Born: March 27 1724, United States
Died: March 10 1766
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Jenny Colden
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
After five years of diligent work, botanist Jane Colden completed her manuscript on the plants of New York in 1758. While there is no documentation on why her manuscript—full of vibrant descriptions of hundreds of native plants, as well as practical uses and beautiful illustrations—was never published, it appears she ceased her botany work after marrying in 1759. While she was leery of her growing fame, the timing may also indicate her husband was not supportive of her pursuits, as it seems unlikely that a woman who had put so much of herself into a project and was in regular correspondence with other botanists of the day would have simply dropped her work without significant reason. Being in her thirties—well into “spinsterhood” by the standard of the day—she may have been forced to choose between the relative security of marriage and a passion she had apparently been pursuing since she was a teen.
After her death in 1766, her manuscript disappeared for more than a decade, but by the 1780s, it came into the possession of a Hessian soldier and botanist. Flora of New York, as the manuscript came to be called, was also the uncredited source for several plants in Materia Medica Americana, published in 1787 by another German in the United States. After passing to a British botanist and plant collector, the book eventually ended up in the collection of the Natural History Museum, London. While this is the best possible outcome, it begs the question of how the manuscript went missing. If indeed her husband was unsupportive, he may have simply given the manuscript away at some point, or never bothered going through her papers after her death. Such a possibility stands in stark contrast to the countless supportive wives who have dedicated their lives to preserving and promoting their husbands’ legacies…
When botanist Jane Colden discovered a small plant with pink flowers near her New York home in 1753, she believed it was a species previously unidentified by Western science. She wrote to Carl Linnaeus, considered the premier expert of the day, that she had found a new species—he dismissed her and assumed it was St. John’s wort. In fact, it was a new species—now known as Hypericum virginicum—but by the time other scientists figured this out, Colden’s role had been forgotten and the honour of naming it was lost to her. Colden discovered a new white-flowered plant in 1756, and this time wrote to botanist John Ellis to lobby on her behalf to Linnaeus. Colden had wanted the name Fibraurea and Ellis wrote, “This young lady merits your esteem, and does honor your system … suppose you should call this Coldenella, or any other name that may distinguish her among your genera.” Linnaeus ignored both and called it Helleborus (later renamed Coptis groenlandica). Botanist Peter Collinson wanted to honour Colden’s contributions to the field, and, like Ellis, asked Linnaeus to allow a plant to be named for her—although there were plenty of plants in need of names, Linnaeus refused. It’s also worth noting that he was a blatant racist, applying his taxonomy classifications to humans as well, with white Europeans as a superior race, followed by Asians, Native Americans and, at the bottom, Africans.