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Reflecting on the success of women’s horticultural training in Britain, the president of the Royal Horticultural Society of London quipped in 1939 how the nation’s premier institution, the Horticultural College, Swanley, had realized “a triumph of brains over brute.” This pride was well placed, as ‘Swanley’ proved to be the pioneer in an international movement to advance women in the ‘lighter branches’ of agriculture and horticulture. But many more institutions, beyond Swanley, located across the British Empire, Continental Europe, and North America participated in this movement. The schools and their networks joined efforts to open scientific and technical instruction to women at a time when the professionalization of science constricted women’s access to educational and professional opportunities in the sciences. A history of this international movement has yet to be told, and it forms the subject of my book-in-progress, Daughters of Ceres: The Scientific Advancement of Women in Horticulture, 1870–1920.
My analysis of the ‘Daughters of Ceres’—a sobriquet coined by one of the early leaders of this movement, Daisy Warwick—shows how during the nineteenth century the fields of horticulture and agriculture were gendered in specific ways that drew on contemporary notions of men’s and women’s physiologies, sex-based divisions of labor, and structural gender discriminations that constrained women’s roles and spheres of activity. At the end of the nineteenth century, efforts aligned with several feminist movements occurring locally and internationally throughout much of the ‘western’ world, countered the various discriminatory logics and established a range of opportunities that brought women into the agricultural and horticultural sciences. Despite the broad significance of this development, histories of women in science have hitherto only touched on it alongside parallel developments in more traditional scientific disciplines. My book thus offers a groundbreaking examination of a neglected subject while also offering a narrative that shows the wider extent of women’s longstanding participation in scientific fields associated with the land, environment, and food production.
Feeding into the historical erasure of women agriculturalists and horticulturalists are historiographies that have cast aside ‘applied’ sciences generally, or more germane to this subject, associated women’s work in agriculture and horticulture as a form of ‘domestic science’ (or home economics), thereby overlooking the distinctiveness and importance of mainstream scientific training in agriculture and horticulture as a distinct sphere worthy of focused study apart from – if not in relation to – such allied fields like domestic science. But such historiographical perspectives also stem from untapped archival sources that document a fuller background to the organizations, educational institutions, professional pursuits, career statuses, and public engagement behind this international movement, one that occurred outside and yet in association with the more traditional institutions of the sciences.
In order to read and analyze the rich materials contained in many archives that document this subject, during my year as a Keith S. Thomson Research Fellow of the Consortium I visited many collections, some at standard libraries such the Huntington Library, Smithsonian Institution, Library of Congress, and Schlesinger Library (Harvard), and others at ‘off-the-beaten-path’ places like the Andalusian Historic House, Gardens, & Arboretum (near Philadelphia). Collections held at the American Philosophical Society, Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HPS), The Library Company, and University of Pennsylvania Archives were also invaluable. The collections included papers of national and local women’s farm and garden associations, clubs, and institutes; botany records; institutional records of training programs; and personal papers of noted horticulturalists and arborists (for example Mira Lloyd Dock). Some of the collections included wonderful photographs showing women at work in gardens and fields, or convened for society and club meetings. At the HPS I was completely awestruck by the magnificent color posters advertising the US Women’s Land Armies.
Within the scope of the fellowship, I focused on North American (primarily US) subjects, but the broader extent of my archives research includes collections held in archives in Canada, Ireland, and the UK.
Although these specific, targeted research activities were the focus of my fellowship, equally valuable and ever-inspiring were my interactions with other fellows during our weekly virtual fellows talks, my conversation with Executive Director Babak Ashrafi during a Consortium podcast, and my engaging conversations with a range of librarians, archivists, gardens staff-persons, and researchers whose interests interfaced with my project’s subject. In sum, this fellowship was invaluable in promoting my progress on the book, both for informing its content and also for building an audience for it once published – hopefully in the months to come!
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Donald L. Opitz is an Associate Professor at DePaul University. He is the 2023-2024 Consortium Keith S. Thomson Research Fellow.