Uncaged Angels: Ecofeminist Literary Ornithology as Citizen Science in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This article examines how women’s ornithological literature facilitated their participation in scientific research and political activism in the nineteenth century. Despite the many confining associations between women and birdcage imagery in Victorian culture, female involvement in the observation of birds was instrumental in the period’s transferring of women’s activity from the private to the public sphere in Britain, the United States and colonial South Africa. By focusing on birdwatching as an early form of what Alan Irwin defines as citizen science (1995), it is possible to explore how women’s ornithological nature writing encouraged environmental advocacy, thus fomenting female autonomous expression in the male-dominated field of natural history. The texts analysed here therefore anticipated ecofeminist approaches to avifauna, allowing for women’s subversive excursions into nature which dissolved the restrictions of the normative ‘angel in the house’.