: 1: 165–94 cited in Rebecca Rodgers. 2013. A Frenchwoman’s
Imperial Story: Madame Luce in Nineteenth-Century Algeria, 11–12.
8
Angel David Nieves. 2018. An Architecture of Education: African American Women
Design the New South, New York: University of Rochester Press.
9
Joan Scott. 1986. ‘Gender a Useful Category of Historical Analysis’ American Historical
Review… op cit., 1053–1075.
highlights analysis of connecting spatial and temporal educational frame-

works.10 And as interest in transnational frameworks has also grown to
include cultural and social histories, so the history of women’s education
has enriched the discussion and extended it to include changing con-
ceptions of femininity. In this way Kay Whitehead has tracked the flow of
ideas and individuals as women educators crossed and re-crossed borders
between what was once seen as merely one-way travel between a putative
centre and its peripheries.11 Furthermore, women, and their perfor-
mance of femininity, becomes central to what Chris Bayly has identi-
fied as the production of nation as a result of transnational flows.12 At this
macro history level, women’s experience has frequently been seen as a
marginal enterprise, and to counter this predilection, work such as that of
Pierre Yves Saunier has identified the need to “recover individuals, groups,
concepts … that have often been invisible or at best peripheral to histori-
ans because [these historians] have thrived in between, across and through
polities and societies”.13 More sophisticated research into the changing
nature of femininity within transnational flows of both formal and infor-
mal educational ideas is now possible.
(iii)
There are more intimate spaces of inquiry that take the discussion into the
personal domain of historical actors where their femininity is discernible
by objects, visual representations and their surroundings: research that
invites a different kind of abstraction and theorisation. For example, there
are studies to consider around sensory perceptions in the classroom that
define feminine sensibilities and form. Additionally, visual representations
of school settings that assume feminine identity, engage scholarship that
10
Barnita Bagchi. 2014. Eckhardt Fuchs & Kate Rousmaiere, (eds.) Connecting Histories’
of Education: transnational and cross-cultural exchanges in (post) colonial education.
New York, Oxford: Berghan.
11
Kay Whitehead. 2014. ‘Mary Gutteridge (1887–1962): Transnational careering in the
field of early childhood education’ in Tanya Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Smyth, eds. Women
Educators, Leaders and Activists 1900–1960, New York: Palgrave Macmillan; Kay Whitehead.
2017. British teachers’ transnational work within and beyond the British Empire after the
Second World War, History of Education, 46:3, 324–342.
12
C.A.Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia
Seed. 2006. ‘AHR Conversation: On Transnational History’, American Historical Review
111: 1441.
13
Pierre Yves Saunier. 2013. Transnational History, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 3.
focusses upon who controls forums of image making and why such studies
need to relate strongly to cultural history.14 Again, gendered spaces are in
play here and the work of Ian Grosvenor and Catherine Burke feature
prominently.15 This field has yielded rich and revelationary perspectives in
the past 15 years about child learning in non-verbal and non-textual ways
despite Karl Catteeuw et al.’s claim that the pictorial turn, given its limited
scope, can only really complement textual sources.16 Furthermore,
there is the much less studied, but equally defining, sensory dimensions of
the classroom concerning olfaction and noise. Here Gary McCulloch,
drawing on the work of Alain Corbin, as well as that of Jill Steward and
Alexander Cowan, imaginatively uses contemporary literary texts, which
stills the hand of the historian and takes it into other disciplinary fields.
Such historical analysis remains largely ungendered and is worthy of
further research.17
Research into teaching spaces, as well as the shifting feminine aesthetic,
is productive in understanding historical constructions of femininity. This
is partly because history, as the study of the artefact, offers a more tangible
source base. For example, Kellee Frith and Denise Whitehouse see the
classroom as a spatial environment with social, cultural and psychological
dynamics which can be explored through the selection of colour, texture,
furnishings and lighting. Here there is room for exploring material
feminine spaces. This is where at least some female school classrooms and
14
Antónia Nóvoa. 2000. Ways of Knowing, Ways of Seeing Public Images of Teachers
(19th – 20th Centuries), Paedagogica Historica, 36:1, 20–52; Mark Depaepe & Brett
Henkens. 2000. ‘The History of Education and the Challenge of the Visual’ in Paedagogica
Historica, 36:1, 11–17.
15
See, for example, Catherine Burke and Ian Grosvenor. 2007. ‘The progressive image in
the history of education: stories of two schools’ in Visual Studies, 22:2, 155–168, on the
typology of photographic images of school and schooling and the visual methodologies of
historical research into the classroom.
16
Karl Catteeuw, Kristof Dams, Marc Depaepe & Frank Simon. 2005. ‘Filming the Black
Box: Primary Schools on Film in Belgium, 1880–1960: A First Assessment of Unused
Sources’ in Ulrich Mietzner, Kevin Myers & Nick Peim (eds.), Visual History. Images of
Education, Bern, Peter Lang, 203–232; I. Grosvenor, M. Lawn, K. Rousmaniere (eds).
1999. Silences and Images: The Social History of the Classroom, New York: Peter Lang.
17
Gary McCulloch. 2011. ‘Sensing the realities of English middle-class education: James
Bryce and the Schools Inquiry Commission, 1865–1868’ in History of Education, 40:5,
601–2, citing Alain Corbin, ‘A History and Anthropology of the Senses’ in Alain Corbin.
1995. Time, Desire and Horror: Towards a History of the Senses, Cambridge: Polity Press, 191;
and Jill Steward and Alexander Cowan, ‘Introduction’, in A. Cowan and J. Steward (eds.)
2007. The City and the Senses: Urban Culture since 1800, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1–2.
other educational spaces deployed “the language of home, [with] comfort

and security [and] … through the choice of paint colours and the use
of fashionable wallpaper and floor rugs”.18
While on the question of feminine aesthetics, like those scrutinised in
Marjorie Theobald’s Knowing Women, gender and class-based readings of
the documentary records are brought into play to produce other internal
tensions regarding femininity. With a good dose of imaginative position-
ing, Theobald sets up femininity as the middle-class female learning
aesthetic “at the piano, in the parlour rather than the classroom …
unequivocally belonging to the realm of culture”. This ‘accomplishments’
learning (poetry, needlework, deportment and the like) is threatened only
by the unfeminine blue stocking teacher in the classroom, urging the
study of masculine academic subjects instead.19 Additionally, the work of
Ruth Watts, as well as that of Claire Jones, posits in different ways other
normalised and shifting feminine constituencies. Were the ‘unnatural’ acts
of women pursuing careers in the masculine domains of science and math-
ematics (in the early to mid-twentieth century) encouraging other females
to move away from the Arts, a domain more aligned to feminine learning
in the past?20
And what then were the domestic and/or professional futures of those
women educators of a generation earlier (who had imbibed an education
of ‘accomplishments’), as their bodies, in middle age, lost their capacity to
conform to nineteenth-century feminine physical sensibilities and aesthet-
ics, so attached to this earlier form of learning? The response here con-
cerns the gendered nature of the life cycle where women’s changing
feminine experience is categorised according to their role as ‘virgin, wife
or widow’. Research in this dimension concerns the effect that the ageing
body has on women’s perceptions of self and their shifting femininity.21
Associated with this sub-topic of age-framing is the role that both formal
and informal education has played for girls on the cusp of adulthood and
18
Kellee Frith and Denise Whitehouse. 2009. ‘Designing Learning Spaces That Work; A
Case for the Importance of History’ in History of Education Review, 38:2, 106.
19
Marjorie Theobald. 1996. Knowing Women: Origins of Women’s Education in Nineteenth-
Century Australia, Melbourne: CUP, 27.
20
Ruth Watts. 2007. Women in Science: a Social and Cultural History, Abingdon:
Routledge; Claire Jones. 2017. “All your dreadful scientific things’: women, science and edu-
cation in the years around 1900’, History of Education, 46:2, 162–175.
21
Katie Barclay, Rosalind Carr, Rose Elliot and Annmarie Hughes. 2001. Introduction:
Gender and Generations: women and life cycles. Women’s History Review 20:2, 175–188.
this forms part of a fruitful discussion on gendered secondary education.22

Girls’ and women’s individual frames of femininity shift, or are shifted, by
their society as they enter adulthood, middle and old ages, yet this
phenomenon requires far greater study.
Research into changing historical constructions of femininity have
benefitted from other interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches
that draw on sociological, philosophical and theological writing. More
recently interest in the ‘post human’ has entered the field.23 The entangle-
ment of people and things, and material practices with non-human life
invites a new direction for shifting the current frame of femininity to
include gendered objects and non-human life, both inside and outside the
classroom. For example, Karen Barad’s notion of agential realism brings
together natural science, social science and the humanities to create
new epistemologies that change how we know the world in which we find
ourselves.24 This de-centering of the human subject inevitably also changes
how we learn about it, how we interact with it, destabilising our assump-
tions of culturally bounded gender roles, including conceptions of
femininity.
Finally, religiosity and femininity take the field into realms of male-
dominated institutions, particularly for the Roman Catholic church.
Newly edited collections, like those of Deirdre Raftery and Elizabeth
Smyth, explore the work of women religious (nuns) within these institu-
tions where men sometimes took the kudos for the successful labour of
women religious in teaching hospitals, schools and colleges.25 Patriarchy
built architectures of control within these institutions, partly justified by
male readings of biblical text. Yet it was feminine agency that created ways
to circumvent the often dull and delaying hand of the episcopate, to bring
about productive learning outcomes for females, often preparing them for
professional futures that were not culturally cognizant of their gender.
22
Stephanie Spencer. 2005. Gender, Work and Education in 1950s Britain, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
23
Geert Thyssen. 2018. ‘Boundlessly Entangled: Non-/Human Performances of
Education for Health through Open-Air Schools’ Paedagogica Historica, 54, 659–676.
24
Karen Barad. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: quantum physics and the entangle-
ment of matter and meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
25
Deirdre Rafferty and Elizabeth M. Smyth, eds. 2015. ‘Introduction’, Education, Identity
and Women Religious, 1800–1950, Abingdon: Routledge, 1–5.
Additionally, as Phil Kilroy argues, women religious, until the mid-

twentieth century, lived their lives parallel to the historical developments
of feminism which they distrusted.26 Using another contextual narrative
through autobiography, he explores if these women when entering a
religious order to educate, really replaced their individual feminine iden-
tity in favour of community life and piety, and if so, did this change direct
the way convent girls were taught?27
As has been shown by this chapter, the dimensions that are engaged by
conceptions of shifting femininity are rich and diverse within the field of
women’s history and histories of education in and beyond the classroom.
These dimensions are posited here partly for future scholars to work with
as the field of women’s history continues to advance. What follows are
eight chapters by international scholars which illustrate a cross-section
of these academic constellations, created as they are by the entanglement
of femininity mentalities and identity formation within broader para-
digms of academic inquiry. These chapters are rich in interesting content
and have been written in a style that engages the reader with accessible
narratives, and in a way that reveals the product of many of these theoretical
approaches without being overwhelmed by their complexity.
26
Phil Kilroy. 2015. ‘Coming to an edge in history: writing the history of women religious
and the critique of feminism’ ch. 1 in Deirdre Rafferty & Elizabeth M. Smyth, eds.,
Education, Identity and Women Religious, 1800–1950, Abingdon: Routledge, 6–30.
27
Sister Agatha with Richard Newman. 2017. A Nun’s Story – The Deeply Moving True
Story of Giving Up a Life of Love and Luxury in a Single Irresistible Moment, London: John
Blake Publishing.
CHAPTER 2
‘Unnatural’ Women and Natural Science:

