The Invisibility of Fungi and Female Mycologists in Victorian History: Analysing Manuscripts of M.F. Lewis
“We Need to De-feminise Botany.”
Studying botany was considered part of popular fashion and polite culture during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In particular, it was believed that acquiring and cultivating knowledge of nature was both suitable and beneficial for women, enabling them to provide better home education for their children. Following this Victorian domestic ideology, botany from the 1790s to the 1830s was primarily written by women. The styles of botanical knowledge during this period were romantic and accessible, often taking the form of novels, family-based instruction, watercolor illustrations, and poetry.
In the 1830s, the gendering of botany persisted but took a radically different turn. Under proposals by figures such as John Lindley, the first professor of botany at the University of London, there was a concerted effort to defeminise botany and establish it as a professional scientific discipline. Lindley argued that the lack of seriousness in existing botanical research stemmed from the field’s association with femininity and the dominance of female practitioners. By the 1860s, the term “botanist” referred almost exclusively to male professionals, and botany had shifted from “polite botany” to “utilitarian botany,” with a stronger focus on investigation rather than aesthetics or public communication. Lindley further classified botanical science into “low” and “high” forms. He wrote books such as Ladies’ Botany for what he termed “unscientific readers,” reinforcing a gender hierarchy in the production of knowledge. Commentary from the scientific community on women’s botanical contributions after the 1830s was largely dismissive. John S. Forsyth described female botanists as “pedantic spinsters,” and in 1832, The Times referred to the presence of women in the audience of the British Association for the Advancement of Science as “degrading the dignity of science.” Despite these shifts, botanical science retained aspects of its Romantic heritage in method. Throughout the Victorian era, the study of plants remained largely observational rather than theoretical, relying on the naked eye and the microscope.
Female botanists were caught in a more complex—and arguably more difficult—position amid this radical shift. Rather than benefiting from the advancement of the natural sciences, they were treated as obstacles, as an unappealing prelude to the development of human knowledge. This “invisibility” was not only gendered, but also reflected in the biological hierarchy. Until the 1960s, fungi were classified as a type of plant—more specifically, as a lower form of plant under the Linnaean system. Fungi were viewed as queer, unpredictable organisms, often associated with decay and death. In this sense, mycologists and women scholars shared a marginalised position. While the study of plants was gradually de-feminised after the 1830s, mycology was largely excluded from this reform of professional masculinity. Professional naturalists saw no need to standardise these lowly, unappealing organisms. As a result, women continued to lead in the field of mycology well into the Victorian era. Even today, fungi remain linked to feminine-coded notions such as “witchcraft.”
Seeking an Investigatory Spirit in Watercolour Sketches
M. F. Lewis was one of the female mycologists working in the late nineteenth century. Her three volumes of watercolour field notes have been archived and recently published as a book titled Fungi Collected in Shropshire and Other Neighbourhoods: A Victorian Woman’s Illustrated Field Notes. The observation dates noted beside her illustrations suggest that her fieldwork spanned from 1860 to 1903. Reading this book allows one to imagine her daily routine—hunting, observing, and sketching fungi across forests and meadows. As with many other forms of intellectual inquiry, her research brought little material reward. Given both her status as a female mycologist and the marginalised nature of fungi, it was even more difficult for the knowledge she produced to be recognised or taken seriously as meaningful scientific output. Some women mycologists adopted more strategic methods to make their work visible. Sarah Price, for instance, a contemporary of Lewis, published her mycological findings in book form and distributed them to subscribers—most of whom were women with an interest in mushrooms.
To reinterpret this history of science, I start by analysing the grouping of illustrations in Lewi’s work, which suggested an investigatory intent beneath the aesthetic surface of these watercolours. Lewis’s realistic painting of reflected the prevailing style of the late nineteenth century, following the tradition of botanical illustration since the Enlightenment Era. This style conveyed accurate detail and also served an ornamental function, while the grouping and spatial arrangement of Lewis’s illustrations were guided neither by aesthetics alone nor by randomness. The sixteenth page in Volume I, for example, brings together illustrations of fungi observed specifically in Ludlow, each accompanied by a label with its Latin name and date of observation. The following page features similar types of puffballs and earthballs observed on different dates and from various locations. This arrangement, along with the blank pages left throughout her collection, invites the reader to infer Lewis’s underlying process of planning and organisation. It suggests her effort to group and catalogue fungi for future study, whether of species identification or fungal activity within a specific locale. There are also repeated entries of the same species, such as Dryad’s Saddle in Volume I (dated 1861) and again in Volume III (dated 1889). This repetition may have been used to study either variations of the same species or the habitat preferences of a particular kind. Altogether, Lewis’s arrangement of illustrations appears deliberate, revealing her primary intention was scientific cataloguing, rather than simply documenting her findings in chronological order.
