It’s Science Literacy Week AND Women’s History Month (in Canada), which means it’s the perfect time to spotlight amazing women in STEM who never got the credit they deserved. Previous posts in the erased women in STEM series:
Rosalind Franklin: DNA Decoder (1920-1958)
Margaret E. Knight: Professional Inventor (about 1837-1914)
Ellen Eglin: A Lost Legacy (1800s)
Eunice Newton Foote: Forgotten Climate Scientist (1819-1888)
You can read more about these women in my Fall 2026 children’s book, THE MATILDA EFFECT: HOW 25 WOMEN WERE ERASED FROM HISTORY. For now, let’s meet Jeanne Baret, scientist and first woman to sail around the world.
When 15th century Europeans “discovered” the New World, they immediately set about claiming its unique resources. Some of those resources were plants like corn, potatoes, beans, and (my personal favourite), cacao, the source of all chocolatey goodness. Identifying New World plants that might have economic or medicinal value to Europeans became big business, influencing culture and politics as well as economics.
The first voyage of exploration to include a professional naturalist (now called “scientist”) began in 1766 under the command of French captain Louis-Antoine de Bougainville. That naturalist’s name was Philibert Commerson, and he boarded ship with his girlfriend, Jeanne Baret.
At the time, it was illegal for a woman to serve aboard a French ship. That’s why Jeanne erased her own identity, disguising herself as Commerson’s “manservant,” Jean.
There’s been a lot of debate over when and how Jeanne’s disguise failed her. The voyage’s doctor claims the ruse was obvious from the jump, while Captain Bougainville maintained that Indigenous people of Tahiti were the first to discover what none of the French sailors had noticed. Though Jeanne could read and write, there are no accounts of her adventures in her own words… and the men who wrote about her had both OPINIONS and AGENDAS.
But all of those men agreed that Jeanne was a hard worker, scrambling up hills and down cliffs in search of interesting plants for Commerson (who had a bad leg) to study. Even after her gender was revealed, Jeanne continued collecting and cataloguing scientific specimens, doing the work of a botanist without the job title (or salary).
There’s been debate over how Jeanne learned to be a botanist, too. Some think Commerson trained her, as they’d been romantically involved for several years before the voyage began. Author Glynis Ridley has another theory: that Jeanne was a herb woman.
At the time, women were not allowed to attend medical schools or study sciences. And botany, which classified plant species according to their reproductive strategies, was denounced in the 1768 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica for being obscene, meaning “entirely inappropriate for the ladies.” But ladies were going about their business regardless of what men thought, including the business of being herb women: unofficial healers who used plants to make medicines. Some early naturalists admitted to paying such women for their botanical knowledge, and this common interest would certainly help explain why Jeanne and Commerson got together in the first place! But the historical evidence that Jeanne was a herb woman is tenuous (at best), which is why I did not include this theory in THE MATILDA EFFECT.
In contrast, there’s plenty of evidence that Commerson appreciated Jeanne’s contributions to his work and to botany in general. For one thing, he named a plant they found in Madagascar Baretia bonafidia. Unfortunately, other botanists had already discovered some closely related plants, which meant that their name for the group took priority. Baretia bonafidia was renamed Quivisia decandra and ultimately Turraea rutlinans… effectively erasing Jeanne from the scientific record.
But not forever. In 2012, botanists named a new plant in the potato/tomato/eggplant family Solanum baretiae! Glynis Ridley is one of three authors on that paper.
Read more about Jeanne’s life and adventures in THE MATILDA EFFECT: HOW 25 WOMEN WERE ERASED FROM HISTORY – and subscribe to my email newsletter to receive a FREE Women’s History Month Resource Kit, perfect for teachers and homeschoolers. Subscribers who pre-order THE MATILDA EFFECT get some extra bonus goodies, too, including an exclusive ticket to the virtual book launch.
Tomorrow: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Mother of Immunology