Canadian Store (CAD)
You are currently shopping in our Canadian store. For orders outside of Canada, please switch to our international store. International and US orders are billed in US dollars.
DETAILS AND REGISTRATION:
Join Ann Shteir for an illustrated book talk about Flora's Fieldworkers: Women and Botany in Nineteenth-Century Canada.
This event is part of series of talks in honour of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec’s 200th anniversary.
Morrin Centre
44 Chaussée des Écossais, Quebec City, QC G1R 4H3
This is a free hybrid event, register here: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/library-lectures-ann-shteir-tickets-1024915679387
Ann Shteir is professor emerita and senior scholar in gender, feminist, and women’s studies at York University.
When Catharine Parr Traill came to Upper Canada in 1832 as a settler from England, she brought along with her ties to British botanical culture. Nonetheless, when she arrived she encountered a new natural landscape and, like other women chronicled in this book, set out to advance the botanical knowledge of the time from the Canadian field.
Flora’s Fieldworkers employs biography, botanical data, herbaria specimens, archival sources, letters, institutional records, book history, and abundant artwork to reconstruct the ways in which women studied and understood plants in the nineteenth century. It features figures ranging from elite women involved in imperial botanical projects in British North America to settler-colonial women in Ontario and Australia - most of whom were scarcely visible in the historical record - who were active in “plant work” as collectors, writers, artists, craft workers, teachers, and organizers. Understood as an appropriate pastime for genteel ladies, botany offered women pathways to scientific education, financial autonomy, and self-expression.
The call for more diverse voices in the present must look to the past as well. Bringing botany to historians and historians to botany, Flora’s Fieldworkers gathers compelling material about women in colonial and imperial Canada and Australia to take a new look at how we came to know what we know about plants.