Downloaded from http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/ on June 17, 2017
Notes Rec.
doi:10.1098/rsnr.2014.0059
Published online
WOMEN PEERS IN THE SCIENTIFIC REALM: SARAH BOWDICH (LEE)’S
EXPERT COLLABORATIONS WITH GEORGES CUVIER, 1825– 33
by
MARY ORR*
University of Southampton, Faculty of Humanities (Modern Languages),
Avenue Campus, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK
The accepted rule for women contributing to nineteenth-century science before 1851 was
that they could play only secondary roles in its production and authorship—as translators,
illustrators, popularizers—and these by virtue of kinship or marriage to eminent scientists
in the field or the laboratory. Sarah Bowdich (Lee) (1791 – 1856) presents an important
amendment to this rule. As an explorer of West Africa on an equal scientific footing with
her husband, and then a writer of science independently after his early death, she had
other key roles as Georges Cuvier’s cross-Channel scientific collaborator and as his first
biographer. This article investigates and reframes Sarah’s many individual achievements
in science and its writing, to examine the larger questions of her case. How were her
publications and ‘uneasy career’ in science possible? Can research on women in science
today find inspiration in her example?
Keywords: Sarah Bowdich (Lee); female peer; Georges Cuvier;
collaboration
REPOSITIONING
THE WOMAN PEER IN SCIENCE,
1790 –1833
The title of this article is deliberate: to rethink various assumptions about the lack of
contributions and authorship of science by women in the nineteenth century, especially in
the first three decades. Because women had little access to formal scientific training,
scientific societies and institutions in Britain, France and other European nations, and
could not be explorers, their contributions to science and physical geography in this
period go largely unrecorded by historians of science and geography.1 In France, the
Revolution and post-Revolutionary decades effectively turned the clock back on women’s
education and hence their continuing contributions to Enlightenment sciences. In Britain,
gentlemanly science at home and rugged science overseas were severely curtailed by the
Napoleonic Wars. The dating of the profession of the ‘scientist’ in 1833 (thanks to
William Whewell) then came on the heels of the founding in 1831 of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science, set up to extend such knowledge beyond the
*[email protected]
1
q 2014 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society.
Downloaded from http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/ on June 17, 2017
2
M. Orr
ranks of the privileged classes. Despite women’s proven equal capacities in earlier epochs on
both sides of the English Channel, the socially constructed inequalities that determine and
explain the paucity of women in early nineteenth-century science echo the ranked
dictionary definitions for ‘peer’, from the French, ‘pair’.2 As women historians of science
and geography since the 1980s therefore continually underscore, only more leisured
women before 1851 could pursue scientific study through marriage or kinship relations
with eminent men in relevant fields—for example Caroline Herschel, 1750 – 1848 (see
Emily Winterburn’s article in this issue3) or Mary Lyell (née Horner), 1808 – 73—and
publish it through secondary roles, as amanuenses, translators and illustrators.4 The later
independent scientific travels and discoveries of Mary Kingsley (1862 –1900) in West
Africa are then significant in the history of women in geography (and science).5 But a
woman of very different social means and rank might, exceptionally for her sex, attain
status as an expert collector and specialist supplier of specimens, as did Mary Anning
(1799 – 1847). The name on the scientific paper describing the ‘discovery’, however,
belonged to the wealthy male dilettante entirely dependent upon, but overwriting, her
specialist knowledge. Anning has only very belatedly been collected for history of science
as a (woman) ‘palaeontologist’.6
On closer inspection, the pursuit of science in the first three decades of the nineteenth
century and on both sides of the Channel was much less clearly stratified. Indeed,
geological metaphors and new advances significantly inform the multi-layered
movements, fault lines and continuities in this period in all scientific fields. While highranking men in Britain exercised disproportionate power and control in the institutional
realms of science—its Royal, Geological and other societies and their official
publications—men from middle, mercantile or artisan ranks, and from non-Anglican
religious persuasion and non-Oxbridge education, could enter the higher echelons of
scientific endeavour through combinations of exceptional connections ( patronage) and
hard-won abilities (education in the field). (Sir) Humphry Davy (1776– 1831) and his
assistant on a tour of mainland Europe in 1813 – 15, and (Sir) Michael Faraday (1791–
1867) are two examples. Others could make their mark and living in science through paid
field exploration at home—such as the surveyor William Smith (1769– 1839) of
geological map fame in 18157—and scientific collecting overseas, undertaken often as
secondary roles to their work as surveyors or ships’ surgeons. Because foreign exploration
in these early decades was largely economic, it was resourced by British trading
companies seeking new markets in plant, animal and mineral products. New findings for
science by this journeyman route (without journeywoman equivalent) were therefore
published as part of company reports and surveys, rather than in scientific papers
disseminated through learned societies.
France’s defeat in the Napoleonic Wars was its victory in science. London in 1815
boasted no National Museums or Institutes of scientific research, whereas Paris had both.
The Jardin des Plantes had re-established the Jardin du Roi in 1793 in an organizational
continuity of its domestic science policy—international collection, classification, exchange
of specimens, training of specialists—little ruffled by the Revolution. The young
Napoleon Bonaparte was among its chief proponents before embarking in 1798 – 99 on his
Egyptian expedition. On this as on all subsequent military campaigns he deployed a
select cohort of scientific experts trained at the Jardin des Plantes. Land conquest was
therefore only part of Napoleon’s wider occupations. He plundered rival national scientific
collections and menageries (for example in Holland and Italy) to augment those in Paris.
Downloaded from http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/ on June 17, 2017
Women peers in the scientific realm
3
By 1810 the Jardin des Plantes in Paris with its Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle was
the mother of all science museums, with daughter institutions established in France’s main
regional centres (Toulouse in 1808, Rouen in 1811), and extra-territorially. For example,
Lisbon’s new Museum of Natural History was established in 1808 by Étienne Geoffroy
Saint-Hilaire (1772– 1844), who accompanied Napoleon on his Egyptian campaign.
