8 i Flora Unveiled
new way of thinking, the woman’s reproductive system was simply different from the
man’s, not inferior to it. The two- sex model was born. Comparisons of male and female
reproductive systems were soon augmented by comparative studies of the skeletons, mus-
culature, and nervous systems of men and women. It became fashionable among anato-
mists to catalog the many physical differences between the sexes in order to differentiate
them functionally.
Why the sudden rush to validate the two- sex model? Once again, gender politics played
an important role. As discussed by Londa Schiebinger in her book The Mind Has No
Sex?, the lofty ideal of human equality in the abstract, so prevalent during the eighteenth-
century Enlightenment period, posed something of a dilemma for men who perceived
women’s sociopolitical aspirations as a threat.^18 If women were indeed equal to men, men
could no longer rule at home, nor could they exclude women from positions of power and
responsibility in business or government. Science again came to the rescue of those who
sought to justify the traditional patriarchal arrangement on the basis of “natural law.”
A burst of new anatomical studies were published demonstrating that the physical dif-
ferences between males and females were not limited to the sex organs, but included the
skeleton and the nervous system as well. A man, by virtue of his distinct physiology and
anatomy, was destined to lead and dominate, whereas a woman’s anatomy and physiology
determined her role as wife and mother. The two- sex model may have indeed represented
scientific progress, but, according to Schiebinger, it owed much of its popularity in the
eighteenth century to the arguments it seemingly provided to opponents of equal rights
for women.
Based on the foregoing, we can say that from the Greeks onward, scientific progress on
the nature of human sexuality has been influenced by gender ideology. Did attitudes toward
gender also influence the history of ideas about sexuality in plants? Could scientific progress
on the sexual role of pollen have been hindered by a reciprocal gender bias even older than
the Greek gender bias regarding animal sexuality? In this book, we will argue that a one- sex
model for plants predated the two- sex model by thousands of years— but instead of being
gendered male, plants were gendered female. This distinction between animals and plants
based on gender may, in fact, have had its origin in the oldest human societies, which often
manifested a division of labor between men as hunters and women as gatherers.
To our knowledge, the only historian of botany ever to have recognized the existence
of the ancient one- sex model of plants is Edward Lee Greene, the founder of the Botany
Department at the University of California, Berkeley. In his book Landmarks of Botanical
History, written around 1936 and published posthumously in 1983, Greene concluded that
“it should be clear that men long ago held that plants are not asexual, but unisexual and
feminine,” and he expressed surprise that this “ancient doctrine” had been overlooked by
other historians of botany.^19 Greene’s important insight, which he noted in passing in his
chapter on the Renaissance botanist Jean Ruel (discussed in Chapter 11), has languished in
obscurity ever since.
To uncover the deep history of the one- sex model of plants, we must travel back through
time to the last Ice Age, around 40,000 years ago, to an archaeological period known as the
Upper Paleolithic. Here, we are confronted with an even more fundamental question than
sex in plants: When did modern humans discover sex in themselves? The answer, it turns
out, is not intuitively obvious.