ABSTRACT
Mrs. Professor Fogey, centered amongst her female pupils and surrounded by the “Wonders of the Deep”. is a recognizable, nineteenth-century stereotype of the women naturalist. (see Figure 3.1) This Punch cartoon offers a defeminized caricature of the woman teacher/ scientist. Mrs. Fogey's elderly, dark, weighty figure with prominent facial features and spectacles, contrasts starkly with the wispy, attractive, young women who are ostensibly her students. She is a masculinized womanנsexually unattractive and unresponsive. Intellectual pursuits, the cartoon suggests, rob a woman of her youth and her beauty, aspects of her person that would ultimately lead to the ideal position of wife and mother. Mr. Professor Fogey is conspicuously absent. He may well have had a hand in the education of his wife, but in picturing him here the artist would have sent the message that a partnership between men and women in the acquiring of scientific knowledge was acceptable. This is certainly not the artist's intention. Rather, attention is drawn to the fact that, as thinkers and speakers in an outdoor setting, women like Mrs. Professor Fogey threatened to moveآoth literally and figurativelyנbeyond the domestic threshold and thus beyond Victorian gender norms.
