On July 31, Ping An Beijing Chaoyang posted a notice on Weibo that Wu Yifan had been criminally detained by the Chaoyang Public Security Bureau on suspicion of rape. The investigation of the case is being further carried out. Previously, Wu Yifan was reported to have repeatedly lured women into sexual relations, including minors.
As soon as the news came out, the netizens of the major social platforms all raised their eyebrows as if they were the New Year. The fermentation process of this incident also allows us to see that in the face of various gender hegemonic remarks and severe situations, women are becoming more and more daring to speak out and dare to fight.
In fact, such protests also occur in academic circles. For a long time, women have always been labeled with such stereotypes: not good at scientific research, better at studying liberal arts, not good at science, better at memory, but not good at logical thinking... However, those who hold this view do not further wonder whether it is precisely because of this preconceived stereotype and popular perception that women face more restrictions and greater resistance in the field of scientific research.
"From 1901 to 2016, a total of 911 people won Nobel Prizes, of which only 48 were women, and 16 of these female winners were Nobel Peace Prizes and 14 were Nobel Prizes in Literature..." British science journalist Angela Sayni made this statistic when she wrote the book "Inferior: What Science Did Wrong to Women.".
"Founded in London in 1660, the Royal Society is one of the oldest scientific institutions in the world, but it did not elect a full female member until 1945." Sayni went on to write.
In response, Ronda Sybinger, a professor of the history of science at Stanford University, quipped, "For nearly three hundred years, the only eternal female presence in the Royal Society was a female skeleton preserved in the Society's anatomical storage room." ”
From any point of view, in the history of scientific development, women, if not completely absent, at least are small-minded. For this phenomenon, many people take it for granted that this is due to the difference in talents between men and women, or the difference in vocation: scientific undertakings characterized by rationality, objectivity, and progress undoubtedly belong to men; women who are "emotional, subjective, and emotionally abundant" are more suitable for family, educational, or service occupations.
On the other hand, in the field of scientific research in which men set the rules (such as the royal society in the past), researchers can only see and only recognize the results of research achieved by men, while the achievements and contributions of women in another form are selectively ignored and excluded from the so-called "science".
The development of botany and naturalism in England in the 18th and 19th centuries is enough to illustrate the problem. Female science enthusiasts are confined to other fields and left to explore botany; they contribute a lot to botany and naturalistic culture, but they are never recognized by the "history of science". In "The Flower God's Daughter", Ann Hidelle, professor emeritus of york University in Canada and one of the founders of the Atkinson College Women's Research Center, uses detailed evidence to rehabilitate the efforts and achievements of women to promote the development and dissemination of botany, and to explain what the so-called "science" has done wrong to women.
"The Daughter of the Flower God", author: [Plus] Ann Hidelle, Translator: Jiang Hong, Version: One Volume Studio| Sichuan People's Publishing House, May 2021.
"Daughter of the Flower God":
Botany is the embellishment of a good wife and a good mother
During the European Enlightenment, "science" became part of popular leisure culture as fashionable as fashion, chess and refreshments. And women, just like consumers of fashion, chess and refreshments, have also been cultivated as consumers of scientific knowledge, and many books and periodicals have been dedicated to popularizing scientific knowledge of the time for "beautiful women".
Science advocates recommend astronomy, physics, mathematics, chemistry and naturalism to women as their activities for moral education and self-cultivation. They believe that science can cure their frivolity and keep them away from dangerous tables, and that women who study science will be more talkative and more successful mothers.
Among the many sciences, the most suitable for women to study is undoubtedly botany.
Some writers have aesthetically argued that botany is in line with a woman's beauty, elegance, or delicacy, and a corresponding person in Gentleman's Magazine declared that "it is not only the more special duty of women to take care of exotic plants... Compared with men's clumsy hands, women's flexible slim jade hands can do better... This kind of meticulous work is difficult to achieve with the degree of care of the gentlemen";
Others argue from an educational point of view that botany is a way to attain piety, health, and a way away from superficial activities, and that it is more suitable for women to "learn in the fields, in the woods, and in their father's garden... It is also more conducive to their physical exercise";
There are also those who compare botany to the exploration of insects and animals, arguing that botany is free from brutal killing and dissection...
These women, who studied botany, were called "the daughters of the flower god" by Ann Hidelle.
Rembrandt created this oil on canvas in 1634, in which the flower god figure is dressed by his beloved wife.
Whether in ancient Roman literature or religious mythology, floral is a symbol of nature, fertility and spring. The ancient Roman poet Ovid called her "mother of flowers" and celebrated her beauty, sexuality and reproductive strength. His Flora represents a dominant idea in the Western cultural tradition: that women are associated with nature and the body, while men are associated with culture and spirit.
