num_pages: 256
description: From Eve to Evolution provides the first full-length study of American womens responses to evolutionary theory and illuminates the role science played in the nineteenth-century womens rights movement. Kimberly A. Hamlin reveals how a number of nineteenth-century women raised on the idea that Eves sin forever fixed womens subordinate status embraced Darwinian evolutionespecially sexual selection theory as explained in The Descent of Man as an alternative to the creation story in Genesis. Hamlin chronicles the lives and writings of the women who combined their enthusiasm for evolutionary science with their commitment to womens rights including Antoinette Brown Blackwell Eliza Burt Gamble Helen Hamilton Gardener Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. These Darwinian feminists believed evolutionary science proved that women were not inferior to men that it was natural for mothers to work outside the home and that women should control reproduction. The practical applications of this evolutionary feminism came to fruition Hamlin shows in the early thinking and writing of the American birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger. Much scholarship has been dedicated to analyzing what Darwin and other male evolutionists had to say about women but very little has been written regarding what women themselves had to say about evolution. From Eve to Evolution adds much-needed female voices to the vast literature on Darwin in America.
language: English
title: From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America
publisher: University of Chicago Press