During the rise of professional biology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, individual naturalists continued to develop private collections by modest means and often within their own homes. Despite the increasing opportunities for women to participate in the sciences, the number of women entomologists remained relatively few. The amateur entomological career of Alice Blanche Balfour, the younger sister of Arthur James Balfour, first Earl of Balfour, reveals how a confluence of personal and social factors shaped a gentlewoman's capacity to pursue her interests in natural history. This paper revises earlier images of Alice Balfour by presenting her as an accomplished amateur naturalist who balanced her avocation with the responsibility of managing the daily domestic affairs of estate.

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The founding of Britain's first horticultural college in 1889 advanced a scientific and coeducational response to three troubling national concerns: a major agricultural depression; the economic distress of single, unemployed women; and imperatives to develop the colonies. Buoyed by the technical instruction and women's movements, the Horticultural College and Produce Company, Limited, at Swanley, Kent, crystallized a transformation in the horticultural profession in which new science-based, formalized study threatened an earlier emphasis on practical apprenticeship training, with the effect of opening male-dominated trades to women practitioners. By 1903, the college closed its doors to male students, and new pathways were forged for women students interested in pursuing further scientific study. Resistance to the Horticultural College's model of science-based women's horticultural education positioned science and women as contested subjects throughout this period of horticulture's expansion in the academy.