Global Knowledge in a Local World

In April 1922 Lady Charlotte Wheeler Cuffe, known affectionately through her lifetime as ‘Shadow’, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Women were officially admitted as members from 1913 onwards, and by 1922 they represented 7.7 per cent of the Society’s total membership. ¹ About half these members were explorers/travellers, a quarter scientists/teachers and the remaining quarter professional women. This honour bestowed on Wheeler Cuffe was in recognition of her contribution to plant hunting and exploration, botanical illustration, and anthropological knowledge accumulated about Burma during the quarter of a century (1897–1922) she spent there with her husband as part of the colonial service. As Avril Maddrell has noted, ‘Those who travelled with husbands or family on imperial duty … represent a continuation of the strong link between the RGS and state institutions and interests’. ² Moreover Wheeler Cuffe also represented a burgeoning cohort of female naturalists who officially, and more often unofficially, were participating in and producing accounts of their work in natural history from the early-Victorian period onward. ³ From travelogues and specimen collections to botanical drawings and compendia of flora women were the producers of significant bodies of knowledge about the natural world both at the local domestic scale of their home lives as well as at a more global scale through travel or overseas residency, often as part of Britain’s wider colonial project. ⁴