With the benefit of hindsight, the scientific value of Lewis’s work is now recognised, and her name is included in affiliations such as the British Mycological Society. Zooming in on the details of her illustrations, one realizes that Lewis was aware of many aspects of fungal knowledge that had not yet been developed. Not only did Lewis draw the mushroom—the fruiting body of the fungus—but also the surrounding environment, suggesting her belief that the habitat might influence its growth. This is best demonstrated in the seventeenth page of illustrations in volume II. At the bottom right corner was a coral fungus on its own, and fungi illustrated in the middle of the page were shown as they reside on leaves and branches. With today’s mycological knowledge, one would know that all of the fungi illustrated on this page have symbiotic or parasitic relationships with one or more particular plants. Whereas Lewis drew her assumptions about each fungus by choosing what to include or not. She also drew section illustrations of some fungi, such as one white mushroom on the last page of volume II. She repeatedly turned the mushroom upside down to observe and record its gills, which are central to fungal identification. The less visible, fruitless forms of fungi, such as fungal diseases on grains and leaves, were also acknowledged and paid attention to in her field notes. By drawing attention to such details, Lewis’s work can hardly be dismissed as lacking scientific or investigatory value.
The Invisibility of Female Labour in the Field of Science
Lewis’s work highlights the invisibility of women’s labour in science, despite its clearly investigatory nature. Her first name remains unknown, and her work stayed hidden from the public for over a century. This anonymity was not incidental, but rather reflected the broader experience of women cultivating and communicating scientific knowledge. Biographical information about both Lewis and Price is largely absent, and to this day, we still do not know their educational backgrounds or even their birth and death dates. It also remains unclear why Lewis never published her work, but the experiences of better-known female botanists point to how unconventional and difficult it was for women to engage in recognised scientific work. Anna Pratt, for example, tried to disguise her identity in her publications and kept her botanical pursuits secret from her family. Beatrix Potter was barred from presenting her mycological research at the Linnean Society of London before she turned to writing fiction about animals. Lydia Becker, a prominent suffragist, published under the abbreviated name L. E. B. in her book Botany for Novices: A Short Outline of the Natural System of Classification of Plants. Abbreviating or anonymising one’s identity was a common strategy to de-gender knowledge and make it more socially acceptable. Invisibility and anonymity thus came to characterise the relationship between female gender and labour within the gendered hierarchies of scientific knowledge.
Historians have been addressing the lack of gender analysis in the history of science since the 1990s. In a 1995 article, Sally Gregory Kohlstedt pointed out that studies of gendered labour in science were neither frequent nor well integrated into mainstream historical discourse. Because women’s access to knowledge, institutional affiliation, and recognition of competence was constrained, most of their contributions to science remained anonymous and ambiguous. Kohlstedt proposed re-categorising labour in science based on participants’ self-perception rather than social recognition. This includes not only the ‘scientists’ conducting formal research, but also the menial, assistant, and administrative roles—often filled by women—that have long remained invisible. I agree that a broader, more flexible definition of what constitutes labour in science is essential for a more comprehensive understanding. This redefinition is crucial not only for feminist scholarship but also for a fuller understanding of the history of science itself. As Anne Phillips and Barbara Taylor famously suggested in their 1980 article, the social status and professional value of work depend less on its skill or difficulty, and more on the gender of the worker and the gendered associations of the field. The shift in societal attitudes toward women’s participation in botany shows how the same activity—producing botanical knowledge—was reclassified from “productive” and central to “unproductive” and superficial, depending on who performed it.
Attention to the ambiguity of labour categorisation is also reflected in more recent work from ecofeminist perspectives. Ann Garascia’s 2019 article highlights the historical underrepresentation of women’s contributions through the story of Anna Atkins. She suggests that rather than lacking objectivity, as positivists claimed, Atkins’s cyanotype technique allowed plants’ subjectivity to be revealed through what she calls “autobotanography,” especially when viewed from a feminine and de-anthropocentric perspective. Similarly, Patricia Kaishian and Hasmik Djoulakian’s 2020 revision of mycological history critiques the ways in which women-generated knowledge has been excluded from science, arguing that labels such as “folklore” and “witchcraft” were applied to delegitimise their work and maintain institutional authority.
It is therefore necessary to read Lewis’s work as representative of many more female botanists and mycologists of her time. Highlighting the contributions of these anonymous women challenges the conventional historiographical focus on named individuals and genealogies, pushing instead for a broader recognition of collective and invisible labour in science.
Reference:
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