Georges Cuvier (1769 – 1832) had turned down the same invitation, preferring to continue
his Paris-based work in comparative anatomy, including his many papers from 1796 on
new fossil findings in the quarries of Montmartre. In 1808 Cuvier published with
Alexandre Brongniart (1770– 1847) the Essai sur la Géographie Minéralogique des
Environs de Paris with a geological map that, before Smith’s, irrevocably changed the
world, and work, of geology and palaeontology.8
The finding, more than the keeping, of new specimens or ideas for science is therefore the
criterion for peer adopted here because, as all the above-named women illustrate, it does not
automatically equate scientific merit with social class, independent (including institutional)
means, or professional expertise, as can be the case with the term ‘discovery’. Emphasis on
finding and finders thus illuminates the many collaboratively produced efforts in science in
this period that were fundamental to later ‘big discoveries’ from 1851, including Darwin’s.
Collaborative finding thus encompasses a variety of expert skills and knowledge-based
scientific investigations undertaken in laboratories (of museums and institutes), in the field
(nationally and internationally) and in interim spaces between public and private spheres
such as ships, meeting halls, schoolrooms, parlours and public houses.9 Such
interconnecting realms of nineteenth-century scientific endeavour, particularly before
1831, then become potentially inclusive of women peers. However, a woman’s equal
work in such scientific realms then equates too rarely to her equal recognition for ensuing
results, as the later well-known case of Rosalind Franklin (1920– 58) abundantly
illustrates. Some have always been considered more equal than others, the principle for
such differentiation again being located, like the term peer, in culturally constructed
definitions of rank and ranking, class and classification. Science has been particularly
prone to distinguishing and establishing a first and second echelon, order and sex—and
also religious bar—on the holders of its positions.
Discriminations therefore include, but extend beyond, sex in nineteenth-century European
science. British gentlemanly science was largely Anglican. Despite the Revolutionary split
between Church and State in France, chair-holders at the Jardin des Plantes could not be
‘non-Catholic’. The Lutheran Cuvier is the notable exception. The history of the many
non-conformist finders at work in all realms of European science, particularly in the
formative early decades of the century, has yet to be written. Its potentially larger
significance is that women across social ranks are found centrally among its protagonists,
and in the allegedly blank period before 1831. Indeed, as historians in British Imperial
and Commonwealth Studies have begun to uncover, British women of the non-leisured
classes were far from invisible overseas after 1815. As proactive, widely travelled
participants in civilizing missions (to Africa and the Far East), many engaged as Baptist,
Methodist, Presbyterian, Quaker, etc., missionaries and teachers in nascent colonial
settlements.10 By also participating in botanical and other scientific observation and
recording in their mission fields, the wives, daughters and sisters of colonial
administrators, surgeons, army officers and ministers of religion undertook the work of
explorers in all except name.11 At home, women from enlightened and/or economically
pressed non-conformist families often enjoyed an educational advantage that was more
Downloaded from http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/ on June 17, 2017
4
M. Orr
usual for sons, and not merely because other siblings in their family were brothers. Mary
Anning, for example, was a Congregationalist. This fact matters for understanding how
her family’s belief systems and outlook enabled her education, not for how her personal
faith might translate into her scientific work on fossils. Anning was treated no differently
from her brothers in their father’s carpentry and fossil business. It was only upon his
early death that her independently acquired scientific acumen and reputation proved
altogether invaluable, both economically for the family and for the records of palaeontology.
Another of Anning’s British women scientific peers visited Lyme Regis to see
acquaintances in the late 1820s. Sarah Bowdich (Lee) (1791– 1856) was a similarly nonconformist fellow-traveller in science, a woman also making possibilities for scientific
work despite social exclusions and adverse circumstances. The following section briefly
outlines key facts of her life, determined by the framing discussion thus far. The purpose
is to note her accrued scientific education, training and work up to 1825. As with Anning,
such preparation only better contextualizes Sarah’s central interest, her independent
scientific contributions and, additionally in her case, sole-authored scientific publications
between 1825 and 1833. Focus on this most intense period of Sarah’s prolific ‘uneasy
career’ until her death not only reveals her merits as a peer in British scientific endeavour
in several fields; it also reveals ways of assessing such merits against the international
French benchmarks of science of her times. In consequence, similar evaluation systems
for women peers in science today can be reassessed in the final section. Does Sarah
Bowdich’s trajectory in science provide alternative responses to the unrelentingly
hazardous ‘leaky pipeline’ model, employed since the 1980s to describe female careers in
the sciences?
SARAH
NÉE
WALLIS (1791– 1813); MRS T. EDWARD BOWDICH (1813–1824/1833);
MRS R. LEE (1826– 1856)
The entry for ‘Sarah Lee’ by Donald deB. Beaver in the Oxford dictionary of national
biography classifies her as a ‘naturalist and author’.12 Many blanks remain, however,
concerning the formative period of her early life in developing her scientific interests and
knowledge. Born in Colchester into an affluent Unitarian merchant family, she was the
only daughter among their children. If her childhood is the likely model for her
penultimate publication, Playing at Settlers; or the Faggot-House (1855), it was spent
exploring the natural world, often on horseback, with her brothers.13 It is the stuff of
historical novels or biographical films how John Eglonton Wallis’s fortunes failed. Several
poor harvests and the Napoleonic Wars compounded social and economic unrest resulting
from an industrial revolution in need of European markets. Wallis relocated his family to
London, where Sarah met T. Edward Bowdich, ‘writer and traveller in Africa’.14 They
married in the (Anglican) Church of St Mary Newington on 9 January 1813.15 Edward
may have been in London to pursue the career in law that his Bristol merchant family
intended for him. His life direction then changed thanks to his maternal uncle, Mr Hope
Smith, who secured Edward a writership in the service of the Royal African Company at
Cape Coast Castle. Edward departed in 1815 when Sarah was expecting their first child.
What happened next is usually the preserve of romances. She decided to join him, so set
sail with baby Florence in 1816 from Liverpool, not knowing that Edward had taken the
same decision, in the opposite direction. His return to his family in Ashanti (now Ghana)
Downloaded from http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/ on June 17, 2017
Women peers in the scientific realm
5
resulted in the ‘Mission’ for which he is best known, including his superlative drawing and
record of the annual Yam Festival.16 The published Mission (of 1819) was the most extensive
geographical, economic, cultural and political information available to British readerships
(and those in Europe through immediate translation). It was also a first major account of
the country’s flora and fauna, as well as the ‘customs and manners’ of its different
inhabitants. Although Sarah’s name appears nowhere in this work, many of the facts,
observations, embedded stories and perspectives, especially those pertaining to the Cape
Coast Castle environs, derive from her contributions (of which more below).17 On their
return to London in 1818 (without Florence, who had died of fever) Edward pressed the
African Society to fund a second mission to West Africa, this time to Sierra Leone.
