BOOK TALK | Ann Shteir- Flora's Fieldworkers

DETAILS AND REGISTRATION:

Ann Shteir will be giving a talk entitled "Women and Botany in 19th-Century Canada", part of the Morrin Centre Library Lectures series. 

This free event is hybrid, with registration required: https://www.morrin.org/en/event/library-lectures-ann-shteir-women-and-botany-in-19th-century-canada-2/

Morrin Centre
44 Chaussée des Écossais
Quebec City, Quebec
G1R 4H3

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

about the book

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.