Ginger Peach Beret

Jeanne Baret

Not only a glass-ceiling-shattering explorer, but also a groundbreaking botanist, Jeanne Baret sailed around the world as part of the first French circumnavigation of the globe, led by admiral Louis-Antoine de Bougainville from 1766 to 1769. Her journey was not smooth sailing, however. Because the French Navy did not allow women on their ships, Baret bound her breasts with linen bandages and boarded the Étoile dressed as a man. Jeanne became “Jean” in a masquerade that planted her place in history.

Trained by her family in their identification and medicinal uses, she earned a reputation as an “herb woman,” . . . won her the attention of a young widowed nobleman and fellow botanist, Dr. Philibert Commerçon.

colleagues and live-in lovers, though they never married. (2 years later)

Commerçon scored the botanist position on the round-the-world French Naval expedition. Then they hatched a plan for getting Baret on board as his assistant. Because of the aforementioned “no girls allowed” rule, the couple decided she would have to live and look like a young man during the years-long journey. (eventually she was exposed) Her exposure marked the end of the journey for Baret and Commerçon. The pair was dropped off at the French colony of Mauritius shortly thereafter. Over the course of seven years there, Baret had another baby that she gave up for adoption. Commerçon died, and Baret eventually wed a French soldier, who brought her home. . . .1775, Baret was a different woman than the girl dressed as a boy who’d departed nearly a decade before. She had seen the world. She had broken boundaries, made discoveries, lost a lover, and found a husband. Though Baret was met with no fanfare, the French government did award her a pension of 200 livres a year for her work gathering plant specimens, even remarking on record that she was an “extraordinary woman.”