Despite the Bowdichs’ long-standing anti-slavery views, this was no ‘missionary’ or
utopian – philanthropic venture to Free Town, the first resettlement of liberated Africans.
Instead, the Bowdichs envisaged the first scientific exploration of Sierra Leone. The
African Society refused its support; with no other outlet in Britain (due to rank, means
and creed) for his/their services to science, Edward publicly decried this response with a
positive course of action. With Napoleon’s defeat, the unsurpassed international scientific
collections at the Jardin des Plantes were once more open to foreigners in science.
Edward and Sarah therefore left for Paris in 1819 to acquire the latest scientific
knowledge for their independent exploration of Sierra Leone.
The Bowdichs’ proposed endeavour seems doubly preposterous if not impossible, which
may explain its absence from histories of nineteenth-century science and geography
(including feminist reappraisals). Neither Bowdich had independent means; women were
as excluded from scientific endeavour, exploration, institutes, laboratories, museums and
scientific publication in France as they were in Britain. But this was a rather unusual
couple, equally matched in scientific rank, understanding and determination, tested in
Ashanti. To achieve their new venture, their extensive and intensive collaborations of
expertise required equal working for pay. In four years they undertook comprehensive
study under key expert mentors such as Jean-Baptiste Biot, Cuvier and Alexander von
Humboldt, and made the acquisition of this knowledge the means to their financial ends.
In the same four years they published more than a dozen works for Anglophone
audiences on the latest French science and scientific travel to West Africa. Although
Sarah’s name is not on their covers, she was much more than the secondary translator or
illustrator undertaking these tasks in their home while Edward did the serious laboratory
work. The more than 600 specialist drawings she produced for these publications clearly
reveal her physical presence in Cuvier’s Gallery of Comparative Anatomy and preparation
laboratories, because they were taken from specimens she saw there under his expert
tutelage. I have elucidated elsewhere the significance of this last sentence.18 Sarah’s
scientific and linguistic abilities must therefore have been as outstanding as her French
scientific mentors were remarkable, not only in permitting her work in their laboratories
and collaborative scientific projects, but also by actively supporting it.
One fact may have made the difference: Cuvier’s lifelong commitments to scientific
education including, unusually, for women. Born into a modest Lutheran family, his
earliest training in reading, drawing and Latin was imparted by his far-sighted and
intelligent mother. He then survived the religious persecutions of the Revolution in
Normandy (as a tutor) and the ensuing ‘inveterate resistance offered to him as a
Protestant’ throughout his subsequent career upon nomination in 1795 to the Jardin des
Plantes.19 Anne-Marie Duvaucel converted to become his wife in 1805, the marriage also
Downloaded from http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/ on June 17, 2017
6
M. Orr
bringing Cuvier an exceptional step-daughter, Sophie, who assisted him in his scientific
work.20 The Lutheran church that the Cuviers attended in Paris engaged in various
philanthropic and educational endeavours specifically for young Protestant women in
penury. The Cuviers’ daughter, Clementine, was one of their teachers. Cuvier’s Saturday
salon therefore takes on a greater importance than his biographers have noted.21 Hosted
by his wife and daughters, it was a magnet for the meritorious and the great in the
sciences and arts in France and from overseas, including women.
The Bowdichs were regular guests at the Cuvier salon, in the same inner circles there as in
his libraries, laboratories and scientific projects. Sophie and Sarah forged a friendship of
equals that lasted their lifetime. The labours of childbirth and realities of infant
mortality—the Cuviers lost three of their four children between 1804 and 1813—may also
have drawn the families together. On top of her scientific study, illustration, translation
and publication work, Sarah gave birth three times in Paris, losing one infant. The elder
surviving daughter, Tedlie Hutchison (named after Edward’s closest travel companion on
the Mission to Ashanti), was under four years old and Hope Smith Bowdich (named after
his great-uncle) only a few months old when the Bowdiches set out via Le Havre, Lisbon
and Madeira for Sierra Leone.22 A further daughter, Eugenia Keir, was born on Madeira.
All three would survive the onward journey to Bathurst on the River Gambia, from where
the Bowdichs would sail to Free Town. They never reached this destination requiring so
much effort: Edward’s overexertion while surveying the River Gambia resulted in a chill,
then fever, from which he died on 10 January 1824. Two months later, Sarah Bowdich
returned to London with her young family, a widow aged 33 years. Her crates of
specimens hitherto unknown to Western science became so waterlogged during violent
storms that their contents were unsalvageable. Without these to deposit at the British
Museum, all doors seemed shut to science for this unusual scientific ‘journeywoman’ and
important finder of flora and fauna of West Africa.
‘AN
EQUAL IN STANDING OR RANK’?
NATURAL
PRODUCTIONS IN SCIENCE,
1824 –33
In 1824 Sarah had no widow’s pension or other means to support her children. She also
lacked the chief material advantage of her higher-born peers in science, a ‘room’, or
rather a sufficiently large home of her own, with space for study, scientific collections and
to entertain well-connected expert scientific visitors. Such narrowed material and scientific
circumstances then make her list of scientific publications for the immediate period of her
widowhood all the more impressive, in quantity and range. Table 1 sets out a
chronological list of her sole-authored publications. The two columns order them by
length and subject matter: longer science publications are on the left; shorter interest
pieces are on the right. They are also classified by format, language and specific genre.
The left column alone constitutes a prodigious output in eight years: three monographlength studies (two with Sarah’s own original drawings and illustrations) and five articles
cover different scientific subjects. That her monographs were immediately translated into
French, the scientific lingua franca in the first half of the nineteenth century, is a further
indicator of their international significance. Sarah was not their translator, just as her
‘Progress of Natural History’ was an informed and evaluative synopsis, not a transcription
of the source text into English. The left-hand column therefore provides full and contrary
Downloaded from http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/ on June 17, 2017
Women peers in the scientific realm
7
Table 1. Publications by Sarah Bowdich (Lee), 1825 –33.
longer publications
shorter publications
Excursions in Madeira and Porto Santo, during The
Autumn of 1823 . . .. (George B. Whittaker, London,
1825)a
Excursions dans les isles de Madère et de Porto Santo
(2 volumes; texte þ atlas) (F. G. Levrault, Paris,
1826)a,b
The Fresh-Water Fishes of Great Britain. Drawn
and Described by Mrs T. Edward Bowdich
(R. Ackermann, London, 1828– 38)a
‘On the Natural Order of Plants, Dicotyledòneae
Anonàceae’, Mag. Nat. Hist. 1, 438 –441 (1829)c
‘Some Account of the Progress of Natural History
during the Year 1828, as reported to the Academy of
Sciences in Paris by the Baron Cuvier’, Mag. Nat.
