ricardienne | No! Not… coed botany!

We're reading A Vindication of the Rights of Woman for FYSEM. I was flipping through the back matter (yay for Norton Critical Editions!) and found an exerpt from a rather angry poem by contemporary Richard Polwhele, "The Unsex's Females". Ironically, he completely misses the point. All of his arguments are precisely the ones that Wollstonecraft demolishes.

Among the many things that bother him about,

A female band despising NATURE's law,
As "proud defiance" flashes from their arms,
And vengeance smothers all their softer charms,

Is that they,

Court prurient Fancy to the private stage;
With bliss botanic as their bosoms heave,
Still pluck forbidden fruit, with mother Eve,
For puberty in signing florets pant,
Or point the prostitution of a plant;
Dissect its organ of unhallow'd lust,
And fondly gaze the titillating dust;

Even more amusing, however, is his note to 'botanic':

"Botany has lately become a fashionable amusement with the ladies. But how the study of the sexual systems of plants can accord with female modesty, I am not able to comprehend. I had at first written:
More eager for illict knowledge pant,
With lustful boys anatomize a plant;
The virtues of its dust prolific speak
Or point its pistill with unblushing cheek.

I have, several times, seen boys and girls botanizing together"

I suspect that the Reverend Polwhele just couldn't bring himself to actually use the word "pistill" in print.

In other news, the discussion-leading I was supposed to do on Rousseau today more or less didn't happen. And it's worth a tenth of our semester grade. This is really icky. But seeing as we got all of 6 minutes to prep, I'm really not surprised.