“Botany has a long history of not holding space for women, & even pushing them out when it becomes expedient to do so. During the late 18th & early 19th centuries, women were very much at the heart of botany”

“Because a subject so heavily undertaken by women couldn’t be considered a consequential intellectual pursuit, a major step …was to “defeminize” botany…to sever the historical association with women so that the men who did it would be taken seriously”

https://lithub.com/how-lydia-ernestine-becker-was-once-central-to-then-excluded-from-the-study-of-botany/