Hist. 2, 409– 428 (1829)c
Mrs R. Lee (late Mrs Bowdich), ‘Some Details
regarding the Garden of Plants and the National
Museum of Paris’, Mag. Nat. Hist. 3, 22–26
(1830)b,c
Mrs R. Lee, ‘Two Poodles from Milan’, Mag. Nat. Hist.
3, 290– 291 (1830)c
Mrs R. Lee, ‘Notice of a Fossil Nautilus found in the
Sandstone of the Isle of Sheppey’, Mag. Nat. Hist. 4,
137 –138 (1831)c
‘Adumissa’, Forget Me Not, 233–253 (1826).d
Memoirs of Baron Cuvier (Longman Rees Orme Brown
Green & Longman, London, 1833)a
Mémoires du Baron Georges Cuvier (tr. Théodore
Lacordaire) (H. Fournier, Paris, 1833)b
‘Amba, the Witch’s Daughter’, Forget Me Not, 9– 39
(1827)d
‘The Booroom Slave’, Forget Me Not, 37–77 (1828)d
‘Anecdotes of a Tamed Panther’, Mag. Nat. Hist. 1,
108–112 (1828)c
‘Eliza Carthago’, Forget Me Not, 57–64 (1829)d
‘Anecdotes of a Diana Monkey’, Mag. Nat. Hist. 2,
9– 13 (1829)c
‘Notice sur une panthère apprivoisée’ par Madame
Sophia [sic] Bowdich’, Gaz. Litt., 8 avril, 301– 302
(1830)b
Mrs R. Lee (formerly Mrs Bowdich), ‘Agay, the Salt
Carrier. An African Tale’, Friendship’s Offering:
A Literary Album, 137– 153 (1831)d
Mrs Lee (lately Mrs Bowdich), ‘A Night Alarm’, and
‘La Mère des Soldats’, Forget Me Not, 117–127
and 212– 223, (1832)d
‘A Visit to Empoöngwa; or a Peep into Negro-Land’,
Friendship’s Offering: A Literary Album, 294–304
(1833)d
Monograph study. bPublication in French. cContribution to science journal. dGift-book contribution.
a
evidence to the alleged fact that women in this period could only contribute and publish in
science at one remove, as translators or illustrators of science penned by men.
The quality of Sarah’s science is further indicated by her publishers and their target
readerships. The most significant is F. G. Levrault, the official publisher for new specialist
science conducted at the Jardin des Plantes, including Cuvier’s, for expert (international)
scientific readerships. The French Excursions of 1826 was thus assured of maximum scientific
reach, but this edition provided much more than further income from Sarah’s enormous
efforts to publish the Bowdichs’ joint scientific findings in Madeira in 1825. Although she
fronted the English edition as Edward’s amanuensis, its final third—the natural history of the
Gambia—was her own undertaking. In the French version, this section increases significantly
in length as a result of the ‘Notes’ (marked ‘CUV’) that Cuvier interleaved into Sarah’s
descriptions of some 20 new species of West African fish (and long before Mary Kingsley
made contributions to this field). As the premier ichthyologist of Europe, Cuvier’s
verifications endorse her expertise and species identifications.23
The publication of Memoirs of Baron Cuvier with Longman (in London, and in an
American edition with J. & J. Harper in the same year) similarly vouchsafed the foremost
Downloaded from http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/ on June 17, 2017
8
M. Orr
authority of ‘Mrs R. Lee’ for specialist and informed generalist readerships.24 Longman was
assured of successful sales, having previously published the anonymous Taxidermy: or the
art of collecting, preparing and mounting objects of natural history. For the use of
museums and travellers in 1820. The only publication with Longman of the roughly
20 works that Sarah and Edward had co-authored to fund their exploration, it was in fact
solely Sarah’s work. Its success is marked by its rapid reprint in five further editions,
including two not recorded in table 1 (in 1829 and 1830).25 Longman was also the
publisher of the Magazine of Natural History, first launched in 1828 for specialist and
informed publics by J. C. Loudon (1783– 1843). Sarah’s findings appeared in its first
number and were commissioned subsequently (see table 1). She wrote for specialist
audiences—on the Dicotyledoneae Annonaceae (1829) and the Nautilus (1831)—and for
informed general readers. Use of the word ‘anecdotes’ (in article titles in the right-hand
column of table 1) thus distinguishes her popularizing engagements in science from more
expert scientific observations (articles on the left).
These quantity and quality indicators for science publications of repute are gender neutral.
When gender is overtly considered, the prominence of Sarah Bowdich’s natural science
contributions in the 1820s is incontrovertible (and this judging only by works in the lefthand column). How and why they were then ignored will be addressed in the final section
of this article. Gender considerations also spearhead new understandings of how women
contributed to natural, Earth and physical sciences in various primary capacities before
1850. The codings in table 1 clearly demonstrate Sarah Bowdich’s initiatives, connections
and creative engagements in various formats to publish her findings in science in Britain
and internationally after 1824, despite social, religious and economic exclusions. Her
efforts and successes all derive from her multilingual, as much as her scientific, expertise,
activities and connections in European natural and Earth sciences and their communities.