Changing Femininity and Expanding
Educational Sites Through Women’s Pursuit
of Natural Science
Ruth Watts
Science in the sense of ‘the principles governing the material universe and
perception of physical phenomena’1 developed hugely in the nineteenth
century but, more even than other branches of knowledge, it remained
peculiarly ‘masculine’. A woman scientist was seen as ‘unnatural’ in both
textual and pictorial imagery. Especially as science professionalised, its
various branches became very difficult, if not impossible, for females to
study in any depth. Concepts of rational man and irrational woman,
promulgated by many male scientists themselves, seriously impeded deeper
and higher education for females. Reinforced by the arguments of
1
‘[T]hose branches of study that apply objective scientific method to the phenomena of
the physical universe (the natural sciences) and the knowledge so gained’ – Shorter Oxford
Dictionary (OD). 2007; 1st ed. 1933. 2: 2697. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
R. Watts (*)
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
e-mail: r.e.watts@bham.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2021 11

T. Allender, S. Spencer (eds.), ‘Femininity’ and the History of
Women’s Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54233-7_2
12 R. WATTS
philosophers and theologians, they added to long-held popular beliefs of

profound differences between ‘masculinity’—brave, active, inventive,
original—and ‘femininity’—timid, passive, nurturing. Admittedly, there
were many nuances in this, the reality of men and women’s lives often
being quite different, while, from the late eighteenth century, there were
fierce debates over femininity and women’s education.2
Since the 1960s when Thomas Kuhn challenged the dominant view
that science is a purely cognitive or impersonal undertaking,3 feminist his-
torians, scientists, philosophers and educationalists have investigated why
serious pursuit of physical or natural science was thought ‘unnatural’ for
females. They have challenged the stereotypical views and network of
deeply embedded gendered associations in the very language of science
that pervaded it even through developments from the seventeenth century
onwards,4 demonstrating that such views still impact profoundly on prac-
tice and scientific explanation, thus undermining objective science.5 Those
who accepted the historical construction of theories of knowledge and
desired to uncover and legitimise ‘subjugated knowledges’, as Michel
Foucault called them,6 produced a wealth of social and cultural historical
studies which have helped form greater understanding of both gendered
‘scientific’ thinking and of fuller, more nuanced versions of scientific
history.7
Feminist historians of science, already working in two disciplines, have
sometimes formulated new interpretations from fresh sources in art and
literature. Using chiefly British examples, although hopefully not exclusive
of experience elsewhere, this chapter will focus on botany, the study and
2
Ruth Watts. 2007.Women in science: a social and cultural history. London and New York:
Routledge.
3
Thomas Kuhn. 1970; 1st ed. 1962. The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press.
4
Margaret Rossiter. 1984, 1st ed., 1982. Women scientists in America. Struggles and strate-
gies to 1940, xv-xviii. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press. See also vols 2 and 3 of this tril-
ogy—1995. Before affirmative action and 2012. Forging a new world since 1972. Baltimore:
The John Hopkins Press; Hilary Rose. 1994. Love, power and knowledge, 235–36. Oxford:
Polity Press.
5
E.g. Evelyn Fox Keller. 1985. Reflections on gender and science, 3–12, passim. Yale: Yale
UP; Sandra Harding. 1991. Whose science? Whose knowledge? Thinking from women’s lives,
119–63, 285–95. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
6
Michel Foucault. 1980. Power/Knowledge. Selected interviews and other writings
1972–1977, 83. Edited by Colin Gordon. Brighton: The Harvester Press.
7
For an overall view of these debates see Watts, Women in science, 1–14.
2 ‘UNNATURAL’ WOMEN AND NATURAL SCIENCE: CHANGING FEMININITY… 13
collection of plants, an aspect of biology/natural history8 in the nine-

teenth century, then seen as the most ‘feminine’ science, albeit still beset
by metaphors and actual barriers that prevented most females from being
accepted as scientists. By examining how some women stretched tradi-
tional feminine learning to enter the margins of what became professional
science, light should be shown both on prevailing, yet changing, notions
of femininity, female learning and masculine science, and on the nature of
educational sites.9
From the late eighteenth century in Britain, the growth of public sci-
ence—lectures, museums, magazines, botanical gardens—was open to
amateurs of both sexes, yet professional scientific studies were for men
only. Botany was mostly accepted as suitable for literate females (despite
some agitation over Linnaean botany with its sexual connotations), par-
tially because it was not the classics largely preserved for educated gentle-
men. Botany was also thought to promote self-improvement,
accomplishment, morality and even religious contemplation—‘part of the
social construction of femininity’.10 Indeed D.E. Allen reflected that bot-
any could break the rules because seemingly it resonated with both of the
contemporary alternative ideals of femininity: an elegant upper-class
accomplishment and an acceptable middle-class aspect of ‘sentimentalised
womanhood: the “perfect lady” of a repressive Evangelicalism’.11
Botanical study often became a familial project with females learning
from and assisting male relatives—illustrating their work, collecting and
collating plants, although sometimes working for themselves.12 Some
women utilised the arts and skills that were permitted in their education,
8
Originally ‘the branch of science dealing with all natural objects, animal, vegetable and
mineral’, OD, 2:1895.
9
Kathryn Gleadle. 2013. The imagined communities of women’s history: Current debates
and emerging themes, a rhizomatic approach. Women’s History Review, 22 4: 1–34.
10
Patricia Phillips. 1990. The scientific lady. A social history of women’s scientific interests
1520–1918. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson; Ann B. Shteir. 1996. Cultivating women,
cultivating science. Flora’s daughters and botany in England 1760–1880, 17–36. London &
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
11
D.E. Allen. 1980. The woman members of the Botanical Society of London, 1836–1856.
British Journal for the History of Science 13: 240–54 – quoted in Stephen Jay Gould. 1997.
Dinosaur in a haystack: Reflections in natural history, 188. London: Penguin Books.
12
Ann Shteir. 1989. Botany in the breakfast room: women and early nineteenth century
British plant study. In Uneasy careers and intimate lives. Women in science 1789–1979, ed.
Pnina G. Abir-am and Dorinda Outram, 31–43. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers
University Press.
14 R. WATTS
to enter the margins of science. Mary Delany (1700–1788), for example,