Similarly, the social environment in which British women lived in the 18th and 19th centuries associated them with physical nature, reproduction, and motherhood, which in turn associated with qualities such as feminine manners, humility, and innocence, paved the way for women's participation in a variety of botanical activities.
Encouraged by parents, teachers and social commentators, flora's English daughters are active in the field of botany and actively develop their interests. They read botanical books, attend relevant public lectures, correspond with naturalists, collect native ferns, mosses and marine plants, paint plants, make specimen collections for deeper learning, and learn the use of microscopes. Of course, as soon as there are more important chores waiting for them to complete, they must immediately put down the plants in their hands.
Strelitzia reginae, named after Empress Charlotte.
Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III of England, is one of the most prominent examples. She loved flowers and horticulture, had received professional botanical guidance, co-sponsored Kew Gardens (the Royal Garden of England, still one of the most famous botanical gardens in the world), had its own herbarium, and the president of the Linnaeus Society (an society established in honor of the botanist Linnaeus, more on Linnaeus later) was invited to help Queen Charlotte manage specimens and guide the queen and princesses in botanical knowledge. There is even a horse ass spirit that named a newly introduced crane orchid after Queen Charlotte, "paying tribute to the botanical enthusiasm and knowledge of the present Queen of Great Britain." ”
Statue of Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus.
Even the French thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote a botanical book for women called The Botanical Correspondence. In the book he wrote 8 letters instructing a young mother in botany so that she could teach her young daughter. These letters were particularly important for British botanical culture. The publisher introduced it into English so that "beautiful female compatriots and uneducated male compatriots in England can read it." ”
But in the British book market at the time, in addition to Rousseau or some well-known male botany, more botanical-related books or magazines were written by female writers. They are particularly good at popular science or introductory book writing, creating a unique popular science model that presents botany in the dialogue between mother and child in a family atmosphere, or tells botany in the form of letters between sisters. For some women who have never married or lived independently, or who have divorced their husbands and have to raise children to adulthood, botanical writing has become an important and stable source of income.
In the 18th century, the number of women openly engaged in writing in Britain reached an all-time high. It is estimated that in the 1790s alone, 300 to 400 women writers published books, including religious books, polemic articles, novels, children's literature, operas and popular science books. Although the subject matter seemed rich, the subject matter of their writing was still limited by the gender ideology of the time. In order to be accepted by the male writer community, female writers often focus on "exclusive women's stories and genres" and incorporate indoctrinated moral stories into the narrative.
One of the safest and most accepted ways for women to write is to speak as a "mother educator." At the time, Britain sought to "create a new mother image for the new family model, to transform the country by transforming women." "Mothers" were elevated to social and cultural priorities, giving the "educators" a lofty status. It is for this reason that the form of dialogue between mother and child in botanical writing is widely popular. The issue of motherhood and family awareness provides a social, intellectual and economic source for women writers to speak out in the education system and the public sphere, playing a more important social role.
However, we have to note that in this atmosphere, women are allowed to engage in botanical writing because they are excluded from writing on other topics. The exalted status that women gain as "mothers" comes at the cost of their complete neglect of their status as "independent spiritual individuals" and "objects of love with sexual desires."
Pistils and stamens:
Botanicals shaped by gender
At the same time, even in fields such as botany, which are "suitable for beautiful women" and "gentle and elegant", taboos and controversies against women are everywhere.
The popularity of botany in England was due to the artificial classification system established by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus. Linnaeus' taxonomy is based on easily identifiable plant flowers, i.e. reproductive organs. This classification method, also known as the Linnaean system, takes the reproductive organs of plants as the core criterion for classification, with the number and proportion of stamens (male organs) as "order", and the number and proportion of pistils (female organs) as secondary "orders". Based on the characteristics of the flowers, it is possible to find a genus for the plant. This simple and intuitive way greatly lowers the threshold for botany enthusiasts to observe flowers and trees.
However, the classification of reproductive organs based on stamens and pistils inevitably introduces unlimited socio-gender imaginations to the originally neutral botany. In particular, the founder of this theory, Linnaeus, has always been rigorous and serious in stating his views and publishing theories, but he is full of rich imaginations about the sexual relations of plants, and even adds branches and leaves to hype up the sexual politics of the time. In his mouth, the stamens are like the human male sexual organs that take the initiative to attack, and the pistils are passively accepted like the human female sexual organs.
Stills from the documentary "Plant Kingdom".
