Wars of the Roses

During the latter half of the eighteenth century, opposition to the sexual theory intensified among social and religiously conservative asexualists who felt threatened by the political theories of the Enlightenment. For some, the Linnaean system was a stalking horse for libertinism, radical Jacobinism, feminism and anarchy. They maintained their ideological purity citing philosophical, religious and pedagogical reasons for rejection. Among the opponents were the Marquis de Condorcet, Hans Möller and William Smellie. Lazzaro Spallanzi and Charles Alston tried, but failed, to repeat Camerarius’s experiments. Flowers were so feminized symbolically the idea that most flowers were hermaphroditic seemed perverse, but Mary Wollstonecraft attacked hyper-feminine poetic metaphors for women as inimical to the struggle for equality. Meanwhile, hybridization experiments by Joseph Gottlieb Koelreuter eliminated the last rational objection to the sexual theory and demolished the preformationist theory, in both ovist and spermist versions. Christian Konrad Sprengel laid the foundation for floral ecology.