Nineteenth-Century Women Naturalists and the Real Nature of Their Writing: The Case of Baby Buds (1895) by Ellis Ethelmer and Its Polish Translation (1903, 1905) by Róża Centnerszwerowa

No further back than the late nineteenth century, equal access to education and science was a controversial and even taboo issue. ‘A very difficult and delicate matter is treated with considerable skill, although many will think that it had better have been left alone’, read an 1896 review of Ellis Ethelmer's Baby Buds from The British Medical Journal.

This article focuses on different uses of natural science, especially botany, in children's literature at the turn of the twentieth century in Great Britain and Poland, the main case being a British botany primer for the youngest readers – actually a sex education handbook – which triggered a serious and indeed heated debate among Polish literary critics, educators, and parents, becoming an important element in the dispute over the shape of Polish education, especially girls’ education.