After the introduction of the Linnaean sexual system to Britain, the English botanist and poet Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles Robert Darwin, the founder of evolution) perfectly inherited this theory and created the "infamous" poem "Plant Love". In addition to the botanical popularization, this poem is more about evoking the impulse of love. By analogy with man, he displaced human sex to the plant world, conceiving the plot of "playboy courting beautiful people and obtaining the love of plants", which is full of passion and sexual fantasy between the lines.
Although Darwin's unscrupulous depiction of female sexuality in Plant Love, his female counterparts were afraid to follow suit. In England at the time, there were still people who thought that conveying or even merely knowing sexual knowledge was not in line with women's moral code, and Linnaeus's association of botany with sex was obviously an ulterior motive.
The priest poet Richard Polwell denounced female botanists as "Don Quixote in the New Philosophy" in his poem "Asexual Woman", and female writers are blatantly demonstrating sexual desire and violating morality. In his poem, he writes:
Botany makes them ecstatic, their breasts towering,
[They] are still picking the forbidden fruit, with Eve's mother,
Marvel at the heartbeat of the flowers that sprout in youth,
Or, without shying away from the lasciviousness of plants,
Dissect its organs defiled by desire,
Innocently staring at the teasing powder.
Thus, despite The simplicity and popularity of Linnaeus' sex classification system, British publishers, teachers, parents, and translators were highly wary of his doctrine and disagreed on how to translate and import his works.
Illustration of the title page of Erasmus Darwin's Botanical Garden.
William Wethering, one of the earliest English translators of Linnaeus' theory, argued that translation needed to be simple and easy to understand, so that women could also read happily. But the female readers he is dealing with, in addition to the general public, but also his own daughters, how should he deal with the sexual depictions in the book? How to grasp the degree of detail and vividness? Should the script present the obscene explanation of polygamous cross-pollination in the plant kingdom? In Wetherling's eyes, women are (or should be) humble and pure, and it is clearly inappropriate to expose the sexuality of plants to them without scruples. So he translated sex-related terms and titles into English and avoided all words related to sex. For readers who do not understand Linnaean's theory, it is difficult to find the important position of pistils and stamens in the book.
On the one hand, this practice prevents female botanists who do not have the ability to read Latin from learning to understand the "real" Linnaean doctrine, and on the other hand, even female botanical writers who are familiar with Linnaean theory are afraid to write, confining themselves to a limited field of expression. As a result, people who did not know Latin or lacked classical education (including mostly English women) could not enter the core field of Linnaeus botany.
Elizabeth Kent, the famous female botanist of the time, wrote in the book that "the naturalistic inquiry of the girls was not encouraged, or even forbidden": at their young age, the teachers confused innocence with ignorance and kept them away from books, because the contents of the books "were either offensive or would provoke the girls to chatter about the root of the problem... Satisfying this curiosity is no good"; as they grow up, young ladies are cowering in the face of scientific terms and Latin because they "fear that they will be given the terrible name of schooling.".
It was not until the 1820s that botany made fruitful progress in more specialized fields, with more and more botanists abandoning Linnaeus' classification of plant reproductive organs in favor of the "natural system" classification established by Yusu in Paris and Decando in Geneva. Ironically, this shift first occurred among those who were able to read high-level journals, and in the eyes of the general public, Linnaeus Botany became an introductory theory more suitable for children, beginners, and women.
Surrounding the bust of Linnaeus, Escolapios, Flora, Cyrus, and Cupid.
When botany develops into a discipline,
Women are hard to come by
"The passionate devotion of beautiful English girls to the study of botany has earned them the greatest respect for themselves and has significantly enhanced the prestige of the science and saved it from blame. While they may not have made outstanding contributions to the discipline, at least made it popular and fashionable – although it is widely accepted that women are not suitable for academic and professional training, this branch of science has been able to achieve such remarkable results thanks to the participation of many women, which is also a strong testimony to the inherent tolerance and generosity of women. ”
—Charles Abbott, Flora of Bedfordshire, 1798
Women's tolerance and generosity towards botany have not been exchanged for the equal acceptance and welcome of women in botany. From 1760 to 1830, a gendered botanical culture opened the door for women, but later, the same gendered ideas prevented them from continuing to participate in botanical research. They were pushed in first, and then driven out.
In the early 19th century, divisions began to emerge within science and culture, and the gap between the masses and experts, popularity and scholarship, was widening. By the 1930s, activities associated with genteel etiquette and leisure and recreation in scientific culture were no longer popular, and society turned to support a "serious, practical, non-entertaining scientific culture." The spokesman for pragmatic culture claims: "The professionalization of the role of science is a political imperative, and the state must support science—not because it fosters a genteel class or is compatible with high culture, but because it brings material practical meaning to civil society." ”
Portrait of Professor of Botany John Lindley, 1848.
