Library Lectures:
Ann Shteir
Women and Botany in 19^th-Century Canada

Celebrating Historical Research and Historical Researchers: Women and Botany in 19^th-Century Canada. An Illustrated Talk

Papers in the Transactions of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec from the 1820s and 1830s are historical documents by individuals in early 19^th-century Canada who were searching for knowledge about nature in a “new land” and who also wanted to “excite in the rising generation a taste for scientific knowledge and pursuits.” Two women were among the researchers: Christian Ramsay (Countess Dalhousie), who contributed a “Catalogue of Canadian Plants collected in 1827,” and Harriet Sheppard (“Mrs. Sheppard”), who wrote about shells and Canadian songbirds in Quebec and had a keen interest in plants.

This talk celebrates women who pursued knowledge of nature, especially knowledge about plants, in 19^th-century Canada. It features Lady Dalhousie and Anne Mary Perceval in Quebec, Catharine Parr Traill and Alice Hollingworth in Ontario, and Mary Brenton in Newfoundland. Who were they? How did they come to know about plants? What were their contributions? What did their work mean to them? How do we find them? And where do we find material by them and about them?

This talk also celebrates researchers in Flora’s Fieldworkers whose curiosity led them to letters and biography, artwork and craftwork, into archives, herbaria, and institutional records, and also into scrapbooks, logbooks, textbooks, and teaching tools to seek answers to those questions about women and knowledge.

Presenter Biography

Ann Shteir is Professor Emerita in the School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, York University. She received an Honorary Law degree from York University in 2016 for her work in developing York’s pioneering graduate program in Gender, Feminist, and Women’s Studies.

Shteir is also the author of Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760 to 1860  (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), which was awarded the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize for Women’s History. She turned her attention next to women and botany in Canada, and collaborated with botanist Jacques Cayouette on an article published in the journal Scientia Canadensis (2019) about four women who collected plants in early 19^th-century Quebec and Newfoundland. As well, she organized a workshop at York University that brought together botanists, historians of science, art historians, literary scholars, garden historians, and others who, like her, wanted to know more about women, plants, and botanical work in Canada across the 1800s. The edited book Flora’s Fieldworkers: Women and Botany in Nineteenth-Century Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022) was the happy result.

The event will be hybrid.

To sign up to attend this event in person or online, please click HERE.

This event is made possible thanks to support from the Government of Canada.