From Eve to evolution
Subtitle: Darwin, science, and women's rights in Gilded Age America
By: Kimberly A. Hamlin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2014
Place of publication: Chicago (Illinois)
Language: eng
Number of pages: 238
ISBN-13: 9780226134611
Copyright date: 2014
Subjects: Evolution (Biology) and the social sciences; Feminism and science; History; Women's rights
First sentence: Prior to the introduction of Darwinian evolutionary theory in the late nineteenth century, the Genesis creation story not only revealed the origins of life on earth, it also explained what it meant to be human and, especially, what it meant to be male and female.
Description: This work provides a study of American women's responses to evolutionary theory and illuminates the role science played in the nineteenth-century women's rights movement. Here the author reveals how 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. 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, it si shown, in the early thinking and writing of the American birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger. In contrast to the extensive scholarship that has been dedicated to analyzing what Darwin and other males evolutionists had to say about women, this work offers information on what women themselves had to say about evolution. -- From book jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 177-228) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Evolution and the natural order; title: Eve's curse; title: "The science of feminine humanity"; title: Working women and animal mothers; title: "Female choice" and the reproductive autonomy of women; title: Conclusion.