merged her skills as an embroiderer and in decorative shell work with her
love and knowledge of plants, to make beautiful paper mosaics of flowers
that were botanically correct. Her considerable sewing and painting skills
were all used to illustrate plants while many of her collages were based on
plants grown at Bulstrode, the home of her friend the Dowager Duchess
of Portland; and then, from 1776, from the Queen’s Garden at Kew and
from the Chelsea Physic garden.13 Other examples include Priscilla
Wakefield who wrote familial books for girls to educate them in botany as
did Jane Marcet.14
Ann Shteir saw such practices as part of an educative enterprise with
women’s popular science books—progressive pedagogically—becoming
part of the ‘largely undocumented history of women’s science writing’.15
Yet for women to be accepted as serious scientists became increasingly
problematic as botanical culture changed, keeping, according to John
Lindley, the first professor of botany at the new University of London,
polite botany for the amusement of ladies, while science and scientific
societies were for the ‘serious thoughts of men’.16 For instance, even the
London Botanical Society of 1836–1856, a rare example of a scientific
society being open to women, never allowed them more than a subsidiary
role.17 As science professionalised, male scientists were eager to prove their
respectability and intellectual worth, which appeared to contrast with ide-
als of femininity: for example, a portrait of Mary Somerville—an interna-
tionally acclaimed science writer—painted when she was fifty-four, was
deliberately made as feminine and youthful as possible, to show she was no
real threat to the males.18 Such attitudes persisted throughout the nine-
teenth century and beyond. In the 1890s, for instance, Beatrix Potter,
after researching privately for many years at the Natural History Museum
still only managed to obtain a student ticket to examine materials in the
13
Ruth Hayden. 2000; 1st ed. 1980. Mrs Delany: her life and flowers, 12–13, 48–49,
87–94, 96–101, 106, 131–58. London: The British Museum Press.
14
Priscilla Wakefield. 1796. Introduction to botany. London: Harvey and Darton; Jane
Marcet. 1829. Conversations on Vegetable Physiology. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown
and Green.
15
Shteir, Cultivating Women, 81.
16
Ibid., 156–57.
17
Gould, Dinosaur, 187.
18
Ludmilla Jordanova. 2000. Defining Features. Scientific and medical portraits 1660–2000,
66. London: Reaktion Books in association with The National Portrait Gallery.
Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew by using the help of her
uncle, the eminent scientist Sir Henry Roscoe. Her research into fungi,
illustrated by her own accurate microscopic drawings, was not taken seri-
ously at Kew, nor was her paper on ‘The germination of the spores of
agaricineae’ laid on the table of the Linnaean Society. Both, however,
were recognized for their worth in the twentieth century, a public apology
being given by the Linnaean society in 1997 for the way she was treated
so ‘scurvily’. Potter made a career for herself using her accurate observa-
tions of nature to illustrate her highly popular Tale of Peter Rabbit and
subsequent children’s books.19
In botany, indeed, many women continued as skilled illustrators, thus
proving the worth of girls studying art properly. Their work, becoming
devalued because so many females did it, nevertheless increased scientific
understanding. For instance, Elizabeth Gould’s exquisite and lively water-
colour paintings and lithographs of birds and plants contributed signifi-
cantly to the renowned series of folios on birds by her husband John, a
brilliant taxidermist and ornithologist. In particular, the one on Australian
birds based on the English couple’s journeys in Australia in 1838–1839
proved to be ground-breaking. There, Elizabeth, taught lithography by
Edward Lear (an early aide to John Gould), produced both a prodigious
amount of accurately observed paintings and yet another baby. Many of
the birds were previously unknown in Europe and Elizabeth received great
acclaim for her work, though less than her husband who claimed artistic
credit for the composition of the designs, yet archival research has indi-
cated that he made only minor changes or simply approved Elizabeth’s
sketches. After her death following childbirth in 1841, she became largely
forgotten in scientific circles outside of Australia. Her husband had to turn
to male illustrators to execute his plates but he and Elizabeth were signifi-
cant pioneers in the nascent field of scientific illustration.20 Other women,
both in Britain and its empire, collected plants and specimens and made
19
Linda Lear. 2007. Beatrix Potter. A Life in Nature, 104–29, 152–54 ff, 482 ftn. 58.
London: Penguin Books.
20
Janet Bell Garber. 1996. John and Elizabeth Gould. In Creative couples in the sciences,
eds. Helena Pycior, Nancy G. Slack and Pnina Abir-Am, 87–97. New Brunswick, New Jersey:
Rutgers University Press; Alexandra K. Newman. 2018. Elizabeth Gould: an accomplished
woman, 8,9. Smithsonian Libraries/Unbound. https://biog.library.si.edu/
blog/2018/03/29/elizabeth-gould-an-accomplished-woman/hash.W3vRzC2ZOi4
Accessed 30 Sept 2019; Isabella Tree. 2003; 1st ed. 1991. The bird man. The extraordinary
story of John Gould 23–26, 29, 32, 43–46, 60, 147–9. London: Ebury Press.
16 R. WATTS
scientific drawings of them but were rarely given public recognition, espe-
cially as their offerings usually passed to male relatives or well-known male
scientists.21 In this way, as helpmeets to men, they retained their femininity
whilst also extending their scientific knowledge and work.
One woman’s life and work illustrates these points but indicates too
how some individuals could stretch ‘feminine’ learning to become accept-
able within larger boundaries of science. Marianne North (1830–1890)
travelled extensively both to see nature for herself and to educate others,
aware of most people’s ‘ignorance of natural history’.22 A daughter of the
Member of Parliament for Hastings (1830–1835, 54–65, 68–69),23 she
shared her father’s love of botany, natural history and gardening. At their
home in Hastings, for example, where her father built three glasshouses
for different types of plants, she said she and her father worked in the gar-
den ‘like slaves’. When living in London, she learnt much from regular
visits to the Royal Horticultural Society’s Chiswick Gardens and to the
Royal Botanical Kew Gardens where, through her father, she knew the
successive directors, Sir William and Sir Joseph Hooker. This was signifi-
cant since Kew had become the prime British institution for official botany
and the information, collecting and distributing centre of its empire.
Strongly affected by the imperial mission, British botany was chiefly inter-
ested in plant classification, sustained by the economic possibilities of a
constant accession of new plants through increasing exploration. This was
unlike France’s former leadership in theoretical and practical botany or
Germany’s contemporary dominance in quantitative research, sustained
by polytechnics and strong science faculties, including botany, in
universities.24
North had little formal education, hating the short period she spent at
school, but she read much as her Recollections, written in her last years and
published posthumously, show. She learnt history from Walter Scott and
21
Shteir, Cultivating women, passim; Watts, Women in science, 90–98; 103–06.
22
Marianne North. 1980. A vision of Eden. The life and work of Marianne North (hereafter
referred to as Eden), 121. Exeter: Webb & Bower in collaboration with the Royal Botanic
Gardens, Kew. NB The two volumes of North’s Recollections of a happy life 1893 were
abridged into this one volume by Graham Bateman for Kew in 1980.
23
Frederick North, MP for Hastings 1830–65.
24
Susan Morgan.1996. Place matters. Gendered geography in Victorian women’s travel books
about Southeast Asia, 108. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press; A. G. Morton.
1981. History of botanical science: an account of the development of botany from ancient times
to the present day, 362–76. London: Academic Press.
Shakespeare and geography from books like Robinson Crusoe.25 Later her
visit to Jamaica was prompted by reading Charles Kingsley’s At Last.26 She
did have music lessons (excelling in singing), and some specialized lessons
in flower painting in both 1850 and 1851 from Magdalen von Fowinkel,
a Dutch flower artist and Valentine Bartholomew, flower painter in ordi-
nary to Queen Victoria, although the teacher she really desired, William
Holman Hunt, refused to teach her. It was in 1865, however, when she
met the Australian artist Dowling that, unusually for a woman, she had
some lessons in oil-painting and this became ‘a vice like dram drinking,
almost impossible to leave off once it gets possession of one’.27
North was also educated by extensive travel. She and her family trav-
elled constantly, their annual journeying between Hastings, London,
Norfolk and Lancashire (where her half-sister, Janet Shuttleworth, mar-
ried to the educationalist James Kay, lived), supplemented by an adventur-
ous two to three years in Europe from 1847. She met many famous people,
such as the artist, musician and humourist Edward Lear who became a
lifelong friend. After her mother died in 1855, North, her father and her
sister took annual journeys to Europe, delighting in mountain walks, until
1865 when Marianne—now the only unmarried child—and her father
spent a year travelling to and around the Middle East. Throughout, North
painted assiduously, the earlier paintings being watercolours. Shorter
European holidays followed in subsequent years but in 1869 her father fell
ill while in Switzerland and died on return. Devastated, North decided to
devote herself to painting and travel to survive.28 In particular, from her
visit to Jamaica in 1871–1872, it was her growing wish to find and paint
multifarious types of vegetation in their natural state, especially in tropical
countries, which took her travelling widely then until 1884—to North
America and the West Indies, Brazil, Japan, Borneo and India and other
25
Marianne North. 1892. Recollections of a happy life, being the autobiography of Marianne
North, 5–26. Edited by her sister Mrs John Addington Symonds. 2 vols. London: Macmillan
and Co.; North, Eden, Biographical Note by Brenda E. Moon, 235; Barbara T. Gates. 1998.
Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women embrace the Living World, 96. Chicago
and London: The University of Chicago Press.
26
Philip Kerrigan. 2010. Marianne North: painting a Darwinian vision. Visual Culture in
Britain 11:1, 3. https://doi.org/10.1080/14714780903509870
27
North, Recollections I: 26–27; Moon in North Eden, 235.
28
North, Recollections I: 5–38; W. Botting-Hemsley. 1893. Earlier Recollections of
Marianne North. Nature 48: 291–92.
18 R. WATTS
places in the Far East, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, the
Seychelles and Chile.29
It was certainly unusual for women of her class to travel independently,
such journeys as hers generally being deemed unfeminine, especially as
North usually travelled without even a servant and often with just a hired
guide as, for example, in the mountains outside Apoquindo in Chile.30
North, however, inherited sufficient wealth and useful connections to
enable her journeys. She used relatives and friends to make introductions
to scientists and collectors abroad and found she easily received invitations
from other notables and artists.31 Her father’s name and her association
with Kew gave her introductions to government officials, rulers and lead-
ing naturalists in many places, including many interesting, well-informed
botanists such as the director of the Natural History Museum and the
president of Columbia College and other academics in New York who
went out of their way to help her and her cousin John Enys, an official and
enthusiastic collector of flora and fauna in New Zealand. She was pleased
to meet important people only if they could aid her scientific quests: for
example, she delighted in visiting the Brazilian Emperor in Rio in 1873
since he was a knowledgeable naturalist (he later visited her in London).
Similarly, she appreciated evening walks in Simla with the Viceroy of India,
who knew more about the plants and trees than anyone else she met there.
She also gained some rail privileges: for instance, in the 1880s she received
free government railway passes in Australia, South Africa and Chile. All
this made her part of Kew’s imperialist mission, an implicit dictum which
generally she accepted.32
North’s tone when writing about other ethnicities often belied an
implicit condescension, such as when she was irritated by the ‘priggishness
of the educative native’ in India who would not accept stamps as payment
for paints!33; she passed on racist comments expressed to her without com-
ment, sometimes, as in Brazil, California and South Africa, seeming to
29
North, Recollections I: 39 ff.
30
Ibid., II:316.
31
Ibid., I: 39, 48–49, 55, 66–7, 71, 73–76, 90–91, 94, 96, 98, 106, 111–12.
32
Ibid., I: 184, 194, 221–22, 236–38, 239, 304, 310, 321; II: 7, 68, 71, 74, 76–81, 89,
105, 109, 140, 149, 164–65, 171, 177, 184–86, 208, 219–20, 229–35, 239, 245–6, 253,
285, 299, 314, 325; Morgan, Place Matters, 108.
33
Ibid., II: 46, 48, 57, 59, 116, 117, 151, 263–4, 272.
concur in some dubious racist opinions.34 Yet equally often (and even in
the same locations), she was appreciative of the behaviour, care and skills
of those from other ethnicities, happy to be living among them, some-
times being the only white person there. Generally, she mixed freely with
and was interested in ordinary (and some rich) people of whatever colour,
valued indigenous knowledge and indigenous names of places.35
Excited by the amazing plants, beautiful views and wonders she found
everywhere, North was always eager to extend her scientific knowledge.
Wherever she went, ever willing to learn and observe, she sought out
naturalists, gardeners, local people with local knowledge, botanic collec-
tors and illustrators,36 included numbers of women.37 For instance, in
Australia she stayed with ‘Mrs R., the flower painter’ who immediately
introduced her to ‘quantities of the most lovely flowers—flowers such as I
had never seen or even dreamed of before’.38 Many such people were so
impressed they went to great lengths to help her, such as the German
director of the wonderful Botanic Gardens in Calcutta and the learned
Hindu who looked after her there who told her that it ‘pleased him much’;
that she ‘should take so much trouble about the flowers that Siva [sic]
loved’. He told her much about the plants, including one, the ‘Bah’,
which was a famous cure for dysentery.39 In Port Elizabeth, South Africa,
she was visited by Mr H. ‘a most interesting man, and a great botanist’.
He had greatly helped make the Botanic Gardens and knew all about
South African flowers, although he was a shopkeeper by day. On his advice
she journeyed to Cadles, where she found, or was given, many ‘beautiful
things’ and marvellous flowers, including a giant protea by a friend who
knew she was looking for one. She ‘almost cried with joy at getting it at
last, I had missed it so often’.40 North was equally eager to share
34
Ibid., I: 66, 73, 120–21, 146, 147–48, 210, 224–25; II 113, 124, 192, 204,221,227,
245, 265.
35
Ibid., I: 52, 55, 64–65, 77, 79, 80–84, 86,90, 100, 105, 117, 221–22, 234–45, 255,
309–10, 230–31; II: 27, 29, 31, 34–40, 47, 53–54, 93, 97, 100, 146–7, 163, 222, 224,
242, 248–49, 255, 269–70, 274–77, 287, 288, 295, 296–97, 300–04, 321.
36
North, Recollections, I: 64–5, 72, 167–68, 194, 232–34, 249–51, 258; II:27, 40, 89–90,
97–98, 101–02, 106, 120, 134–35, 139, 141–3, 147, 155, 171, 205, 207, 208, 220,
229–30, 239, 244–49, 252, 273–74, 294, 315, 317–18, 327.
37
Ibid., I: 48–49, 234; II: 138–39, 155–58, 166, 171–72, 218, 221–26, 247, 275,
277, 320.
38
North, Recollections II: 148–50.
39
North, Recollections II: 27.
40
Ibid., II: 239–42.
20 R. WATTS
knowledge, as when she revisited the museum in Cape Town after a trip
around and up Table Mountain to take some ‘gorgeous’ multi-coloured
caterpillars that she had collected to the delighted curator (they eventually
became large Atlas moths).41 Baron von M. whom she made friends with
in Melbourne was very excited on her second visit there to see her paint-
ings of the nuytsia and Eucalyptus macroparca which he had named but
never seen in flower. He appropriated for himself her bud which she had
been saving for Kew.42 The learned Dr Arthur Burnell, Judge of Tanjore,
whom she first met on a steamer to Java, corrected her when she repeated
something that Sir William Hooker had told her about a sacred plant of
the Hindus. They became friends, and when she visited Tanjore, she stayed
with him as he had all sorts of sacred Hindu plants ready for her to paint,
wanting to write a history of such plants using her illustrations.
Unfortunately, however, he died before this could be completed.43
North worked to be accepted as part of the scientific botanic commu-
nity in several ways: she took thousands of specimens back to Kew—some
new to Europeans, four of them being named after her: her painting of the
pitcher plant from Sarawak caused such botanical excitement that a nurs-
ery firm sent out a collector to bring back a specimen (now its over-
collection is threatening extinction); Crinum Northianum from Sarawak,
although common in Borneo, was previously unknown to Western science
as was Kniphofia Northiae from South Africa (North also provided a speci-
men); Kew already had a seed of Northia Seychelliana but could not estab-
lish its genus or species until North brought back both her paintings and
a living specimen (Fig. 2.1).44
North’s accurate paintings, executed before the days of exact photog-
raphy in botany, proved to be very useful, not least because other botanists
could then follow up her work and discover more about the plants.
In 1877, at the request of Kensington museum, North lent them 500
studies, for which she made a catalogue for a successful exhibition. On her
return from India in 1879, so many people visited her to see her paintings,
that North hired a room in Conduit Street for two months to set up an
exhibition of them which not only mostly paid for itself but saved her from
41
Ibid., II: 229–30.
42
Ibid., II: 168.
43
North, Recollections I: 252–3, 327–28.
44
Michelle Payne. 2011. Marianne North: a Very Intrepid Painter, 16–17. Royal Botanic
Gardens, London: Kew Publishing; North, Recollections II: 305.
Fig. 2.1 Nepenthes northiana (Sarawak) plant collected by, painted by, and
named after Marianne North. Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens,
Kew, reproduced with permission
‘fatigue and boredom’ at home. The great success of this persuaded her to
offer them to Kew Gardens. At the same time she offered to pay for a gal-
lery to house them, an offer accepted with alacrity by Sir Joseph Hooker,
although her further offer of having refreshments provided was declined
as he thought it would be impossible to keep the ‘British public in order’.45
North chose both the architect, James Fergusson, a highly respected
architectural writer, whose particular interests in ancient Indian and classi-
cal architecture can be seen in his works, and the somewhat secluded site
at Kew and approved the design—a mixture of classical and colonial styles.
She painted the two golden circles above the entrance representing the
Eastern and Western Hemispheres, which were connected by her own
monogram, and spent a year fitting, framing, patching and sorting the
pictures, grouping them in the gallery closely by geographical location.
45
North, Recollections I: 321; II: 82, 86–87; Payne, North, 87.
22 R. WATTS
She was also responsible for the gallery’s finishing touches and interior
decoration, including a dado of 246 wood samples she had collected,
arranged beneath the paintings, and the establishment of an artists’ studio,
allowing visiting artists to copy and paint specimens away from other visi-
tors. The Marianne North Gallery at Kew Gardens was opened to great
acclaim in June 1882, The Times lauding it as ‘unquestionably the most
brilliant and accurate series of illustrations of the flora of the globe that has
ever been brought together’, while the Daily News praised North’s gener-
osity to the nation, saying that ‘few women, and not a great many men
have raised [such] monuments to art by their own unaided initiative,
energy and industry’.46
Subsequently, once an extension had been added in 1885, North
included new paintings from her final journeys to South Africa, the
Seychelles and Chile which she had undertaken partly to fill gaps she had
perceived in her collection. Still supervising minutely the whole building
and arrangement of her scientific collection,47 and aiming at keeping ‘the
countries together as much as possible, the geographical distribution of
the plants being the chief object [she] had in view’, she reordered and
renumbered the whole collection (848 paintings and 246 species of
wood). All this was carefully described in an informative catalogue
(Fig. 2.2).48
In her last years, North, wanting (as with her gallery) to leave some
permanent testimony of her work, wrote two volumes of recollections of
her travels and findings. These, published posthumously since she was
unable to find a publisher in her lifetime, and edited by her sister, were
primarily an account of her botanical adventures, helping further popula-
rise and contextualise her work in natural history.49 This was deliberate
public education. For her Kensington exhibition, she had made a catalogue
as best she could of the 500 studies she lent, saying that she was ‘putting
in as much general information about the plants as I had time to collect,
46
North, Recollections, II: 210–11; Payne, North, 87–89.
47
Moon in North, Eden, 234.
48
North, Recollections II: 330; Royal Gardens Kew [No author given]. 2009, copy of sixth
edition of 1914; 1st ed. 1882. Official Guide to the North Gallery. London: HMSO.
49
Eden, Preface by Professor J.P.M. Brenan, Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew
in 1980, 7–8, Introduction by Anthony Huxley 9–13. Payne, North, 87–89. Today, thanks
to a very generous Heritage Lottery Fund grant, Kew has been able to restore the Gallery
and paintings using modern technology to enable conservation. Ibid., 90–95.
Fig. 2.2 Marianne North Gallery, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Board of
Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, reproduced with permission
as I found people in general woefully ignorant of natural history’.50 Her