The list of publications on the right-hand side footnoted with ‘d’ is therefore especially
illuminating as an additional dimension to such engagements. Instead of turning to
translation or illustration work to support her family, or as a backdoor route to science,
Sarah found a very new vehicle for ‘popularizing’ and ‘translating’ her own fieldwork and
to provide a living. Ingeniously she did not split her endeavours into ‘science’ and ‘nonscience’ writing, as the left-hand and right-hand columns might suggest. She forged two
simultaneous modes of production, to capitalize on specific, and ostensibly gendered,
markets. Forget Me Not was the first British gift book (based on German models),
established in 1825 by Ackermann.26 Its florilegium format—stories, poems, landscape
descriptions, architectural and historical cameos, educational tales, articles on art and
culture—was designed to entertain and educate the genteel young woman reader. Gift
books came only in luxury formats, with a binding of leather or silk, with a design appeal
for female purchasers and recipients that elevated taste and accomplishments. To add to
their drawing room status as beautiful and rarer objects of display (reflecting their
owners), gift books were liberally illustrated with expensively produced lithographs. The
commissioning of stories and artwork from well-known writers and illustrators was part of
their continuing attraction and value. The immediate success of Forget Me Not spawned a
host of rivals and imitators, including Friendship’s Offering. Other gift books had more
overtly moral and religious content, but none was designed as an outlet for science. Six of the
stories listed in table 1 (‘Adumissa’, ‘Amba’, ‘The Booroom Slave’, ‘Eliza Carthago’, ‘Agay’
and ‘A Visit to Empoöngwa’) recount the lives of various Ashanti characters, their adventures,
and their overcoming of various injustices and adversities. Putting ‘civilized’ values in black
Downloaded from http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/ on June 17, 2017
Women peers in the scientific realm
9
skins, and figuring female ‘heroes’ (except Agay) as active protagonists, were only part of Sarah
Bowdich’s abolitionist and ethnographical point. The reader must view these worlds (and her
own) from the native protagonist’s perspectives. But the accurate scene-setting and
descriptions on which the morals of the stories might turn allowed Sarah to insert her firsthand knowledge of West African flora, fauna, manners and customs into otherwise
non-scientific accounts. Agay, for example, is a salt carrier. Salt has a high, but lesser
commodity and cross-community, exchange value compared with gold. Agay’s story—doubly
subtitled ‘An African Tale’. ‘A Tale from Real Life’—was, however, borrowed and enlarged
from a tale found in an extensive note in Edward Bowdich’s Mission to Ashantee.27 There it
exemplified the King of Ashanti’s wisdom and character in appointing the historical Agay as
his second linguist. If Sarah’s gift-book Agay is rewarded at the end of the tale with
appointment as ‘fourth linguist’, her dénouement elevates him in line with the original: the
position of ‘linguist for all foreign palavers, the highest office he could hold which was not
hereditary’.28 At the same time it is a tale of real life, that of Sarah Bowdich seeking a
position as (woman) writer of science deriving from her expertise—scientific and linguistic—
gained on grounds of merit, not heredity.
The two columns therefore capture Sarah Bowdich’s inventively double-track scientific
endeavours: the writing of gift-book contributions generated income enabling her pursuit of
new projects in natural science deriving from earlier expertise. The Fresh-Water Fishes of
Great Britain, with its 10-year dateline, was her most ambitious scientific undertaking so far.
The first dedicated work on British freshwater ichthyology to appear using Cuvier’s new
classification system for fish (and before he had published it in volume 1 in 1828 of his
Histoire naturelle des poissons), it was also the first European ichthyology to contain
specialist drawings of specimens all taken from the life.29 To manage such an undertaking,
especially the individually hand-painted watercolour drawings, Sarah published The FreshWater Fishes of Great Britain in 10 annual numbers, four fish descriptions in each.
Ackermann produced them in a similar deluxe format to his Forget Me Not gift book to about
50 subscribers, of whom seven were peers of the realm (among them Sir Humphry Davy).
Sarah had, however, undertaken a substantial part of the essential research in 1826. An added
expense and drain on time for this resourceful woman was necessary cross-Channel travel to
collate the best current knowledge in Cuvier’s specialist ichthyology library and specimen
collections. London did not at that time have such specialist resources, even if she had been
permitted to use them. Her full review of earlier accounts and nomenclatures in different
European languages headed each species in her descriptions. Sarah could then make her own
expert observations in the field—according to season and fitted around writing for money—to
bring new knowledge of British fish physiology, habitats or habits to expert, angling, amateur
and female audiences.
Sarah’s cross-Channel research visits were in fact a two-way exchange of scientific knowledge
and expertise. She was the only woman in Cuvier’s team of expert collaborators producing the
definitive Histoire naturelle des poissons (although various European women sent him pickled
specimens). Cuvier inspected every fish himself before inclusion. The exceptions are various
Tahitian and Far Eastern species gathered on Cook’s voyages by Johann and Georg Forster
and Sydney Parkinson (but with errors of naming and illustration). These he entrusted to his
British foreign researcher, Sarah Bowdich. She made expert examinations in Joseph Banks’s
library and collections and sent Cuvier quality drawings from the originals. In an unusual
mention in the prospectus to the Histoire (published in 1826), and in a rare footnote to its first
volume, Cuvier overtly acknowledges Sarah’s invaluable scientific expertise permitting him to
Downloaded from http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/ on June 17, 2017
10
M. Orr
definitively categorize and merge the Cook fish collections into his own project. If she made a
number of trips to Paris to fulfil this commission (and as a method of continuing her scientific
work in the collections and laboratories of the Jardin des Plantes), she was also a primary
conduit for disseminating to British scientific audiences Cuvier’s latest reports on French
science. The Magazine of Natural History synopsis in the table is indicative. Yet hers were no
secondary roles as (mere) translator and popularizer of Cuvier’s science for British audiences.
By also making known to European experts the key British collections in London before
specialist curators were appointed to undertake this job, she played major international roles
in extending and exchanging scientific knowledge and endeavour. When Cuvier visited
London in 1828, Sarah Bowdich was among the inner circle of his whirlwind scientific
networking activities, although she would remain on the outermost edges of the British
scientific establishment.
