Description:

This presentation will analyze Latin American women’s involvement with botany in the 19th-century. Through botanical motifs in women’s friendship albums and women’s literary works such as María Josefa Acevedo’s El oráculo de las flores i el de las frutas (1857) and Soledad Acosta de Samper’s Conversaciones y lecturas familiares (1896), the presentation will demonstrate that the relationship between women and botany speaks of the barriers women faced in formal education and their attempts to overcome them in order to gain control of themselves and their own academic and social interests, as well as their sexual and reproductive bodies. Moreover, from an ecofeminist perspective, 19th-century women’s exploration of friendship, sexuality, and knowledge through a vegetal rhetoric and through concrete references to botany let us think along a connection of women and plants beyond the anthropocentric and patriarchal point of view from which they depart.