Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World

Scholars in the age of Charles Darwin, writes feminist scholar Barbara Gates, were of two minds about women: on one hand, they embodied "the restful responsiveness of nature" and were somehow closer to living in a state of nature than were men; on the other hand, by the very virtue of this naturalness, they were less capable of being truly civilized and educated. Despite this, generations of women labored to speak on nature's behalf and to study its ways; "denied formal higher education," Gates writes, "they also constituted large portions of the audience at public lectures on science and read whatever was available to them on the subject," including a large literature in popular science written by women. Gates recounts the lives of many important naturalists of the age, among them traveler and Africanist Mary Kingsley, independent scholar Arabella Buckley (who served as secretary to the eminent English geologist Sir Charles Lyell and was acquainted with many of the leading scientists of her time), eminent illustrator Jemima Blackburn, and antivivisectionist Frances Power Cobbe. Although these women are not well represented in standard histories of science, Gates demonstrates that their contributions to their contemporaries' understanding of the natural world were estimable indeed. --Gregory McNamee