Kew catalogue, of which she wrote the first draft, contained not only the
titles of the pictures, but also short notes of the life history of the plants
painted and their products and the geography of where they were found,
how they were used locally and what was already known about them.
Coloured maps on the inside covers showed where North had travelled.
Many of the plants she described were, or were to become, useful in medi-
cine or other ways, like the cinchona from whose bark quinine was now
mass produced, enabling travellers like North to proceed safely; the
Madagascar periwinkle which now is widely used in treatment of bone
marrow cancers; the African baobab tree she painted in Tanjore, India,
whose bark can be used for paper, basketry and rope, timber for fuel, insu-
lation material and canoes. It is now also seen as providing a highly nutri-
tious ‘superfood’. William Botting Hemsley of Kew’s Herbarium,
50
North, Recollections I: 321.
24 R. WATTS
corrected and added to the catalogue so she asked him to complete it and
put his name to it.51 As Botting Hemsley said, North exhibited her paint-
ings free to the public not only because she wanted ‘less fortunate persons
to see and enjoy what she herself had seen and enjoyed so much’ but
because she also wished to make the gallery ‘as instructive as possible to
those who know least of such things’.52
North was rich but to win approval to build a dedicated gallery at Kew
was a huge signal of official scientific approval. The director Sir Joseph
Hooker, passionate about the scientific value and reputation of the gar-
dens, could not praise the collection enough, saying that it was ‘not pos-
sible to overrate its interest and instructiveness’ in connection to the
treasures already at Kew and acknowledging it recorded ‘vividly and truth-
fully’ natural wonders and scenes fast disappearing forever as lands were
colonised and settled.53 This sentiment echoed North who bemoaned the
modern destruction of ancient forests and woodland. For example, she
was heart-broken to see the giant redwood forests of California destroyed:
‘It is invaluable for many purposes and it broke one’s heart to think of
man, the civiliser, wasting treasures in a few years to which savages and
animals had done no harm for centuries.’54 In Tenerife she lamented that
the famous view of the Peak ‘described so exquisitely by Humboldt’ had
been spoilt by a mistaken and ugly attempt to grow cochineal cacti which
had resulted in the palms and other trees being cleared away.55 Similarly in
Australia, when she saw huge trees being destroyed, she commented:
‘civilised men would soon drive out not only the aborigines but their food
and shelter’.56 She saw the irony when a local botanist at Verulam in South
Africa reported to her that when he had written to Kew about the noble
aloe trees fast being cut down there, ‘they had coolly asked him to cut one
down and send them a “section” for the Museum!’57
51
Payne, North, 59, 68.
52
W. Botting Hemsley. June 15, 1882. The Marianne North Gallery of Paintings of
“Plants and their Homes”, Royal Gardens, Kew. Nature 26: 155. NB A successful major
restoration and conservation project of 2008–11, much based on interdisciplinary work, has
enabled such education to be enhanced and continued. Payne, North, 90–95.
53
J.D. Hooker. 2009. Preface to the First Edition of the Official Guide, iii–iv.
54
North, Recollections I: 211–12.
55
North, Recollections I: 192–93.
56
Ibid., II: 116.
57
North, Recollections, I: 278.
Hooker’s friend, Charles Darwin, the foremost biologist of the age,

was also enthusiastic and wanted to meet North, the subsequent meeting
arranged by his daughter, Mrs Lichfield. It was his prompting in 1880 that
led North to visit Australia since she believed Darwin to be:
the greatest man living, the most truthful, as well as the most unselfish and
modest, always trying to give others rather than himself the credit of his own
great thought and work. He seemed to have the power of bringing out
other people’s best points by mere contact with his own superiority.58
Darwin suggested she should not try any representation of the world’s
vegetation until she had seen and painted that of Australia because it was
unique. Taking this as ‘a royal command’, North set off immediately.59 On
her return a year later she took her collection of Australian paintings to
Down House to show them to Darwin in his ‘perfect home’. Frail physi-
cally, but ‘full of fun and freshness’, he ‘talked deliciously on every subject
to us all for hours together’. Looking at her collection of Australian paint-
ings, he showed ‘in a few words how much more he knew about the sub-
jects than anyone else, myself included, though I had seen them and he
had not.’ He died less than eight months later ‘living always the same
peaceful life in that quiet house, away from all the petty jealousies and
disputes of lesser scientific men.’ He had written to her thanking her for
taking her pictures, vivid reminders of scenes he still recalled with great
pleasure, modestly reflecting that his ‘mind in this respect must be a mere
barren waste compared with your mind’, praise which was treasured
by her.60
As Philip Kerrigan has convincingly argued, North’s paintings, indeed,
engaged with Darwin’s theories of conflict and the survival of the fittest,
depicting the natural environment of plants, the ways in which ‘tangled
banks’ of plants both interconnected with each other and with the insect
and animal life around them and struggled for existence, some, especially
parasitic and carnivorous plants, living at the expense of others.61 For
instance she produced many examples on insectivorous plants, illustrating
how some plants sensed, trapped and digested prey as animals do, in
58
Ibid., II: 87.
59
Ibid., II: 87.
60
Ibid. II 215–16.
61
Kerrigan, North; Anka Ryall. 2008. The world according to Marianne North, a nine-
teenth-century female Linnaean. TïjdSchrift voor Skandinavistick 29 1 & 2: 212–15.
26 R. WATTS
keeping with Darwin’s arguments on the ‘fundamental kinship between

all living things.’ This subverted the usual scientific assumptions of the
distinctiveness and superiority of animals to plants (Fig. 2.3).62
Kerrigan argues that it was North’s desire to illustrate Darwin’s argu-
ments, seen in his books on plants, which led her to represent each plant
as an individual shaped by and struggling with its particular environment
rather than any idealized or generalised portrait of an isolated plant.
Reviews recognised and often were enthusiastic about her ‘life-like repre-
sentations of plantlife, habit and natural surroundings’, a rare phenome-
non in botanical art.63 Botanical artists, however, were restrained in their
praise as North’s method of rapid nature painting in oils, started if not
Fig. 2.3 Interdependence of plants, insects and animal life, ‘tangled’ and car-
nivorous plants. Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, reproduced
with permission
62
Kerrigan, North, 17–19.
63
Kerrigan, North, 5.
finished out-of-doors and necessarily including imperfect, sometimes

