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Barbara T. Gates and Ann B. Shteir, eds., Natural Eloquence: Women Reinscribe Science. Madison: U of Wisconsin P,1997.256 pp. ISBN 0-299-15480-7, $45.00 cloth; ISBN 0-299-15484-X, $17.95 paper.
Although the title Natural Eloquence might suggest that there is something essentialist in the ways that women write about nature, in fact the suggestion here is rather that the women write in an engaged way, using their individual perceptions and relationships within natural, cultural, and scientific environments. The individual essayists are evocative, teasing the reader with sometimes quite minimal biographical information even as they probe what it means for women writers to operate in intersections among scientific cultures, individual enthusiasms, and a changeable natural world. The net effect is to mark the significance-and the complexity-of women writing about nature over two centuries.
Both editors, Barbara T. Gates and Ann B. Shteir, have written on women writers, and their introduction reflects on descriptors for those writers who might be termed "scientific popularizers" but whose capacities and variety resist the subtle denigration of that term. Arguing that in the early nineteenth century many women writers established a distinctive discourse that was familiar and directed, in part, at an audience of women and children, the editors trace the major literary and historical discussions about this genre. About mid-century the dialogue and narrative style tended to change and choices were made that modified the approach, although the new forms often retained the distinctive, individual voices of the authors. From the nineteenth century on, the writings of many women writers can continue to be contrasted with standard textbook accounts. The essays in this volume move the discussion into the late twentieth century, concluding with an interview with naturalist poet Diane Ackerman.
The first contribution of these chronologically organized essays is a reprinted sketch by Stephen Jay Gould that recounts his historical encounter with the nineteenth-century English conchologist Mary Roberts. Himself a conchologist, Gould tracked down this author of a dozen or more books of natural history and offers an assessment of The Conchologist's Companion (1834 edition): it represents the mainstream of the field in her day. Reflecting on the invisibility of women naturalists like Roberts and on their conventionality in terms of a religious and gendered outlook, he investigates her other books and...