Survey in databases allowed us to find 71 women naturalists who lived between the seventeenth and nineteenth century. Of these, 43 were excluded because they did not fit the inclusion criteria. Thus, 28 women naturalists who participated in scientific expeditions or trips, or in a curiosity cabinet, or who were collectors of Natural History during this period of time were included in the present study (Table 1). All of these 28 women illustrated a botanical species and/or recorded some use of useful plants or reported observations about plants in the form of a published work, letters or diaries.

As shown in Fig. 3, the nationality of the majority of the women naturalists included in this work was from an European country: 10 of these 28 women were from France (35%), 7 from England (25%), 4 from Germany (14%), 2 from the USA (7%) and 1 for each of these countries: Austria, Belgium, Spain, Poland and Switzerland. 71% of these women traveled to other countries and 60% of them came to South America; other destinations were India, Gambia, Serra Leoa and Mexico.

Nationalities of the 28 female naturalists found after a survey in databases

Among the women who did not travel, two of them were collectors of natural history, for example Anna Jabonowska (1728–1800), who curated a very important European cabinet of natural curiosities. Her cabinet was considered one of the most important natural history collections in Europe in the eighteenth century [55]. The other ones (21%) worked in their countries, in particular Marie Le Masson Le Golft (1749–1826), whose work focused on marine biology; she published many books, including Coup d'Oeil Sur l'État Ancien et Présent du Havre (1778), with notes on fauna and flora of a French harbor [88, 89].

Ten of them traveled and/or published works with their husbands (35%). However, some of these women persisted traveling after their husbands’ death, such as Ottile Coudreau (1870–1910), who assumed control of an expedition in the Amazon region, publishing alone the results [92,93,94,95,96]. Eight of these female naturalists (25%) traveled by their own pursuits, such as Ida Pfeiffer (1795–1858) who traveled during 15 years around the world, coming to Brazil in 1846. She carried a letter of recommendation from Humboldt and other naturalists, helping her with her expeditions; she published many books that were translated to several languages [72]. Dorothea Maria Gsell (1678–1743), in particular, did not travel with her husband and neither traveled by her own pursuit, but traveled as an assistant of her mother, Maria Sibylla Merian. Later, she became professor of Arts in the Saint Petersburg’s Academy of Art and counselor of arts acquisition of Czar Peter. Also, she became administrator of Czar Peter’s natural history collection [62].

Six of them (21%) where traveler writers who made observations about plants in their publications, such as Baroness E. de Langsdorff (1812–1889), who came to Brazil in 1842 with the aim of dealing with the marriage of Prince of Joinville and Princess Francisca, Brazilian Emperor D. Pedro I’s sister; Langsdorff published her observations on landscapes and plants in a journal [56]. Teresa von Bayern, Princess of Bayern (1850–1925) [100] and Maria Graham (1785–1842) [80] collected plants that were included in Flora Brasiliensis of the German naturalist Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius [101].

Most interestingly is to note that the trajectory of every one of these women is really admirable. Adela Breton (1849–1923), for example, was an archeologist, explorer and artist. She registered an archeological site in Mexico, including observations on landscape and vegetation. Her work is recognized as of great importance for Mesoamerican studies. Breton also made many watercolors of plants native to Central America, mainly Mexico [50]. Jeanne Barret (1740–1897) traveled disguised as a man, being the first woman ever to travel around the world in a scientific expedition. She was the botanist assistant of Philibert Commerson [77]. Marianne North (1830–1890) carried out many scientific expeditions aimed at illustrating plants in their natural environment, illustrating more than 700 plant genres. Some were totally unknown and were named after her, such as Northia seychellana, Nepenthes northiana and Crinum nothianum, the last one was described based on her drawings [82, 83].

However, something in common is the ethnobotanical data in their works, which still did not receive necessary attention.

Maria Sibylla Merian's trajectory draws a lot of attention, although her scientific relevance has been neglected during the last centuries, mainly outside Europe. After all, she managed to carry out a self-financed scientific expedition in the seventeenth century, publish her work and achieve recognition by her contemporaries, being quoted by Linnaeus [[102], page 293] and Goethe [41, 63]. Her name is on the façade of the Artis Library at the University of Amsterdam along with 35 men of science [62]. She was one of the few women to be mentioned by the Royal Society at that time, having her work advertised in the first scientific journal, the Philosophical Transactions [103].

Maria Sibylla, alongside James Petiver,Footnote 2 made several efforts to publish an English version of Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium but was unable to do so. The limited number of publication languages is one of the reasons for this relative obscurity [104]. However, several editions were published in German, Dutch, Latin and French. Hans Sloane, later president of the Royal Society, acquired one of the first editions [105]. Thus, the language limitation does not seem to have been sufficient to suppress one of the first detailed texts in the field of Entomology.