decomposing specimens, was innovative and opposed to the accepted
norms of botanic art where representative, exemplary specimens were
painted in exact detail on a white background to highlight their features
and executed in line and watercolour. This contravening of the exacting
demands of botanical illustration made North’s paintings seem unscien-
tific in standard Linnaean botanical terms but North was supremely scien-
tific in the way she implicitly illustrated Darwin’s theories. This also saved
her from competing with existing professional illustrators yet established
her alongside explorers and objective commentators. Anka Ryall has com-
mented that by focussing on the connection between individual plants and
flowers and their environments, North showed herself to be a field bota-
nist ‘continually testing her own observations against received knowl-
edge’. Her purpose was botanical but she had the perspective of an artist.64
Botanists were certainly enthusiastic—many were inspired to seek for
themselves the new plants depicted—while reviews of her paintings
stressed their uniqueness and truthfulness, the Daily News, for instance,
believing that such ‘a record of research into natural history’ had ‘never
before been made by a single hand, and the like of which … exists
nowhere else’.65
This praise was somewhat gendered, however: for example, The
Athenaeum, while lauding North’s great conversational powers, incisive
intellect and ‘rugged shrewdness’, together with her ‘astonishing phy-
sique … absolute fearlessness, and … majestic and commanding beauty’,
also added that her masculine side was always checked by her feminine
tenderness and ‘delicacy of feeling’66; The Times, having quoted Hooker’s
praise of the ‘interest and instructiveness’ of North’s gallery, asserted that
she had flair but was not a real botanist; the Daily News praised her taste
and ‘charming gallery’. Into the early twentieth century, North became
seen primarily as a woman traveller and ‘great benefactress’ and remained
excluded from or subordinated in scientific societies, although popular
with a wide, general audience of those interested in natural science of the
world that included women and working people. This, says Barbara Gates,
made her like other women on the margins of science, a valuable science
64
Ibid., 6–7; Ryall. North, 211–14.
65
Kerrigan, North, 7; Morgan, Place Matters, 100–01.
66
Obituary. September 6, 1890. Miss Marianne North. The Athenaeum 3280: 319.
Accessed 25 Oct 2015.
28 R. WATTS
educator, making inaccessible knowledge public and reaching wide audi-

ences in a way generally underestimated by historians. But such women
were ‘colonials in the land of science, entering the masculine, politicized
space by their scientific contacts, by ‘subversive bravado narratives,’
through new technologies and ‘drawing nature differently and correcting
others’ misrepresentations’.67
North undoubtedly was neither a timid nor a helpless female and in her
intrepid travels and actions pushed at the boundaries of Victorian feminin-
ity. She wryly recalled one man who told her she was lucky not to have
lived 200 years earlier or she would have been burnt as a witch.68 She did
not mind travelling in wild places with just local guides, often natives of
the place, with no other women present. She made little of the difficulties
of the planning and managing of all her trips, the hazards of weather and
the problems of transporting oil paintings, often not yet dry, over inhos-
pitable territory, although her dislike of the cold and her increasing rheu-
matism forced her to leave some places such as Japan and north India. She
made light of seeming insurmountable difficulties as when, for example, in
Chile, where she had already ridden into the mountains alone, scrambling
about after flowers, people warned her of the problems, even dangers, of
going off into the forests to paint the monkey tree, she found ‘as usual …
when I got nearer the spot that all difficulties vanished’.69 She delighted
rather than feared the sight of strange, possibly dangerous, insects and
animals. For instance in Brazil, in 1872, she once ‘saw a spider as big as a
small sparrow with velvety paws; and everywhere were marvellous webs
and nests’ adding, ‘[H]ow could such a land be dull?’, for friends in Rio
had warned her she would only find ‘dreary monotony’, a sentiment she
often faced from the ruling colonials.70
North was no typical Victorian lady. She never let difficulties of acces-
sibility of the plants she wanted to paint stop her and brushed aside objec-
tions that travel was impossible, for example in India scornfully saying
people ‘were so accustomed to feminine helplessness’.71 There, again
amazed at the lack of interest of many colonial residents in their beautiful
surroundings, she found it difficult to be civil to the ignorant women who
67
Gates, Kindred Nature, 100–05.
68
North, Recollections II: 211–12.
69
Ibid., I: 228–29, II:320; North, Eden, Introduction by Anthony Huxley, 10.
70
North, Recollections I 136–37.
71
Ryall, World ---North’, 206; North Recollections II:11.
visited her—‘Those unthinking, croqueting-badminton young ladies

always aggravated me’.72 At the same time she delighted in meeting many
intelligent, helpful women wherever she went and met some very distin-
guished ones.73 She was also introduced to some well-known ones such as
the adventure traveller and writer Isabella Bird and, especially, Constance
Gordon Cumming, another global traveller and largely self-taught artist.74
North saw herself as a professional, disliking, for example, Julia
Cameron’s theatrical portrait of her, commenting that when she stayed
with her in Kalutara in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), Cameron had failed to
make an interesting photo of her. Similarly, she probably would have
abhorred her sister’s portrayal of her having almost psychic connection
with plants.75 North’s very rhetoric of professionalism, according to
Antonia Losano, meant she enlarged women’s role in botanical science,
while she emphasised most her production of scientific illustrations to
educate her viewers and further scientific knowledge. She admired those
who worked tirelessly as she did and valued the praise of those who recog-
nised her ‘applied art labour’, although many commentators, as we have
seen, preferred to set her in a more acceptable feminine frame.76 North
pitied intelligent women having to live in seclusion from men, such as the
Princess of Tanjore who could only talk to Dr Burnell through a curtain.
Yet she was no obvious feminist, believing from examples she had known
like the sister of the attorney-general of Kingston, Jamaica, a ‘perfect gen-
tle woman’, ‘that a really distinguished woman’, ‘needs no college or
“higher education” lectures’.77 North herself had had no higher educa-
tion. Admittedly, women in Britain were only just beginning to win some
opportunities for such in North’s latter years, yet some of those with suf-
ficient support were enthusiastically taking advantage of the new
opportunities. Henry Sidgwick, in his desire to promote both scientific
studies at Cambridge and the entry of women undergraduates there, even
urged, with some success, women to enrol for the new Natural Science
Tripos. This was a paradoxical pairing, however, since the fact that women
72
Ibid., II:31.
73
North, Recollections I: 48–49, 76, 328–29 and throughout.
74
Ibid., II: 212–13.
75
North, Recollections II: 314–15. Antonia Losano. 1997. A preference for vegetables:
The travel writings and botanical art of Marianne North. Women’s Studies 26:5, 423–43.
76
Losano, A preference for vegetables, 428–31.
77
North, Recollections I: 91, 328.
30 R. WATTS
took the subject was hardly likely to make it more palatable to men in the
fevered gendered climate of Cambridge academia.78
North wanted to be recognised as a professional seeker after scientific
fact and realism. Her own deep and extensive understanding of plants,
culled from experience, much reading and wide, useful contacts in botany,
art and officialdom, was evidenced in her lively, very readable but knowl-
edgeable accounts of her travels. Extending her knowledge further
through travel, she could make comparisons, as, for instance, when she
compared the monkey puzzle trees she found in Chile with those she had
seen in England, Brazil and Queensland.79 She was an amateur botanist,
but so, in the modern sense, were many leading botanists of the age in
England, not least Darwin himself who made such huge contributions to
botany in his last twenty years, working at home in Down House.80
Upper class, with privileged access to governing and scientific society, it
was those who could help her scientific, artistic and educational aims
whom North sought rather than the niceties of polite society. Feminist or
not, as a woman, her pleasure in associating with such people, together
with her activities and lifestyle, challenged the boundaries of Victorian
femininity just as her findings and paintings challenged science and art.
Her funding of her gallery, its catalogue and her Recollections, demon-
strated her wish for her work to be publicly known. Thus, not least at Kew,
she deliberately engaged with the public sphere in a way that challenges
the gendered theories of the influential philosopher Jürgen Habermas,
who promoted the idea of public education in the twentieth century.81
The art historian, Kimberley Rhodes, has inferred that public spaces
like publishing, history and museums should undergo scholarly examina-
tion to reveal how women used them at the margins of different disci-
plines, using Hilary Fraser’s work on women art historians as a prime
example.82 Fraser herself wished to correct the ‘partial and distorting view
78
Watts, Women in science, 103–12; Janet Howarth and Mark Curthoys. 1987. Gender,
curriculum and career: a case study of women university students in England before 1914.
History of Education Occasional Publication 8 Women and the Professions, 4–20.
79
North, Recollections II:323.
80
Morgan, Place Matters, 110–17; Morton Botanical Science, 363–71; 412–18.
81
Luke Goode. 2005. Jürgen Habermas. Democracy and the Public Sphere, 31–33, 38–47.
London, Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press.
82
Kimberley Rhodes. 2015. Review – Finding feminist art in history in the nineteenth
century. Nineteenth-Century Gender studies 11.2. http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue112/
rhodes.htm; Gates, Kindred Nature, 100.
of the emergent discipline of art history’ that it was ‘a masculine intellec-

tual field in which a handful of women played a merely secondary role’.83
Her analysis demonstrates many parallels with histories of women in both
science and art. It shows that, from the mid-nineteenth century, art his-
tory was professionalizing while opportunities to view art were increasing
dramatically but women were kept out by legal constraints and social
taboos plus lack of higher education and professional memberships.
Nevertheless, there were some well-informed (often self-educated) female
art historians who used a variety of ways to reach the public. Such women
read widely in most current European critical literature and thence medi-
ated it to the British public: they researched using original archives and
criticized even well-known male art historians who did not; they used fic-
tion and other genres, including travel writing and poetry, to write on art
and women’s place in it; they translated important European art history
texts and practised ekphrasis (a literary description of, or commentary on,
a visual work of art); they modified historical periods to examine the role
of women in the arts. Thus, understanding that art was influenced by
social, political and economic considerations, they began the work of
demonstrating that dominant representations and ideologies were neither
monolithic nor anonymous but multi-voiced and faceted and ‘unstable’.
Thence, realizing the relativity of cultural significance, they included pop-
ular, democratic and ephemeral art forms like the decorative and domestic
arts. Interestingly their praise of crafts in art included the new art of pho-
tography which, as yet largely amateur and seen as a handmaid to art, was
much associated with women. Fraser believes examining female art critics
in this way enabled her to identify patterns in women’s art writing not
necessarily visible otherwise and usually ignored.84
In similar fashion, Marianne North’s career was paralleled by other
women who carved new niches for themselves in the masculine world of
science yet remained on the margins of contemporary mainstream science,
‘deferring’ to ‘real’ and, therefore, male scientists. For instance, Eleanor
Omerod, allowed in her wealthy home to follow natural history as a pri-
vate hobby and learn from her professionally qualified younger brothers,
was able to study more seriously after her father’s death when she was
83
Hilary Fraser. 2014. Women writing art history in the nineteenth century: Looking like a
woman 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
84
Ibid. passim; see Morgan, Place Matters, 10–13, 19, 27 on Victorian women, gender
and travel.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
in the names and circumstances of these two stories, Varillas having
only changed the sex of his victim and substituted the wife for the
murdered husband.
Nevertheless Paul Lacroix, in his Curiosités de l’Histoire de France,
does not yield to our view of the argument, but is still disposed to
coincide with Varillas. Didot, in his Biographie Universelle, also
supports the same hypothesis; but we attribute their persistence and
that of many others, to the influence exercised over their imagination
by the production of two popular novels.
Pierre de Lescouvel, a Breton author, wrote a novel on this
supposed assassination, which went through four or five editions and
was at first attributed to the Countess Murat, who had gained some
reputation as an authoress at the court of Louis XIV.
Madame de Lussan also founded a romance on this tragical event,
under the title of Anecdotes de la Cour de François I.
CHARLES V. OF SPAIN.
a. d. 1540.
Notwithstanding the information afforded by the latest writers

