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New Day Cafe: Fungi Fangirls [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-08-17  

Welcome to the New Day Cafe! This is an open thread.

JSTOR had a recent piece on women in early mycology.

x Rare is the woman who so loves toadstools she forgoes other activities to devote herself to their documentation. https://t.co/ExYCVlc6Nb — JSTOR Daily (@JSTOR_Daily) August 15, 2023

From the piece,

“’I am always under the uncomfortable impression that the thing that I am doing is not the right thing to be doing.’ So wrote Anna Maria Hussey, an amateur mycologist, in 1849. Hussey was an essential part of a small cadre of women in the nineteenth century committed to scientific illustration. Though polite society tended to view them as eccentric, their enthusiasm for their subject did not waver. Mary Elizabeth Banning, another amateur mycologist, had ‘clean gone mad’ for her interest in ‘frog stools,’ according to her account from 1880, and in 1865 Margaret Plues observed, ‘Men will acknowledge beauty in the tiniest moss … and then peep into your basket of Fungi … and merely exclaim with disgust, ‘What a lot of toadstools!’”

The scientific establishment mostly ignored the contributions of these women.

Here are several of those figures:

-Anna Maria Hussey (1805-1853) made pioneering illustrations with the help of her sister Frances Reed.

-Mary Elizabeth Banning (1822-1903), the first mycologist of Maryland.

-Margaret Plues (1828-1901)

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/17/2166422/-New-Day-Cafe-Fungi-Fangirls

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