In the eighteenth century, Maria Sibylla was widely admired for her contributions to art, natural science and exploration. However, in the nineteenth century, the major institutionalization of science contributed to the official exclusion of women from scientific practices [106]. Many women voyagers were concealed because they transgressed the expected image of a respectable woman at the time [38], including the Merian’s work [45]. In the twenty-first century, feminist movements and researchers have rescued Merian from oblivion [30, 48, 60, 62]. The question that remains about Maria Sibylla's trajectory is how and why, after reaching a level of scientific recognition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, she is erased in the nineteenth century and until today she does not receive the same level of attention as other male naturalists?

In How to suppress women’s writing (1983), Joanna Russ [107] describes how women’s contributions to literature have suffered systematic devaluation and reports patterns in their suppression. In Maria Sibylla Merian's trajectory, which went from recognition to ignorance, it is possible to recognize these same mechanisms, with a similar pattern of erasure of women in literature and in science.

The first key area of suppression, described by Russ, is formal and informal prohibition. Merian only had access to natural history books and contact with botanists because she was the daughter of an important book publisher. Matthaus Merian, her father, published some of the most influential texts on natural history in the 1600 s, and through her brothers she also learned to engrave on copper plates, which allowed her to publish her own works and thus finance her expedition [45]. Had it not been for her stepfather Jacob Marrel, Merian would not have had access to artistic training. At the time, women could not become artists' apprentices [41]. After leaving the Labadist community, she moved to Amsterdam because it was one of the only places that allowed women to own a business [64]. In addition to formal bans, informal ones such as discouragement are also strong deterrents. It is possible to see in the preface of one of her first works that Merian was discouraged, saying that she did not feel safe making discoveries because she was only “a young woman” [44, 108].

After managing to overcome the barrier of prohibitions and to write her work, Russ [107] reports that the next tool for suppression is to deny authorship, stating that she did not write it, attributing it to someone else (usually a male). Even though her focus was on entomology and her illustrations revolved around her discussion of metamorphosis, Maria Sibylla Merian, for many years, was seen as an artist rather than the scientist she was. In a 1997 catalog of an exhibition of Merian's work [109], it is said that her work should be read as artistic and not scientific since she was not an academic and did not have the necessary qualifications to be the author of a scientific work: “Merian was not a scholar. She was a painter, an embroideress, a dealer in paints, a teacher, a housewife, and a mother and a lover of nature. She came from a family of craftsmen, had not studied at a university, knew little Latin and basically had none of the qualifications required of an author of a scientific work.”

She was seen by many as a skilled artist, but when she published her work Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium [7], she made it clear that she saw herself as a naturalist. Like many others, she had no formal academic training and studied in Amsterdam's collections and library and read and cited the work of Leeuwenhoek, Moffet, Swammerdam, Goedart and other distinguished scientists [110]. In addition to having devoted great care and effort to correlating her work with that of other naturalists, such as Willem Piso [111]. For each plant, she gave an indigenous, Dutch, and Latin name prior to Linnaeus's taxonomy [112]. For example, the illustration 21 refers to Passiflora laurifolia L. (Passifloraceae) and Merian reported its vernacular name as “marquiaas” and also “passiebloem”. She also annotated the names given by Marcgraf (“Murucuia Guacu”) and Piso (“Murucuia quarta”) (Fig. 4).

Illustration 21 (left) and description (right) about Passiflora laurifolia L. in Maria Sibylla Merian’s Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705) [7]

The ultimate test for claiming that Maria Sibylla Merian is a scientist is the fact that plant species can be identified from her illustrations. The number of identifications is extraordinarily high, proof of the accuracy of her work and concern for scientific rigor rather than just an aesthetic issue, Merian's accuracy even surpasses that of several later naturalists [63]. The ultimately botanical identification was made by the botanists Tinde van Andel, Hajo Gernaat, Auke Hielkema and Paul Maas published in the 2016 facsimile edition of Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium [48].

After the publication of her diary by the Russian Academy of Science [113], historians began to examine her contribution as a naturalist. They found out that, at the age of 13, Merian began observing the metamorphosis of the silkworm, reporting its entire life cycle starting from the egg. When she published her book on European caterpillars [44], the spontaneous generation of insects was still well accepted by academics and she wrote in her preface: “all caterpillars are born from eggs”. She made discoveries independently and at the same time (sometimes even before) as other renowned scientists such as Redi, Malpighi and Swammerdam [104]. Her observations helped to discredit the spontaneous generation of insects [62].