on the closing years of the life of Charles V., which were passed in
the convent of Yuste,[34] the history of that monarch by Robertson
and by other authors who have adopted his views, is still received by
many as unimpeachable authority. According to these, Charles V.,
after his abdication, retired to the convent of St. Yuste, in
Estramadura, where he adopted the habit of a monk, withdrew from
all interference in the government of his vast empire, occupied
himself wholly with mechanism and the construction of clocks and
watches, and at length, when his mind had become weakened and
worn out, personally rehearsed his own funeral. All this is in fact
nothing but a tissue of errors, clearly disproved by existing authentic
documents. The love of the marvellous, however, always inherent in
the human mind, has fostered the adoption of this romance, to the
exclusion of truth and veracity.
The name even of the monastery has been transformed. Sancho
Martin, a Spanish gentleman, presented a small piece of land to
some monks in 1408; a convent was built upon it which was called
Yuste, from a small stream of that name that trickled down the rocks
and watered the garden of the monks. It is this stream, the Yuste,
that merged its cognomen, even in Spain, into St. Juste or Justo,
leading one to suppose that the monastery was dedicated to a saint
of that name.
Charles V. did not live with the monks, as is commonly asserted; he
never wore the habit of the order; and he never ceased to wield the
imperial sceptre de facto and to control the affairs of the state. He
had, moreover, a residence built for himself, detached from the
convent but communicating by passages with the cloister and the
church.
Except in Titian’s portrait the Emperor was never seen in the habit of
St. Jerome. He always retained his secular dress, which was a
single black doublet, exchanged during periods of illness and
déshabille, for rich wadded silk dressing-gowns, of which he
possessed no less than sixteen in his wardrobe, if we may believe
the inventory made after his death. In his letters to intimate
correspondents we continually find the following observation: “I shall
never become a monk, notwithstanding my respect for the children
of St. Jérome.”
Far from adopting an appearance of poverty, or limiting his
attendants to twelve in number, as Sandoval and Robertson have
asserted, the household of the Emperor consisted of more than fifty
individuals, the chief of whom was the major-domo, Luis Quijada.
Their annual salaries amounted to above 10,000 florins, equal to £.
4,400 of the present day.
The profusion of plate taken by the Emperor to the monastery was
employed generally for the wants of the establishment, and for his
personal use. The dishes and ornaments of his table, the
accessories of his dressing-table, which betokened the recherché
nature of his toilet, the vases, ewers, basins, and bottles of every
shape and size in his chamber, utensils of all sorts for his kitchen, his
cellar, his pantry and his medicine chest, were made of solid silver,
and weighed upwards of 1,500 marks.
All these details, which are derived from authentic documents in the
archives of Simancas, bring Charles V. before us in his convent of
Yuste in a very different light from that in which we have usually seen
him. Neither must we picture to ourselves the convent in
Estramadura as the gloomy and solitary residence it had been up to
this time. It now became a centre of life and action. Couriers were
continually arriving and departing. Every fresh event was
immediately reported to the Emperor, whose opinion and whose
commands were received and acted upon in all important matters.
He was the umpire in every dispute, and all candidates for favours
applied to him. In spite of the gout with which he was continually
afflicted, he spent whole hours in reading despatches; in fact he was
almost as much immersed in public affairs in his retreat, as he had
been while actually on the throne. Although he had delegated all
official authority, he retained the habit of command, and was
emperor to the last.
Another error propagated by Robertson and several subsequent
writers is, that the intellect of Charles V. deteriorated until he became
a mere second-rate amateur of clocks and watches, and that
Torriano, who held the title of watchmaker to the Emperor, worked
with his master at the trade. The truth is, that Charles V. had a great
natural taste for the exact sciences, which is corroborated by the
variety of mathematical instruments enumerated in the inventory of
his effects taken after his death. Torriano, far from being a mere
clockmaker, was a first-rate engineer and mathematician, and was
called by the historian Strada the Archimedes of his age. His
mechanical inventions gained him a reputation for sorcery among
the monks of Yuste. With regard to the reported collection of clocks,
we only find mention of four or five in the long inventory. The
Emperor was a very exact observer of time, but no contemporary
writer has authorised us to suppose that he took especial pleasure in
amassing a variety of watches and time-pieces.[35]
Let us now examine the account given by Sandoval and Robertson
of the famous funeral ceremony of the 31st August 1558. The Scotch
historian, with a sublime indifference to facts, informs us that Charles
V., in the last six months of his life, fell into the lowest depths of
superstition. He describes him as seeking no other society but that of
the monks; as continually occupied in singing hymns with them from
the missal; as inflicting on himself the discipline of the scourge, and
lastly, as desiring to rehearse his own obsequies. A desire which
could only have originated in an enfeebled and diseased brain. Such
are the events contained in the introduction to Robertson’s romance.
He goes on to say that: “The chapel was hung with black, and the
blaze of hundreds of waxlights was scarcely sufficient to dispel the
darkness. The brethren, in their conventual dress, and all the
Emperor’s household clad in deep mourning, gathered round a huge
catafalque shrouded also in black, which had been raised in the
centre of the chapel. The service for the burial of the dead was then
performed, and was accompanied by the dismal wail of the monks’
prayers interceding for the departed soul, that it might be received
into the mansion of the blessed. The sorrowing attendants were
melted to tears at this representation of their master’s death, or they
were touched, it may be, with compassion by this pitiable display of
his weakness. Charles, muffled in a dark mantle, and bearing a
lighted candle in his hand, mingled with his household, the spectator
of his own obsequies; and the doleful ceremony was concluded by
his placing the taper in the hands of the priest in sign of his
surrendering up his soul to the Almighty.”
Such is the account given by Robertson, and it has been still further
embellished by later writers. Not only have they represented Charles
V. as assisting at his own funeral, but they have extended him in his
coffin like a corpse. In that position he is reported to have joined the
monks in chanting the prayers for the dead. Another writer (Count
Victor Duhamel, Histoire constitutionelle de la Monarchie Espagnole)
goes still further: “After the service,” says he, “they left the emperor
alone in the church. He then arose like a spectre out of his bier,
wrapped in a winding-sheet, and prostrated himself at the foot of the
altar. This ceremony was succeeded by fearful delirium caused by
an attack of fever. The Emperor,” he continues, “at length regained
his cell, where he expired the following morning.”
Here the horrible and the absurd seem to vie with one another. But
these descriptions are in complete contradiction with the strength of
mind really displayed by Charles V. in his last moments; and are
moreover contrary to his character, his habits, and mode of life, and
with his sentiments as a man and as a Christian on the solemnity of
death, and the gravity of the burial service. His dependants, who
never left his side, and who have transmitted the minutest details of
his life, would surely have been cognizant of these imputed
eccentricities, and would doubtless have alluded to them. But their
testimony, on the contrary, contradicts everything told by the monks,
and their records differ materially in regard to dates.
In the first place, how can we give credence to the ceremony itself?
—a ceremony reserved only for the dead by the Roman-catholic
church, and never performed for the living? A council held at
Toulouse in the beginning of the 14th century pronounced, that the
church considered an anticipated funeral to be an act of censurable
superstition, and prohibited any priest under pain of
excommunication, from taking part in it. This circumstance would
perhaps be insufficient to cast a doubt upon the obsequies of
Charles V., if it stood alone, but it is supported by others. The greater
number of the incidents related by the monks are improbable or
false. The Hieronymite chroniclers allege that Charles V. expended
on this ceremony two thousand crowns which he had saved up. Now
a forcible objection arises to the employment of so enormous a sum
for so simple a service. Only a very small part of it could have been
used in obsequies which were without pomp and needed scarcely
any outlay. It is more probable, on the contrary, as Sandoval affirms
(Vida del Emperador Carlos V. en Yuste), that it was from this sum
that the expenses of the real funeral were drawn, the solemn
services of which lasted nine days. Moreover, the physical strength
of the Emperor, which was on the wane, could not have borne the
fatigue of any such mock display. On the 15th August he was carried
to the church, and received the sacrament sitting. It was only on the
24th that he was free from gout: the eruption on his legs succeeded
the gout: and he was quite unfit to present himself before the altar on
the 29th. On the 31st August, the day that has been selected for
these obsequies, he was confined for twenty hours to his room by
illness. If all these impossibilities and improbabilities do not settle the
question, it remains to be explained why neither the major-domo, nor
the Emperor’s secretary, nor his physician, who mention in their
letters all the ordinary incidents of his religious life, especially when
they bear some reference to the state of his health, do not speak of
so extraordinary a ceremonial?—why, remembering the funeral
service of the Empress on the anniversary of the 1st May, they make
no mention of the sham funeral that the emperor had devised for
himself?—why, after stating that he had been carried to church on
the 15th of August, where he received the sacrament sitting, they are
entirely silent respecting the absurd obsequies of the 31st, to which
their master would undoubtedly have summoned them, and which
were so immediately followed by his death? But they are even more
than silent, they indirectly deny all the alleged circumstances. Their
narrative is at complete variance with that of the monks.
About two o’clock on the morning of the 21st September 1558, the
Emperor perceived that his life was slowly ebbing away and that
death was near. Feeling his own pulse, he shook his head as much
as to say: “It is all over.” He then begged the monks, says Quijada, in
a letter to Vasquez of the 21st September, to recite the litanies by his
bedside, and the prayers for the dying. The archbishop, at his
request, gave him the crucifix which had been embraced by the
empress in her last hours; he carried it to his lips, pressed it twice to
his breast and said: “The moment has come!” Shortly after he again
pronounced the name of Jesus and expired breathing two or three
sighs.
“So passed away,” wrote Quijada, with mingled grief and admiration,
“the greatest man that ever was or ever will be.” The inconsolable
major-domo adds: “I cannot persuade myself that he is dead.” And
he continually entered the chamber of his master, fell on his knees
by his bedside, and with many tears kissed over and over again his
cold inanimate hands.
THE INVENTOR OF THE
STEAM-ENGINE.
a. d. 1625.
The biography of Salomon de Caus and the account of his labours

