Erin Zimmerman is a scientist, journalist, and mother. In her recent book, Unrooted: Botany, Motherhood, and the Fight to Save an Old Science, Zimmerman successfully captures the challenges surrounding woman and childbearing people in academia through her personal journey.
By walking readers through her thoughts and encounters, Zimmerman highlights the mental and physical toll that being an academic and mother has on a person. Her truthful and elegant writing voices the concerns that women have been experiencing, mostly in solitude, for the entirety of science’s existence as a professional career.
The interpersonal conflicts of a work-life balance in science.
Zimmerman discusses her time working in herbaria and collecting plant specimens, while navigating the conflicts of life as a woman. She reveals her difficulties dealing with creating a functional work-life balance in a field that praises those without one, a common issue for many in academia and science that certainly needs to be addressed.
I desperately wanted people to see me as a professional and not just a harried mother in over her head. I tried to work harder to make-up for any lost time and to show that I was dedicated to the project, but it felt like the delicate balance I’d established was starting to disintegrate.
As a new mother, she is able to convey the major gaps in support and the difficulties or working in a field that is not structured for family-oriented women. She emphasizes the inequalities between genders in academia especially as a mother, and the additional difficulties it poses in a field where jobs opportunities are fleeting.
[My supervisor] talked sometimes about raising his two now-adult children while building his career, how it had been challenging, but he’d managed it. Yet in the next breath, he’d mention that his wife had stayed home with their kids when they were young.
Having worked in herbaria across the globe, Zimmerman uses her experiences in botany to raise a red flag on the critical need to preserve plant specimens for the future and continue herbarium research.
A single specimen may stand in for an entire species, gone from the living world. Or there may be many of a kind, collected over decades or centuries, that tell a story of how life for this organism changed with the climate, the air quality, or the local ecosystem.
Her rawness and honesty give a fresh view on science and personal conflicts not widely discussed in the media but are critical to science and working women everywhere. Zimmerman also provides resources for readers to get involved in botany at any stage of life or education, in an attempt to expand the field and create opportunities in science.
What can readers expect?
A realistic look into the life of a woman who undergoes the journey from graduate student to the working world, while also being a mother. Unrooted: Botany, Motherhood, and the Fight to Save an Old Science, is a unique combination of personal narrative and botanical history that takes readers through the personal journey of a woman who experienced what many others have or have considered going through at some point in their career.
Zimmerman gives the full scope of the tribulations experienced by a person working in an overlooked field and as a woman in science. This book is great for adults just starting out their careers or are looking for a fresh perspective from different experiences, and is relatable to anyone in academia or other intense careers. Her reality will relate to women of all ages who have been or still are in the rigor of academia and open the eyes of those who are not.
