Flora Unveiled

408 i Flora Unveiled

Indeed, some eighteenth- century women writers reinforced this patronizing attitude in
their own literary work. In her poem “To a Lady with Some Painted Flowers” Anna Laetitia
Barbould compared women to decorative garden flowers:

Flowers to the fair: to you these flowers I bring.

And strive to greet you with an earlier spring.

Flowers S W E E T, and gay, and DELICATE LIKE YOU;

Emblems of innocence, and beauty, too.

With flowers the Graces bind their yellow hair,

And flowery wreaths consenting lovers wear.

Flowers, the sole luxury which nature knew,

In Eden’s pure and guiltless garden grew ...

... Gay without toil, and lovely without art,

They spring to cheer the sense, and glad the heart.

Nor blush, my fair, to own you copy these:

Your best, your sweetest empire is — to please.

According to Barbauld, women, like flowers, are “delicate,” “innocent,” and “sweet;” like
the lilies of the field they are “gay without toil” and their sole purpose is “to please.” The type
of woman the poem addresses is young, virginal, and privileged. It is certainly not addressed
to ordinary middle- or working- class women.
Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), force-
fully attacked such hyperfeminine floral metaphors for women as degrading and inimical
to the struggle for equality.^12 To her, the age- old identification of women with flowers had
devolved into decadence, and the ideals of strength and productivity had been eclipsed by
ideals of weakness and nonfunctionality. Women, she wrote, were classed with mere “smil-
ing flowers that adorn the land” or “sweet flowers that smile in the wake of man.” She did
not, however, disown the use of all floristic metaphors. She made use of them herself:

The conduct and manners of women,” she stated, “evidently prove that their minds

are not in a healthy state; for like flowers which are planted in too rich a soil, strength

and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty; and the flaunting leaves, after having pleased a

fastidious eye, fade disregarded on the stalk, long before the season when they ought

to have arrived at maturity.”^13

This “barren blooming” she attributed primarily to “a false system of education.”

Prominent Eighteenth- Century Opponents

of the Sexual Theory

Many of the eighteenth- century botanists who continued to oppose the sexual theory
did so, in large part, because of their opposition to the Linnaean sexual system of clas-
sification. In Italy, Giulio Pontedera, Professor of Botany and Director of the botanical
garden in Padua, rejected the sexual theory in his book Anthologia (1720), hewing to the