Mary Elizabeth Barber
| Mary Elizabeth Barber | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
5 January 1818 South Newton, Wiltshire, England |
| Died | 4 September 1899 (aged 81) Malvern, Natal Province, South Africa |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields | |
| Spouse | Frederick William Barber |
Mary Elizabeth Barber (5 January 1818 – 4 September 1899) was a pioneering British-born amateur scientist of the nineteenth century. Without formal education, she made a name for herself in botany, ornithology and entomology. She was also an accomplished poet and painter, and illustrated her scientific contributions that were published by learned societies such as the Royal Entomological Society in London, the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, and the Linnean Society of London.
Barber was born Mary Elizabeth Bowker in South Newton, Wiltshire, on 5 January 1818. She was the ninth of eleven children and first daughter of Miles and Anna Maria Bowker of Gateshead, Northumberland. Her father was a moderately wealthy sheep farmer, owning his own wool-manufacturing business. In 1820 he moved his family to Cape Colony, South Africa along with other British settlers who wished to take advantage of the South African government's offer of 100 acres of land for every man over the age of 18. The Bowker family received land in Albany, near Grahamstown. Here Bowker set up a school for his children and those of this workers, and his affinity for natural history heavily influenced the lessons the children received.
Mary and her brothers all shared a love of natural history, but it was the 1838 publication of the book The genera of South African plants, arranged according to the Natural System by Irish botanist William Henry Harvey that changed her life. She was fascinated by the chapters on the structure of plants and the Linnean classification system, and responded to the author's request for specimens so that he could begin documenting the flora of the Cape. Her ongoing correspondence with Harvey took place during a time when it was not generally accepted for women to engage in scientific discussion; indeed, in the beginning she did not disclose the fact that she was a woman. She enjoyed unprecedented freedom in this respect, partly because she was released from the relatively constraining Victorian culture of her home country, but also because of her father's encouragement and the generally relaxed pre-Victorian (Georgian) ideals he carried from an era when women enjoyed a freer voice. She became one of Harvey's main suppliers of plants from South Africa and also assisted him in the naming and classification of numerous species. Over a nearly 30-year correspondence, she sent Harvey approximately 1,000 species with notes on each one. She also established a correspondence with British botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker.
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