page_title: The Unsex'd Females
section_title: Botany
hierarchical_section_title: The Unsex'd Females / Structure and themes / Botany
caption_attribution_description: The Botanic Macaroni, 1772; a satire of Joseph Banks
context_page_description: The Unsex'd Females, a Poem, by Richard Polwhele, is a polemical intervention into the public debates over the role of women at the end of the 18th century. The poem is primarily concerned with what Polwhele characterizes as the encroachment of radical French political and philosophical ideas into British society, particularly those associated with the Enlightenment. These subjects come together, for Polwhele, in the revolutionary figure of Mary Wollstonecraft.
  The poem is of interest to those interested in the history of women, as well as revolutionary politics, and is an example of the British backlash against the ideals of the French Revolution; it is representative of the strategic conflation of women writers with revolutionary ideals during this period; and it helps illuminate the obstacles faced by women writers at the end of the 18th century.
context_section_description: Polwhele had a variety of targets. In addition to literary and artistic improprieties, he deplored the popular female pastime of amateur botany. While this may seem a strange preoccupation to a contemporary reader, Polwhele was in fact intervening in an ongoing, and quite heated debate about the propriety of girls and women learning about the reproduction of plants, a debate that arose in part after Erasmus Darwin published an English translation of the work of Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, as well as his own poem, "The Loves of the Plants" (1790):
  With secret sighs the Virgin Lily droops,
  
  And jealous Cowslips hang their tawny cups.
  
  How the young Rose in beauty's damask pride
  
  Drinks the warm blushes of his bashful bride;
  
  With honey'd lips enamour'd Woodbines meet,
  
  Clasp with fond arms, and mix their kisses sweet. (ll.15–20)
  To Polwhele this is practically pornography and he graphically depicts the repercussions should women and girls be allowed to practise botany:
  With bliss botanic as their bosoms heave,
  
  Still pluck forbidden fruit, with mother Eve,
  
  For puberty in signing florets pant,
  
  Or point the prostitution of a plant;
  
  Dissect its organ of unhallow'd lust,
  
  And fondly gaze the titillating dust. (ll.29–34)
  Perhaps ironically, these lines in particular were singled out by the anti-Jacobin British Critic, apparently unaware of the authorship of the poem, as being in "bad taste."
  According to Ann B. Shteir, "Polwhele's objections [to women practicing botany] combine critiques of female scientific practices with critiques of other 'Gallic' and 'revolutionary' practices, such as acknowledging sexuality and teaching children about sex." In a note, Polwhele writes that "Botany has lately become a fashionable amusement with the ladies. But how the study of the sexual system of plants can accord with female modesty, I am not able to comprehend… I have, several times, seen boys and girls botanizing together" (8). His concerns about propriety dovetail neatly with what Robin Jarvis describes as the "intellectual backlash provoked by the French Revolution" whereby "by the mid-1790s scientific opinions were no longer ideologically neutral."
caption: Caricature of botanist Joseph Banks, 1772, which equates flowers and female genitalia
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