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IN THE HISTORY OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE, popular science writing remains largely unexplored terrain. Women's popular science writing is even less studied. Yet, women's popular science writing was a distinctive feature of science culture in late eighteenth-century England, when authors such as Priscilla Wakefield, Margaret Bryan, and Jane Marcet wrote books on topics in natural philosophy and natural history. During the period 1790-1840, women writers particularly cultivated the market for popular botany books. Maria Jacson (1755-1829), for example, a woman with scientific interests and connections, wrote three books about Linnaean botany and plant physiology and another about horticulture. When we reconstruct her life and career, we see that science writing was a resource for women, but one bounded by literary conventions and social and political constraints. Her story, that of a woman popular science writer in late eighteenth-century England, blends Enlightenment science culture with intricacies of gender ideology. In his painting Experiment with the Air Pump (c.1768), Joseph Wright of Derby gives one representation of women's relationship to Enlightenment science culture, portraying two girls and a young woman among those at a science demonstration. The youngest watches, pained and wary, as the natural philosopher extracts air from the vessel containing a lovely white bird; an older girl averts her gaze while a father-figure comforts and explains; the young woman is more involved with a male companion, and turns her gaze to him instead.
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