and his discoveries were scarcely known until the year 1828, when a
learned French scholar, Arago, published for the first time in
L’Annuaire du Bureau des Longitudes, a remarkable article upon the
history of the steam-engine.
In it he cites the work of Salomon de Caus entitled Les raisons des
forces mouvantes avec diverses machines, &c., which was first
published at Frankfort in 1615 and reprinted at Paris in 1624. M.
Arago draws from it the conclusion that De Caus was the original
inventor of the steam-engine. Six years later there appeared in the
Musée des Familles, a letter from the celebrated Marion Delorme,
supposed to have been written on the 3rd February 1641 to her lover
Cinq-Mars. It is as follows:
“My dear d’Effiat,[36] Whilst you are forgetting me at Narbonne and
giving yourself up to the pleasures of the court and the delight of
thwarting the cardinal, I, pursuant to the wishes you have expressed,
am doing the honours to your English lord, the Marquis of Worcester,
and I am taking him, or rather he is taking me, from sight to sight,
always choosing the dullest and the saddest; speaking little, listening
with great attention, and fixing upon those whom he questions two
large blue eyes which seem to penetrate to the very depths of their
understanding. Moreover, he is never satisfied with the explanations
that are given him, and scarcely ever sees things from the point of
view in which they are represented. As an instance of this I will
mention the visit we made together to Bicêtre, where he thinks he
has discovered in a maniac a man of genius. If the man were not
raging mad I really believe that your Marquis would have demanded
his freedom, that he might take him with him to London and listen to
his ravings from morning till night.
“As we were crossing the court-yard of the asylum, I more dead than
alive from fright, a hideous face appeared behind the large grating
and began to call out in a crazy voice. ‘I am not mad; I have made a
great discovery that will enrich any country that will carry it out.’
‘What is this discovery?’ said I to the person who was shewing us
over the asylum. ‘Ah!’ said he, shrugging his shoulders, ‘it is
something very simple, but you would never guess it. It is the
employment of the steam of boiling water.’ At this I burst out
laughing. ‘This man,’ resumed the warder, ‘is called Salomon de
Caus. He came from Normandy four years ago to present a memoir
to the king upon the marvellous effects that might be produced from
his invention. To listen to him, you might make use of steam to move
a theatre, to propel carriages, and in fact to perform endless
miracles.’ The Cardinal dismissed this fool without giving him a
hearing. Salomon de Caus, not at all discouraged, took upon himself
to follow my lord cardinal everywhere, who, tired of finding him
incessantly at his heels, and importuned by his follies, ordered him to
Bicêtre, where he has been confined for three years and a half, and
where, as you have just heard, he cries out to every visitor, that he is
not mad, and that he has made a wonderful discovery. He has even
written a book on this subject which is in my possession.’
“My Lord Worcester, who all this time appeared to be in deep
thought, asked to see the book, and after having read a few pages,
said, ‘This man is not mad, and in my country, instead of being shut
up in a lunatic asylum he would be laden with wealth. Take me to
him, I wish to question him. He was conducted to his cell, but came
back looking grave and sad. ‘Now he is quite mad,’ said he, ‘it is you
who have made him so; misfortune and confinement have
completely destroyed his reason; but when you put him into that cell
you enclosed in it the greatest genius of your epoch.’ Thereupon we
took our leave, and since then he speaks of no one but Salomon de
Caus.[37] Adieu my dear and loyal Henry; return soon, and do not be
so happy where you are, as to forget that a little love must be left for
me. Marion Delorme.”
The success obtained by this fictitious letter was immense and
lasting. The anecdote became very popular, and was copied into
standard works, represented in engravings, chased on silver goblets,
&c. At length some incredulous critics examined more closely into
the matter, and found that not only had Salomon de Caus never
been confined in a lunatic asylum, but that he had held the
appointment of engineer and architect to Louis XIII. up to the time of
his death, in 1630, while Marion Delorme is asserted to have visited
Bicêtre in 1641!!
On tracing this hoax to its source, we find that M. Henri Berthoud, a
literary man of some repute and a constant contributor to the Musée
des Familles, confesses that the letter imputed to Marion, was in fact
written by himself. The editor of this journal had requested Gavarni
to furnish him with a drawing for a tale in which a madman was
introduced looking through the bars of his cell. The drawing was
executed and engraved, but arrived too late; and the tale, which
could not wait, appeared without the illustration. However, as the
wood-engraving was effective, and moreover was paid for, the editor
was unwilling that it should be useless. Berthoud was therefore
commissioned to look for a subject and to invent a story to which the
engraving might be applied.
Strangely enough, the world refused to believe in M. Berthoud’s
confession, so great a hold had the anecdote taken on the public
mind; and a Paris newspaper went so far even as to declare that the
original autograph of this letter was to be seen in a library in
Normandy! M. Berthoud wrote again denying its existence, and
offered a million of francs to any one who would produce the said
letter.
From that time the affair was no more spoken of, and Salomon de
Caus was allowed to remain in undisputed possession of his fame as
having been the first to point out the use of steam in his work Les
raisons des forces mouvantes. He had previously been employed as
engineer to Henry Prince of Wales,[38] son of James I., and he
published in London a folio volume, “La perspective, avec les raisons
des ombres et miroirs.”
In his dedication of another work to the queen of England in 1614,
we find some allusion made to the construction of hydraulic
machines. On his return to France he, as we said before, was
appointed engineer to Louis XIII., and was doubtless encouraged by
Cardinal Richelieu, that great patron of arts and letters.
In the castle of Heidelberg we find another instance of the difficulty
that exists in uprooting an historical error. There is in the Galerie des
Antiquités of this castle a portrait on wood of Salomon de Caus.
Above this portrait is exhibited a folio volume of this author, the
Hortus Palatinus, Francofurti 1620, apud Joh. Theod. de Bry, with
plates. A manuscript note that accompanies this volume, mentions
that the letter of Marion Delorme describing the madman of Bicêtre
was extracted from the Gazette de France of 3rd March 1834.
Is it not singular that Heidelberg still remains in ignorance of the truth
respecting this absurd story, and that the extract from the Gazette de
France is still permitted to mislead the public?
As recently also as the 30th September 1865, at a banquet given at
Limoges, M. le Vicomte de la Guéronnière, a senator and a man of
letters, who presided, made a speech which was reproduced in the
Moniteur and in which he repeats the anecdote of Salomon de Caus
and Bicêtre. The newspaper L’Intermédiaire, in its 45th number, of
the 10th November 1865, designates this persistence in error as
inept and stupid.
The works of de Caus were held in high estimation among learned
men during the whole of the 17th century. He had however been
anticipated in the discovery of the application of the power of steam
for propelling large bodies.
On the 17th of April 1543, the Spaniard Don Blasco de Garay,
launched a steam-vessel at Barcelona in the presence of the
Emperor Charles V. It was an old ship of 200 tons called La
sanctissima Trinidada, which had been fitted up for the experiment,
and which moved at the rate of ten miles an hour. The inventor of
this first steam-vessel was looked upon as a mere enthusiast whose
imagination had run wild, and his only encouragement was a
donation of 200,000 marevedis from his sovereign. The Emperor
Charles no more dreamt of using a discovery which at that time
would have placed the whole of Europe at his feet, than did
Napoleon I., three centuries later, when the ingenious Fulton
suggested to him the application of steam to navigation. It is well
known that Fulton was not even permitted to make an essay of this
new propelling force in presence of the French Emperor.
So then we must date the fact of the introduction of steam navigation
as far back as 1543; anterior to Salomon de Caus in 1615, to the
Marquis of Worcester in 1663, to captain Savary in 1693, to Dr.
Papin in 1696, and to Fulton and others, who all lay claim to the
original idea.
But we may be wrong after all in denying originality to these men, for
we have no proof that either of them had any knowledge of the
discoveries of his predecessors.
It was not until the 18th of March 1816, that the first steam-vessel
appeared in France, making her entrance into the seaport of Havre.
She was the Eliza, which had left Newhaven in England on the
previous day.
GALILEO GALILEI.
a. d. 1630.
There are few celebrated men about whom more has been written
than Galileo.
The mere enumeration of the works of which he is the subject would
fill many pages: nevertheless an important mistake relative to one of
the principal events of his life has been so generally accepted and
believed, that it may be said to have passed almost into a proverb,
and many historians and scientific writers have carelessly adopted
and propagated the error.
Between the years 1570 and 1670 Italy had fallen into a state of
torpor. The Italians, including even the magnates of the land, had
lost all dignity and self-respect, and lay cringing and prostrate at the
feet of papal authority. During this period of mental depression
Galileo came into the world. Although endowed with a capacious and
liberal mind, he was wanting in strength of character, the great failing
of his countrymen and of the age in which he lived. Never was he
known to exclaim “E pur si muove!” Never did he display the heroic
firmness that is falsely attributed to him. Greatly in advance of his
epoch in science, he still belonged to it in all its shortcomings and
defects. He yielded, he hesitated, he drew back before opposition,
and was sometimes induced to deny his own doctrines through
timidity or in the hope of disarming his enemies, and of escaping
from the storm and the whirlwind he had raised around him.
The whole of his correspondence proves the weakness of his
character. In Italy, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the
most dangerous accusations that could be brought against any man
were deism and infidelity. To doubt was punished with death. Galileo
was so imprudent as to address a long letter to Castelli, in which he
sought to reconcile the words of scripture with the rotation of the
earth as discovered by Copernicus. Copernicus had proved the fact
previous to Galileo, but he had used the wise precaution to give his
opinion only as an hypothesis, and in his work on the motion of the
heavenly bodies, dedicated to Pope Paul III., he avoided wounding
any susceptibilities, taking especial care to separate theology from
science.
Galileo went even further in a second letter, in which he not only
attempted to reconcile his principles of astronomy with scripture, but
he endeavoured to make the words of scripture subservient to the
axioms he laid down. Some powerful friends tried to bring him to a
sense of his indiscretion. Cardinal Bellarmini sent him a written
remonstrance, urging him to confine himself to mathematics and
astronomy, and to avoid the field of theology.
Monsignor Dini, the friend of Galileo, wrote to him thus, 2nd May
1615: “Theologians allow mathematical discussion, but only when
the subject is treated as a simple hypothesis, which is alleged to
have been the case with Copernicus. The same liberty will be
accorded to you if you keep clear of theology.” Cardinal Barberini,
also on terms of friendship with Galileo, sent word to him by
Ciampoli on the 28th February of the same year, “that he was not to
pass the physical and mathematical limits of the question, because
the theologians maintain that it appertains to them alone to elucidate
scripture.” They all advised him openly and explicitly to refrain from
quoting the bible, and his pertinacity might have excited admiration
had it been based on firmness of character, but his timidity and
innumerable self-contradictions when directly accused of heresy
gave the lie to his apparent determination and adhesion to his
principles. When Cardinal Maffeo Barberini was elected pope, under
the name of Urbanus, Galileo, who had long been on terms of
friendship with him, went to Rome to offer his congratulations, and
soon after published his celebrated work: Dialogo intorno ai due
massimi sistemi del mondo.
Unfortunately, instead of limiting himself to astronomy in this work,
he enters again upon questions of theology utterly irrelevant to the
main subject; but, strangely enough, in the preface to the Dialogo he
has the weakness to disguise his real opinions. “I come,” says he, “to
defend the system of Ptolemy. As the friend of the cardinals who
have condemned the doctrines of Copernicus, I highly approve their
decision; a most excellent decision; a most salutary decision. They
who have murmured against it, have been to blame. If I take up my
pen it is out of excess of catholic zeal; this it is that moves me to
reappear before the public after many years of silence.”
The reader cannot but feel compassion in observing so much feeble-
mindedness, unworthy of so great a genius. It may be said in his
excuse that the counsels of his best friends forced him to play the
miserable part with which he has been reproached, that of servile
submission and the abandonment of his convictions. While
expressing the liveliest interest in his works, his principal patron, the
ambassador of Tuscany, thus advises him in letters of the 16th
February and 9th April 1633: “Submit yourself to whatever may be
demanded of you, as the only means of appeasing the rancour of
him who in the excess of his anger has made this persecution a
personal affair. Never mind your convictions, do not defend them, but
conform to all that your enemies may assert on the question of the
earth’s movement.”
Galileo was ordered to Rome to explain himself before the tribunal of
the Inquisition. After remaining a month in the palace of the
ambassador of Tuscany, he was removed to the palace of the
Inquisition, but so far from being imprisoned there, he himself
informs one of his friends that he has the use of three spacious
apartments, and the services of his own servant, and that he can
roam at pleasure through the whole building. On the 12th April 1633
Galileo underwent his first examination. He declares that in his
dialogue upon the systems of the world, he neither maintains nor
defends the opinion of the mobility of the earth and the immobility of
the sun; that he even demonstrates the contrary opinion, shewing
that the arguments of Copernicus are without weight, and are
inconclusive. On his second examination, on the 30th April, he says
plainly: “I do not actually entertain the opinion of the movement of
the earth and the immobility of the sun; I will add to my Dialogo two
or three colloquies, and I promise to take up one by one the
arguments in favour of the assertions which you condemn, and to
refute them unanswerably.”
Certainly the humiliation this great man underwent was profound. He
had carried submission so far as to renounce the strongest
convictions of the man of science. His persecutors were culpable
and cruel, but our business here is only to examine carefully and
truthfully the two following propositions: Was Galileo thrown into the
dungeons of the Inquisition? and Was he subjected to torture?
A valuable opportunity has been lost of clearing up the doubts which
surround the trial of Galileo. In 1809 all the original documents
relating to this suit were transmitted from Rome to Paris with the
papal archives, and it was intended to publish the whole in the form
of a volume consisting of seven or eight hundred pages. Delambre,
the historian of modern astronomy, while sending several extracts
from these deeds to Venturi, one of Galileo’s biographers, attributes
the oblivion into which this intention was suffered to fall, entirely to
political motives. Delambre informs us, moreover, that in 1820 the
original deeds were no longer forthcoming. Monsignor Morrini, who
had been commissioned to claim from the French government
whatever appertained to the Holy See, endeavoured in vain to obtain
the papers relating to the trial of Galileo. At length the manuscript
was restored to Gregory XVI., it was not known how, or by whom,
and it was deposited by Pius IX., in 1848, in the archives of the
Vatican; since which date no full details have been published. It is
now, however, positively affirmed that Galileo was never thrown into
the dungeons of the Inquisition.
After the second examination to which Galileo was subjected,
Cardinal Barberini suffered him to return to his apartments at the
embassy of the grand Duke of Tuscany, where the ambassador
Nicolini, his family and household, continued to treat him with much
affectionate consideration.
He was again summoned before the Inquisition on the 10th May and
on the 21st June, when he repeated that he held as true and
indisputable the opinion of Ptolemy, that is to say the immobility of
the earth and the mobility of the sun. This was the close of the trial.
The next day, Wednesday, 22nd June, 1633, he was brought before
the cardinals and prelates of the congregation to hear his sentence
and to make his recantation.
It was in the church of the convent of St. Minerva that Galileo Galilei,
aged seventy years, pronounced on his knees a form of recantation.
It has been said that Galileo, on rising from his knees, murmured
these words: “E pure si muove!” No doubt this protestation of truth
against falsehood may at this cruel crisis have rushed from his heart
to his lips, but it must be remembered that if these words had
actually been heard, his relapse would have infallibly led him to the
stake.
Monsieur Biot, in a learned and conscientious biographical notice,
has clearly pointed out, that Galileo was not subjected to torture
during any part of his trial anterior to the 22nd June 1633. M. Libri, in
his Histoire des sciences mathématiques en Italie, is of opinion that
as Galileo was subjected to a rigorous examination, according to the
wording of the sentence, it might be logically inferred that torture had
really been inflicted on him.
But Monsignor Marini has fully proved that the rigorous examination
was an enquiry which did not necessarily include torture. M.
Philarète Chasles, in his Essay on Galileo (the best compendium
that we have on the life, labours, and persecutions of the learned
Italian astronomer), shews that the popular story, or rather fable, of
the persecution of Galileo, accepted by the vulgar, is based upon a
false document, a letter forged by the Duc Caetani and his librarian,
and addressed to Reineri, and which Tiraboschi, a dupe to the fraud,
inserted in his Histoire littéraire d’Italie. This letter was taken as an
authority, and M. Libri, in his remarkable work “Histoire des sciences
mathématiques en Italie,” cites it in support of his opinion. But this
apocryphal letter is rejected by Nelli, Reumont, and all accurate
critics. If Galileo was really subjected to torture, how can we account
for the circumstance that during his life-time no rumour of it was
current?—that his pupils, his partisans, his numerous defenders,
knew nothing of it in France, in Holland, or in Germany?
A few days after his recantation, Galileo Galilei returned to Sienna to
his friend the Archbishop Piccolomini, in whose palace the Pope
desired him to remain. The following letter was written soon after his
arrival at Sienna: “At the entreaty of the ambassador Nicolini, the
Pope has granted me permission to reside in the palace and the
garden of the Medici on the Trinità, and instead of a prison the
archiepiscopal palace has been assigned to me as a home, in which
I have already spent fifteen days, congratulating myself on the
ineffable kindness of the Archbishop.”
On the 1st December the Pope issued a decree by which Galileo
received permission to occupy his villa d’Arcetri, which had been in
his possession since 1631. This villa, where Milton visited him, and
where Galileo died, on the 8th January 1642, at nearly seventy-eight
years of age, is situated on a declivity of one of the hills that overlook
Florence. An inscription still perpetuates the memory of its illustrious
proprietor. It was here, under arrest, and pending the good will and
pleasure of the Pope, that Galileo expiated his imaginary crime. On
the 28th July 1640 he wrote to Deodati: “My definitive prison is this
little villa, situated a mile from Florence. I am forbidden to receive the
visits of my friends, or to invite them to come and converse with me.
My life is very tranquil. I often go to the neighbouring convent of San
Matteo, where two of my daughters are nuns. I love them both
dearly, especially the elder, who unites extraordinary intellectual
powers to much goodness of heart.”
The growing infirmities of age now began to tell upon Galileo. His
weary eyes refused to serve him, and he became completely blind.
He was tended in his solitude by his two daughters from the convent.
One of them was taken from him by death, but she was replaced by
other affectionate relatives, who endeavoured to amuse and console
the lonely captive. His letters breathe a poetical melancholy, a quiet
irony, an overwhelming humility and an overpowering sense of
weariness.
Those who wish to form a just idea of this great and persecuted
man, of his true character, his labours, his foibles, and his lack of
moral courage, should read the Beiträge zur italienischen
Geschichte, by Alfred von Reumont, envoy of his Majesty the King of
Prussia at Florence. He has classified the correspondence of Galileo
and that of his friends, and has completed the labours and
researches of Fabroni, Nelli, Venturi, Libri, Marini, Biot, &c. Dr. Max
Parchoppe has also very recently sifted and weighed in a
remarkable manner, all the evidence relating to the life of Galileo.
We will conclude by mentioning a circumstance very little known and
with which the public have only recently become acquainted through
an unpublished letter of Galileo dated in the second year of his
retreat. It exhibits this illustrious scholar in a new light, as an amateur
of good wine and good cheer. “I desire,” he says, “that you should
take the advice of the most experienced judges, and procure for me
with all diligence and with all imaginable care, a provision of forty
bottles, or two cases of liqueurs of various kinds and of the most
exquisite quality. You need not consider the expense: I am so
moderate in all other sensual indulgences that I may allow myself
some scope in favour of Bacchus without fear of giving offence to
Venus or to Ceres. You will, I think, easily find wines of Scillo and of
Carini (Scylla and Charybdis if you prefer to call them so)—Greek
wines from the country of my master, Archimedes the Syracusian;
Claret wines, &c. When you send me the cases, be so good as to
enclose the account, which I will pay scrupulously and quickly, &c.
From my prison of Arcetri, 4th March.” “Con ogni diligenza e col
consiglio et intervento dei piu purgati gusti, voglio restar serviti di
farmi provisione di 40 fiaschi, cioè di due casse di liquori varii
esquisiti che costi si ritrovino, non curando punto di rispiarme
dispesa, perche rispiarmo tanto in tutti gl’altri gusti corporali che
posso lasciarmi andare a qualche cosa a richiesta di Bacco, senza
offesa delle sue compagne Venere e Cerere. Costi non debbon
mancare Scillo e Carini (onde voglio dire Scilla e Caribdi) nè meno la
patria del mio maestro Archimede Siracusano, i Grecchi, e Claretti,
&c. Havranno, come spero, comodo di farmegli capitare col ritorno
delle casse della dispensa, ed io prontamente sodisfaro tutta la
spesa, &c.
Dalla mia carcere d’Arcetri, 4 di Marzo.
Galileo Galiᵉⁱ.”
It is worthy of remark that he designates his pretty villa at Arcetri as
his prison; probably because he was forbidden to extend his walks
beyond the convent of San Matteo.