The death of Cuvier in 1832 came as the severest blow to Sarah Bowdich, ending a special
scientific collaboration and familial support for her work at the Jardin des Plantes. Thanks to
her regular contributions, the Magazine of Natural History approached her to write a short
obituary article outlining Cuvier’s main achievements in science. Stronger overtures came
from Cuvier’s widow and family, and from his closest research collaborators at the Jardin
des Plantes. Sarah eventually agreed to write what was the first major biography on
Cuvier, in English or French, and before his French scientific colleagues had written his
official funeral oration (Éloge funèbre). It is unusual even today, let alone in 1832 – 33,
for a woman scientific peer to write the authoritative biography of a great man in science,
particularly of a nation not her own. Even more unusual is ‘Mrs Lee’s’ authority concerning
Cuvier’s science, described as though she were his scientific collaborator working in his
laboratories. This highly specialist account does more than describe Cuvier’s life in science: it
elucidates the importance of his main scientific papers and multi-volume collaborative
publications, especially the Histoire naturelle des poissons, and details his many leadership
roles in French institutes and other non-scientific organizations. His roles as ‘Grand Master of
the Faculties of Protestant Religions’ (1822) and ‘charge of government of all non-Catholic
religions’ (1827) are particularly telling.30 The fourth and final part is perhaps the most
distinctive with regard to the great life/great works format of the science biography, or the
official Éloge funèbre genre that Cuvier had made his own for more than 25 years.
Significantly, Sarah’s biography captures Cuvier’s personal and family life as though she were
indeed almost a member of his family, to insert herself into the wider family of science
without sex, to which he always actively subcribed.
PAIR (DE FRANCE),
UNEQUALS IN
BRITISH
SCIENCE?
WOMEN
PEERS IN SCIENCE IN AGENDA-
SETTING ROLES
This short excursion has revealed Sarah Bowdich (Lee)’s many expert contributions and
publications in science, in both national and international contexts, and in reputed
scientific and creatively ‘non-scientific’ formats. The invisibility of her works therefore
derives not from their unimportance but from an imposed and established view of how,
where, and by whom important science findings should be published. Scientific papers
were read by members of scientific societies and disseminated in sanctioned society
Transactions or similar reviews. Sarah Bowdich’s work and works prompt (British,
French, European) historians of science and geography of the early nineteenth century to
Downloaded from http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/ on June 17, 2017
Women peers in the scientific realm
11
reassess their standard lines about the absence, or unequal secondary presence, of women as
scientific peers at home or overseas. Her case and multiple engagements in international
(French-medium) science also nicely overturn nationalistic or neo-imperial categorizations
of women’s places and work in scientific endeavour. It has also been made abundantly
clear how Sarah Bowdich came to contribute and publish in science, not least because her
own distinctions and expertise were everywhere enabled and magnified by the work of
non-conformist men in science—Edward Bowdich, Cuvier, Humboldt—across the usual
divides of social class, national, religious or linguistic identity. Indeed the case of Cuvier
is particularly important with regard to a re-examination of peerage systems, both political
and scientific, as blocks to women’s advancements in public and professional life. Cuvier
was made a Baron in 1819 and created a peer in 1832, but these honours were not
determined by linkage with creed.31 Future writing of a larger history of nineteenthcentury European finders and finder classes in science will therefore reveal further peers
working outside discriminatory systems of gender, class, creed or ethnicity.
As Sarah Bowdich’s major mentor, patron and collaborator Cuvier was instrumental in
facilitating her otherwise impossible direct access to the collections and resources of the
Jardin des Plantes, because women in France could not enter such institutions. Her case
then confirms extensive research since the 1980s on the history of women in science that
returns variously to the central importance of support networks and mentors if women are
to survive, let alone advance, in their fields of scientific engagement.32 Mentoring
schemes today are also identified as the catch-all solution for the main attrition points for
women in science: the secondary education system; maternity; mid-career (non-)progression;
later juggling of caring roles and responsibilities.33 Our findings suggest that key male
mentors remain as important for women in science as the now more plentiful and
prominent female ones. But more emphasis should also be placed on the importance of
peer-to-peer intellectual friendships—the ‘Sophie Duvaucels’—especially those
discounted because they include ‘non-scientists’.
Sarah’s support by her many networks and connections with Cuvier and the Jardin des
Plantes as pivotal to her ‘uneasy career’ in her own name in science between 1825 and 1833
does not, however, wholly explain its trajectories before and after these dates. The science
she produced in this period only revealed an already established pattern: her earlier coauthorships and also sole authorship. Conventions of anonymity and scientific naming—here
the patronymic ‘Bowdich’—are the issue to challenge, because always assumed to be male.
Overt naming of women and their full participations in science and its outputs—past and
present—would immediately bring their equal contributions and results to light and into
proper recognition; in citations, acknowledgements, breakthroughs and prize-winners they
continually fail to be represented. Sarah would not have taken such pains to manage her
change of married name had she not been aware of such reputational issues. Name change
and Cuvier’s death did not end her contributions and publications in science, even though her
access to the Jardin des Plantes was effectively shut. From 1833 until her death in 1856, she
continued to research and publish her science in the same double mode discussed above.
Such achievements cannot be explained, and minimized, by referring to the early nineteenth
century as being easier for an exceptional woman to negotiate, because science was not yet
‘big’, professionalized or requiring sophisticated instruments or specialist facilities. Reports
by the European Union and other bodies on women in science continually raise, but skirt
round, these contradictions; however, they largely ignore historical comparison, even
precedent, to reconsider other interpretations.
Downloaded from http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/ on June 17, 2017
12
M. Orr
The more fruitful perspective is to understand the changing definitions of ‘peer’ across
time and history as being of two orders: culturally constructed, or built on prima facie
evidence. Sarah Bowdich maintained a lifetime’s work in science against seemingly
impossible odds. She lost key men in science in her life. She encountered all the
circumstances considered as tipping points in the ‘leaky pipeline’ model: ‘at risk due to
lack of support; at risk due to lack of career expectations; at risk following motherhood;
at risk due to isolation and exclusion.’34 Quality of research and material environment,
support networks and resources were only part of her ability to redirect her scientific
work. Sarah could only fulfil the greater plenitude of her pursuit and publication of
science because her own specific attributes, qualities and priorities also ensured support of
self. Throughout her ‘uneasy career’ Sarah Bowdich manifested significant constants and
strategies. Each ‘leakage point’ demonstrated her particular perseverance and selfdetermination. Rather than take easier, short-term or second-best options, she continued
with the original science project by finding alternative routes. At such junctures—this
article covers two, namely 1825 and 1832—she galvanized her creative problem-solving
skills to make new connecting points over the potential leak, to advance intended ends.
