Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America
by Kimberly Hamlin
Buy on AmazonA study of American women's responses to evolutionary theory, illuminating the role science played in the nineteenth-century women's rights movement. A number of nineteenth-century women, raised on the idea that Eve's sin forever fixed women's subordinate status, embraced Darwinian evolution, especially sexual selection theory as explained in The Descent of Man, as an alternative to the creation story in Genesis. The author chronicles the lives and writings of the women who combined their enthusiasm for evolutionary science with their commitment to women's rights, including Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Eliza Burt Gamble, Helen Hamilton Gardener, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.…
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"We forget what the decades in the run-up to women finally getting the vote were like. There was a huge amount of intellectual debate amongst women. Darwin’s theories played an important role in helping to rethink what it meant to be female. Evolution painted a new story of the past that countered religious narratives, and in some ways liberated women from conservative religious expectations. Although, of course, Darwin also believed that women were the intellectually inferior sex, almost less evolved than men. Hamlin beautifully captures the state of debate at the time, and profiles the incredible women thinkers engaging with these fresh scientific ideas."
Scientific Differences between Women and Men · fivebooks.com