As a result, the botanical doors that were once opened to women in order to cultivate "more elegant ladies and more successful mothers" seemed inappropriate. In his inaugural address in 1829, John Lindley, the first professor of botany at the University of London, made it clear that botany was denigrated in England and grossly underestimated precisely because "it was treated as a pleasure for ladies rather than as the profession of a well-thought-out man." ”
Lindley's distinction between "scientific" and "literary skills" triggered a revolution in early Victorian Britain, from which botany became a "gentleman's discipline" and began a process of "de-feminization". The history of many disciplines repeats the patterns of 19th-century botanical culture: different groups distinguish between different ways of practicing disciplines, disengage professional researchers from hobbies, divide the hierarchy of participants, promote and level appropriate speech, and so on.
The self-identification and scientific practice of the elites were exclusive, and they were aggressive and aggressive in the historical narratives of women and botanical culture.
The "expert culture" of men deprived earlier women of the authoritative value of their emotions and experiences. Such as epistolary style, dialogue style and other "intimate style", originally the most respected writing mode of female writers, and even recognized as a model, has also led the trend in the British publishing market, accompanied by thousands of British children growing up, providing a primer for botany enthusiasts with limited conditions; now it is denounced as too "feminine", difficult to climb the elegant hall, not suitable for training today's boys, future botanists: "The genre of dialogue or epistles is written by those who do not understand science at all and want to spread science... Curious people resent this way of writing, and when they are forced to read this ambiguous thing, some chattering old woman or an old maid who shows off her knowledge becomes a more authoritative master of the basics in fictional correspondence. ”
In the Romantic culture, scientific women were criticized; in scientific culture, women were excluded from the research botanical gardens.
It is not that women botanists have adopted rigorous scientific research methods and explored new botany theories, and Agnes Ibissen is one of the best. She combines observation and experimentation, studying plants with the help of microscopes and anatomy. She has also made numerous discoveries in plant physiology and has published more than 50 articles in various scientific journals, some of which have been translated in swiss, French and Italian scientific journals. In 1810, the editor-in-chief of the Curtis Botanical Journal named the coastal honey tea tree after her and praised her for publishing several "very original and enlightening papers on plant physiology."
Even so, Ibsen's path to research remains difficult, subject to the cold eyes and repression of male authorities. She longed for her original research to be taken seriously and her claims to be known, but she was old, far from the metropolis, without formal mentors, and could not join a scientific society because she was a woman. She had to go it alone.
Ibsen wrote several times to Sir James Smith about his research, hoping for his recommendation and help, but Smith repeatedly ignored her request. When Lindley wrote a thesis discussing the theory of recommending a French botanist, Ibissen found himself having noticed the botanist 12 years earlier and found that his views bore similarities with his own. In this regard, she lamented: "How easy it is for the name of the theorist to be biased!" ”
Flora, the god of flowers, dresses up the earth (from a new illustration of the Linnaean sex system).
Feeling the difference between gender, Ibsen deliberately changed his name to what he wrote when he submitted to an academic journal, so that the other party mistakenly thought he was a "gentleman", and did not clarify this error until the third time he published an article. In the early 18th century, 100 years ago, it was men who used female pseudonyms to submit articles to the "Ladies' Journal" to popularize mathematical knowledge.
Today, 200 years on, the situation of female scientists seems to have improved, at least women can use "rigorous scientific writing" to compete with men in the same field, and it turns out that in the professional and defertile scientific culture, it is also beneficial to give women the opportunity to participate in mainstream science in an equal way. But on the other hand, it also means endorsing a male-led, male-constructed scientific research system, using the male model to construct science, and keeping it away from family, motherhood, and contextual thinking, as well as other cultural factors that are gendered into "femininity."
In this way, women cannot participate in academic research as "women", but only as "neutral" or even "male".
At the same time, the barriers that once plagued and restricted British women's participation in scientific research and scientific achievements have not completely disappeared, and women are still imprisoned in a hidden but effective way. For example, it seems to raise women to the priority of social culture, proposing that "the degeneration of women leads to the degeneration of the country"; for example, using praise and praise, pushing women into the trap of domestic and maternal labor, and then ignoring the value and meaning of such labor legally and economically; or according to the consequences of this social reality, inferring the conclusion that women are suitable for reading liberal arts and men are suitable for science...
The history of the "Flower God's Daughter" continues.
Written by | Xiao Shuyan
Edit | ZHANG Ting; WANG Qing
Proofreading | Zhang Yanjun