Her double-channelled publication activity is one example; her cross-Channel access to
scientific resources is another. ‘Local’ opportunities, such as gift-book publication,
allowed her to envisage bigger or riskier outcomes. The Fresh-Water Fishes of Great
Britain proved an enormous undertaking and financial burden, especially when
subscribers chose not to pay, yet it provided international cross-Channel collaborations,
with Valenciennes after Cuvier’s death, for example, and re-workable writing
opportunities in different form in her later career.35 Overarching all these was Sarah’s
primary expectation: the necessities of scientific, and linguistic mobility. This allowed her
to meet and work with others (Edward Bowdich, Cuvier, Humboldt, Sophie Duvaucel)
also crossing official science boundaries and practices, within and outside its institutions.
As a peer in science, rather than a derivative ‘peeress’ or ‘scientiste’, Sarah Bowdich in
her many important findings and publications represents an important counter-model directly
challenging that of the culturally constructed (ideal) ‘scientist’, the elite discover in his
laboratory, or apparently lone expedition. It is easy to locate the brokenness of his model:
his ‘pipelines’ are never ‘leaky’. This is the pressure point that twenty-first-century
women scholars should target concertedly, as is the fact that important scientific
endeavour has always been collaborative, accretive and multinational. In consequence
Sarah Bowdich (Lee)’s many modes and solutions for advancing scientific work,
particularly against the odds, demonstrate that women—and also other outsiders by
discriminatory bars—should resist secondary roles and find various modes of resilience in
primary ones. Her pipeline of multiple productions included children, job moves, longstanding scientific friendships and multimedia publications. Her example of scientific and
linguistic mobility, flexibility and non-conformism therefore continues to encourage peers,
including men, into the sciences of equals.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This article derives from research undertaken during a Leverhulme Research Fellowship
(RF/1/RFG/2010/0435), the project ‘A remarkable woman in science: Sarah Bowdich
(Lee), 1791 – 1856.’ I thank Claire Jones and Sue Hawkins for the opportunity to present
Downloaded from http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/ on June 17, 2017
Women peers in the scientific realm
13
an earlier version of this paper at the conference ‘Revealing Lives: Women in Science 1830 –
2000’, held on 22 and 23 May 2014, and for further feedback. Financial support to attend this
conference was gratefully received from the Research Travel Fund of the Institute for
Language and Culture, University of Southampton.
NOTES
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
See, for example, D. N. Livingstone, Putting science in its place: geographies of scientific
knowledge (Chicago University Press, 2003); D. N. Livingstone and C. W. J. Withers (eds),
Geographies of nineteenth-century science (Chicago University Press, 2011); C. McEwan,
Gender, geography and empire: Victorian women travellers in West Africa (Ashgate,
Aldershot, 2000). For French women in science, see J. P. Poirier, Histoire des femmes de
science en France: du moyen âge à la Révolution (Pygmalion Gérard Watelet, Paris, 2002)
and E. Sartori, Histoire des femmes scientifiques de l’antiquité au xx e siècle: les filles
d’Hypatie (Plon, Paris, 2006). Women’s scientific presence in salons (Poirier, p. 19), or in
botany (Sartori, p. 330) is noted, but both studies fail to produce French women born after
1789 contributing to knowledge of French sciences (natural, Earth, chemical, etc.) in the
post-Revolutionary decades specifically addressed in this paper. The mathematician and
polymath Mary Somerville (1780–1872), also classified as ‘the first woman geographer’, did
not travel overseas. See M. Sanderson, ‘Mary Somerville: her work in physical geography’,
Am. Geogr. Rev. 64, 410– 420 (1974), at p. 410.
See the Oxford English Dictionary as an example: ‘Peer: ME. [-AFr., OFr. Per, peer (mod.
Pair):- L. par, par- equal; cf. PAIR]: 1. An equal in standing or rank; one’s equal before the
law. 2. An equal in any respect ME. 3. One matched with another; a companion, mate; a
rival . . .. 4. A member of one of the degrees of nobility in the United Kingdom; a duke,
marquis, earl, viscount, or baron.’ Although women in Britain could be peeresses by
marriage, and later peers in their own right (when there were no male descendants), the
presence and creation of women peers in the UK’s House of Lords have only been possible
since 1963. See http://www.parliament.uk/business/lords/lords-history/history-of-the-lords/
(accessed 8 June 2014).
Emily Winterburn, ‘Caroline Herschel: agency and self-presentation’, Notes Rec. 69, http://dx.
doi.org/10.1098/rsnr. 2014.0060 (this issue).
Classic studies remain the work of P. G. Abir-Am and D. Outram, Uneasy careers and intimate
lives: women in science 1789– 1979 (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1989);
H. M. Pycior, N. G. Slack and P. G. Abir-Am (eds), Creative couples in the sciences
(Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1999). Building on these for women in
geology see C. V. Burek and B. Higgs (eds), The role of women in the history of geology
(Geological Society Special Publication no. 281) (Geological Society, London, 2007). The
‘uneasy careers’ in the abstract and below refer to the first title in this list.
See, for example, A. Blunt, Travel, gender and imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa
(The Guilford Press, New York, 1989); J. K. Guelke and K. M. Morin, ‘Gender, nature,
empire: women naturalists in nineteenth-century British travel literature’, Trans. Inst. Br.
Geographers NS 26, 306 –326 (2001).
See H. Torrens, ‘Mary Anning (1799–1847) of Lyme; “the greatest fossilist the world ever
knew”’, Br. J. Hist. Sci. 28, 257 –284 (1995).
For fuller biographical and bibliographical information see ‘William Smith—a man who
changed the world’ on the British Geological Survey’s website at http://www.bgs.ac.uk/
discoveringGeology/geologyOfBritain/archives/williamsmith/home.html (accessed 9 June
2014).
Downloaded from http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/ on June 17, 2017
14
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
M. Orr
For a comprehensive history of the Jardin des Plantes see Le Muséum au premier siècle de son
histoire (ed. C. Blanckaert, C. Cohen, P. Corsi and J.-L. Fischer) (Paris: Éditions du Muséum
National d’Histoire Naturelle, 1997).
See A. Secord, ‘Science in the pub: artisan botanists in early nineteenth-century Lancashire’,
Hist. Sci. 32, 269 –315 (1994).