Merian was also one of the first naturalists to accurately describe the complete metamorphosis of amphibians [114] as is possible to see in Fig. 5. Her description is not as detailed as that by Leeuweenhoek and Swammerdam (who are credited), but she probably did not have access to a microscope like they did—again an informal ban aiding the obliteration of a female scientist [110]. She described the development of frog eggs and tadpole metamorphosis in her diary in 1686 [113], more than a decade before Leeuwenhoek observed the same phenomenon and reported it to the Royal Society on September 25, 1699 [115], and she provided the first representation of the amphibian Pipa pipa and Trachycephalus venulosus [110].

Metamorphosis of a frog and blue flower by Maria Sibylla Merian, circa 1701–1705. Watercolor on bodycolor on paper. The Minnich Collection The Ethel Morrison Van Derlip Fund. Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) (https://collections.artsmia.org/art/10445/metamorphosis-of-a-frog-and-blue-flower-attributed-to-maria-sibylla-merian)

Another authorship denied to Merian is the observation and report of one of the first determinations of the mechanism of parasitism and parasitoidism [44]. She was the first to observe and document the metamorphosis of tropical insects, the first to illustrate many of the tropical plants in detail, and one of the first to offer a color edition of tropical species. For example, she first documented the plant Inga edulis [7, 48].

Linnaeus, considered to be the father of modern taxonomy, used Merian's work to name more than one hundred species, with Maria Sibylla's work being one of the main references for tropical species of insects and plants [10, 62, 104, 111, 114]. Over the centuries, species names have been substituted. The specific epithet merianella has been abandoned. For example, Eulamprotes wilkella (Linnaeus, 1758), which replaced Tinea merianella, and Micropterix aureatella (Scopoli, 1763), which replaced Phalaena merianella [116]. One of the names of the frog Trachycephalus venulosus, which was illustrated for the first time by her, was Rana meriana, which credited the discovery to Maria Sibylla Merian [110]. The specific epithet “merianella” is still used, however, in minor frequency than initially.

Her work was copied in the eighteenth century and influenced many later naturalists, such as Eleazar Albin, August Johann, Rosel von Rosenhof and Mark Catesby. Rosenhof, in his work on German frogs [117], included images of frogs in their habitat that resemble her work. Eleazar Albin referred to Maria Sibylla's early books in his compositions [118]. Mark Catesby’s work “Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands” [119] is similar to Sibylla's work in design, length and composition, but he only cites her work to criticize errors; he pointed out that she misunderstood the depiction of the cashew nut. It is well established that all the naturalists cited were familiar with her work [110].

Natural history was becoming an academic discipline and, at the same time, the name of Maria Sibylla Merian was being suppressed from the history of science [63]. Unlike most naturalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Merian acknowledged the help of enslave people, mainly African and indigenous women, in recognizing species and in gaining knowledge about the uses of plant species [[7], see the preface and illustration number 45]. Maria Sibylla's work is a compendium of women's knowledge written by a woman [111].

Etheridge [111] questions whether and how gender relations in Europe influenced knowledge about plants that naturalists collected in other cultures. In several communities, women and the elderly are essential in retaining traditional knowledge about medicinal plants [120]. This raises the possibility that inequality between men and women may have influenced the underestimation of the knowledge held and propagated by women.

Despite being related to different contexts and specific particularities, the way in which Maria Sibylla describes an abortifacient plant [7] stands out, differing in many aspects when compared to other male naturalists. Hans Sloane [11] and Alexander von Humboldt [121], for example, described abortifacient plants and it can be seen from their observations that, as a result of their time, these naturalists did not understand what could justify the use of this type of resource [60]. In contrast, Merian describes abortifacient plants as a resistance tool for enslaved women to control their reproduction [[7], see illustration number 45], transcribing a dialogue she had with women about believing that, by being aborted, their children would be born free [111].

This recognition of how unfair slavery was, present not only in the section about an abortifacient plant, also contributed to the erasure of the naturalist [60]. This position of hers was criticized, using another mechanism described by Russ [107], called pollution of agency, which consists of spreading the idea that women make themselves ridiculous by occupying spaces that were denied to them, showing them as neurotic, unpleasant, unlovable, abnormal, etc.

In the nineteenth century, Lansdown Guilding, a British naturalist best known for his work on Caribbean fauna and flora, published a review of Merian's work in the Magazine of Natural History (1834) [122]. His article was brutal and racist, openly criticizing her for crediting Africans and indigenous people who helped her. He called her work worthless, meaningless, unimportant, a judgment he justified based on his misconceptions. He cited errors in coloring, present only in non-original editions, such as a fruit that should be yellow (it was yellow in the original) and an insect that could not be red (it was not red), suggesting that she lied.

Contemporary reviewers criticized her for being a peculiar woman with strange interests, fearing that her travel to distant places would set a bad example for other women [114]. In an article published in 1834, William S. MacLeay, a British entomologist, criticized a book illustration for showing a tarantula attacking a bird (Fig. 6) [123]. Tests were conducted to prove that spiders could not attack a bird [