Femininity and The History of Womens Education Shifting The Frame 1St Edition Tim Allender Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Femininity and The History of Womens Education Shifting The Frame 1St Edition Tim Allender Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

‘Femininity’ and the History of Women's

Education: Shifting the Frame 1st

‘Femininity’ and the

ISBN 978-3-030-54232-0 ISBN 978-3-030-54233-7 (eBook)

This book explores the different theoretical and epistemological constitu-

circulation: embracing the intimacies of empire and shifting international

encouraging drills, marching and sport while simultaneously emphasising

they embraced these male domains to achieve their religious-building pro-

1 Shifting ‘Femininities’: Multifaceted Realms of Historical

2 ‘Unnatural’ Women and Natural Science: Changing

3 African American Women, Femininity and Their History

4 Suzanne Karpelès’ Encounters in Indochina and Europe

5 Troubling Gender Relations with the Appointment of

6 Shifting Spaces of Femininity: Everyday Life of Girl

7 ‘I turned into the boorish, stiff, unpleasant teenager…

8 ‘A Great Builder’: Female Enterprise, Architectural

9 Reconfiguring Women and Empire: Sex, Race and

10 Histories of Women’s Education and Shifting Frames of

Tim Allender is Professor and Chair of History and Curriculum at the

Joyce Goodman is Professor of History of Education at the University of

Stella Meng Wang is a PhD candidate at Sydney School of Education

Shifting ‘Femininities’: Multifaceted Realms

Tim Allender and Stephanie Spencer

© The Author(s) 2021 1

the reader with interesting accounts of how these historical contexts

oppression.2 It is within these shifting intellectual frames, and others like

highlights analysis of connecting spatial and temporal educational frame-

other educational spaces deployed “the language of home, [with] comfort

this forms part of a fruitful discussion on gendered secondary education.22

Additionally, as Phil Kilroy argues, women religious, until the mid-­

‘Unnatural’ Women and Natural Science:

© The Author(s) 2021 11

philosophers and theologians, they added to long-held popular beliefs of

collection of plants, an aspect of biology/natural history8 in the nine-

to enter the margins of science. Mary Delany (1700–1788), for example,

as I found people in general woefully ignorant of natural history’.50 Her

Hooker’s friend, Charles Darwin, the foremost biologist of the age,

keeping with Darwin’s arguments on the ‘fundamental kinship between

finished out-of-doors and necessarily including imperfect, sometimes

educator, making inaccessible knowledge public and reaching wide audi-

visited her—‘Those unthinking, croqueting-badminton young ladies

of the emergent discipline of art history’ that it was ‘a masculine intellec-

Notwithstanding the information afforded by the latest writers

The biography of Salomon de Caus and the account of his labours

You might also like

1 Shifting ‘Femininities’: Multifaceted Realms of Historical

2 ‘Unnatural’ Women and Natural Science: Changing

3 African American Women, Femininity and Their History

4 Suzanne Karpelès’ Encounters in Indochina and Europe

5 Troubling Gender Relations with the Appointment of

6 Shifting Spaces of Femininity: Everyday Life of Girl

7 ‘I turned into the boorish, stiff, unpleasant teenager…

8 ‘A Great Builder’: Female Enterprise, Architectural

9 Reconfiguring Women and Empire: Sex, Race and

10 Histories of Women’s Education and Shifting Frames of

Additionally, as Phil Kilroy argues, women religious, until the mid-