See, for example, A. Porter, ‘“Cultural Imperialism” and Protestant missionary enterprise,
1780–1914’, J. Imp. Commonwealth Hist. 25, 367–391 (1997); E. Provost, ‘Assessing
women, gender and empire in Britain’s nineteenth century’, Hist. Compass 7, 765–799
(2009). Women emigrants from non-conformist religious backgrounds also took opportunities
as teachers in settler colonies from the 1830s in Australia, South Africa and Canada.
See J. Vetter, ‘Introduction: lay participation in the history of scientific observation’, Sci.
Context 24, 127 –141 (2011). Where Vetter proposes ‘lay’ as an oppositional term to
‘professional’ in scientific endeavour (or potentially as synonym for ‘amateur’ at home), I
avoid use of the term.
The online entry is at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16310 (accessed 13 June 2014).
For a reading of Mrs R. Lee’s Playing at Settlers; or the Faggot-House (Grant & Griffith,
London, 1855) as a mirror of British imperialism, see M. A. Norcia, X marks the spot:
women writers map the Empire for British children, 1790– 1895 (Ohio University Press,
Athens, OH, 2010). For a reading of this work as a pioneering critique of imperial policies
particularly through the mouthpiece of its female protagonist, Adela, see M. Orr, ‘Reflections
on a British “re-civilising” mission: Sarah (Bowdich) Lee’s Playing at Settlers; or the FaggotHouse’, Int. Res. Children’s Lit. 5, 135–150 (2012). The subtitle of this section flags the
problem of women’s invisibility to history of science if they had various changes of name.
Although she married R(ichard) Lee before 1833, she continued to use ‘Mrs T. E(dward)
Bowdich’ or ‘formerly Mrs T. E(dward) Bowdich’ on her scientific publications.
See the revised entry by F. Driver, in the Oxford dictionary of national biography, http://www.
oxforddnb.com/view/article/3027 (accessed 13 June 2014).
Newington in the Borough of Southwark was a relatively affluent suburban area of an expanding
London in the early nineteenth century. Michael Faraday, born in Newington Butts in 1791, was
brought up a Glassite (an evangelical movement) and was an elder in its Sandemanian church.
T. Edward Bowdich, Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee (John Murray, London, 1819).
The widely reproduced fold-out drawing has also been chosen as the image to publicize the
permanent exhibition at the Maritime Museum at Greenwich, ‘The Atlantic: Slavery, Trade,
Empire’. See http://www.rmg.co.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/atlantic-worlds (accessed 16 June
2014).
These can be cross-referenced in her extensive notes to her collection of accounts about Cape
Coast Castle ( published as Mrs R. Lee, formerly Mrs T. Edward Bowdich), Stories of strange
lands, and fragments from the notes of a traveller (Edward Moxon, London, 1835).
M. Orr, ‘Fish with a different angle: The Fresh-Water Fishes of Great Britain by Mrs Sarah
Bowdich (1791– 1856)’, Ann. Sci. 71, 206 –240 (2014), at pp. 216–218.
The phrase comes from Mrs R. Lee’s Memoirs of Baron Cuvier (Longman Rees Orme Brown
Green & Longman, London, 1833), p. 21.
See M. Orr, ‘Keeping it in the family: the extraordinary case of Cuvier’s daughters’, in Burek
and Higgs, op. cit. (note 4), pp. 277 –286.
See, for example, P. Taquet, Georges Cuvier (Odile Jacob, Paris, 2006). Taquet is also indicative
of other biographers who downplay, or ignore, the importance of Cuvier’s religious background
for understanding his lifelong commitment to mentoring and educating others in science. This
commitment was aside from his personal faith.
I am very grateful to Veronica Swayne, the great-great-great-grand-daughter of Sarah and
Edward Bowdich, for sharing this information with me in an email of 21 June 2013. Hope
Smith’s birth was registered on 27 February 1822; he was born on the previous day.
Downloaded from http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/ on June 17, 2017
Women peers in the scientific realm
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
15
The French Excursions had a second supplement, the long afterword by Alexander von
Humboldt, similarly endorsing the Bowdich contributions to knowledge of the geology and
plant geography of Madeira. For a longer discussion of the significance of the geological
contributions to science by Sarah Bowdich in Excursions, and of Humboldt’s afterword, see
M. Orr, ‘New observations on a geological hotspot track: Excursions in Madeira and Porto
Santo (1825) by Mrs T. Edward Bowdich’, Centaurus 56, 135– 166 (2014), online
(subscription required) at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cnt.2014.56.issue-3/
issuetoc (accessed 26 September 2014).
A name change is a further hazard that women in science have always contended with, and a
factor contributing to their greater invisibility. Memoirs was the first major work in which
Sarah more overtly dropped references to being ‘formerly Mrs T. Edward Bowdich’.
After 1835 the majority of Sarah’s natural science works, and natural science fiction works for
juvenile audiences of both sexes, were published by Longman.
For a study of the history of the genre see A. Renier, ‘Friendship’s Offering’: an essay on the
annuals and gift books of the nineteenth century (Private Libraries Association, London, 1964).
Bowdich, op. cit. (note 16), pp. 248 –249. Sarah’s ‘Agay’ was republished with other African
stories in 1835 under the title Stories of strange lands and fragments from the notes of a
traveller (Edward Moxon, London, 1835), under her ‘new’ married name of Mrs R. Lee. The
16 pages of the fifth story of the 1835 collection ( pp. 152–168) now have 20 endnotes,
taking up 10 further pages ( pp. 169 –179), so that the story is half as long again as the
original. The scientific interest of these notes lies beyond the discussion here but merely
extend and better display the science already embedded in Sarah’s 1831 version, since the
main story is unchanged.
Lee, op. cit. (note 17), p. 168.
For a list of the many firsts that the Fresh-Water Fishes reveals, see Orr, op. cit. (note 18), p. 235.
Lee, op. cit. (note 19), pp. 348 and 350 respectively.
Ibid. Humboldt was also a Baron.
See, for example, the report on ‘Women in Science and Technology: Creating Sustainable
Careers’ (Office for Official Publications of the European Commission, Luxemburg, 2009).
Ibid., p. 84. See also the many useful resources and studies on the European Platform of Women
Scientists home page at http://home.epws.org/filter/About (accessed 19 June 2014).
Op. cit. (note 32), p. 6.
For a fuller account of Anecdotes of the habits and instincts of birds, reptiles and fish (1853), see
Orr, op. cit. (note 18), pp. 233 –235.