Cultivating science in the field: Alice Eastwood, Ynes Mexia and California botany, 1890-1940

This study asks how gender ideologies affected the practice of science by exploring the interrelationship between gender and scientific authority. It contrasts the experiences of two women who began scientific careers during different historical moments in the professionalizing discipline of botany. Women were encouraged to "botanize" as amateurs in the nineteenth century. Yet as botany developed into an academic discipline in the twentieth century, women were discouraged from scholarly inquiry. How did those women who pursued professional botany acquire and sustain scientific authority? The study integrates literature from the history of women, cultural studies of science, gender theory, and the history of the American West.;Alice Eastwood (1859-1953) and Ynes Mexia (1870-1938), worked as botanists in the San Francisco Bay Area in the first half of this century. This project argues that their scientific voices were products of their historical locations and changed accordingly. They shared gender, discipline, and geographical location, but differed by time period, personality, and ethnicity. Each woman creatively adapted to the historical era in which she became a professional. Eastwood, who began her career in the 1890s, capitalized on prevailing notions of femininity. She fostered a network of women botanists, among them Ynes Mexia, and used this group as a resource for her life and work. Mexia rebelled against prevailing ideas about femininity when she began her botanical career in the 1920s. She instead crafted herself into an autonomous and ungendered adventurer in pursuit of scientific knowledge.