COMPOUND OBJECT (1 Items)
Meal Tree / Viburnum (Viburnum dentatum) Item Info
- Title:
- Meal Tree / Viburnum (Viburnum dentatum)
- Description:
- Priscilla Wakefield was an English Quaker philanthropist and author. She wrote books on feminism, economics, and science. From her 1796 book, An introduction to botany, Wakefield wrote about the Meal Tree, or what we more commonly call viburnum. She wrote that its blossom with 'a small cup superior to the seed-vessel, with five teeth; one bell-shaped petal, with five hollow clefts turned back; its fruit a roundish berry of one cell, concealing a single seed as hard as a bone'. From her 1798 Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex; with Suggestions for Its Improvement, ‘There are many branches of science, as well as useful occupations, in which women may employ their time and their talents, beneficially to themselves and to the community, without destroying the particular characteristic of the sex… And here the author may be allowed to express her hope, that among the numbers of the female world, who appear to be satisfied with their own inferiority, many require only to be awakened to a true sense of their real consequence…’ She wrote that women could study many subjects, including botany. To place Wakefield in context, both she and Mary Wollstonecraft recommended education to enable women to be financially self-supporting. Both of them agreed that women and men should be paid equal wages for equal work.
- Type:
- record
- Format:
- compound_object
Attribution
- Citation:
- "Meal Tree / Viburnum (Viburnum dentatum)", Quaker Roots Walking Tour, Friends Historical Library, https://github.com/QRoots/Quaker-Walking-Tour/items/qr27.html