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ISSN 2159-9270
REVIEW
From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s
Rights in Gilded Age America
by Kimberly A Hamlin
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 256 pages
reviewed by Tina Gianquitto
For anyone curious about the reception of evolutionary theory by women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Kimberly A Hamlin’s From Eve to Evolution: Darwin,
Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America is mandatory reading. Her textured
and richly researched book addresses a substantial void in our understanding of the reception and application of evolutionary theory in the United States, offering the first fulllength investigation into women’s engagement with evolutionary theory and the role that
the theory played in the women’s rights movement. Women political activists, writers, intellectuals, and scientists of the period have been largely left out of the histories of evolutionary science in America. Yet evolutionary theory, writ large, in fact provided women’s rights
activists of the Gilded Age—the Darwinian feminists—with a foundation on which to organize their calls for everything from co-education to reproductive autonomy for women.
In her compelling book, Hamlin follows the lives and works of key late-century suffragists who enlisted the aid of scientific research in feminist causes. Thus, instead of focusing
on the well-known narrative of “the ways in which science was used to thwart women’s
advancement,” Hamlin asks: “In what ways did women use science for feminist purposes?”
(page 197, note 6). She demonstrates how, instead of rejecting science as sexist, women
of the later nineteenth century recognized the “radical potential of science” for feminist
causes, specifically “the extent to which discussions of women’s rights hinged…on the
scientific study of women’s bodies” (page 22). Hamlin makes her case for the eager embrace of evolutionary theory by women’s rights activists and others by illuminating “the
long legacy” of the biblical Eve. She begins with her study with a clear premise: Darwinian feminists found in evolutionary theory a powerful way to repudiate “Eve’s curse.”
The popular idea of Eve, based on the Genesis story detailing “Eve’s secondary creation,
sin, and subsequent curse,” served, as Hamlin notes, “as a ‘cautionary tale about allowing women too much … influence’” (page 30). Religious and political leaders, as well as
various artists, latched on to the “legacy of Eve” as a powerful rhetorical tool in efforts to
circumscribe women’s educational, political and professional ambitions within the narrow
domestic realm.
For the Darwinian feminists—women’s rights reformers such as Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Eliza Burt Gamble, Helen Hamilton Gardener, and Margaret Sanger, among others—the hurdle that the “legacy of Eve”
presented could only be effectively overcome by evolutionary theory. As Hamlin notes,
“feminism and Darwinism were bound together as examples of new ideas that threatened
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to disrupt the traditional order” (page 33). More specifically, Hamlin uncovers the various
ways in which suffragists and others tactically deployed evolutionary theory in general
and The Descent of Man in particular to offer an “alternative creation story,” one that
undermined the biblical narrative of Eve’s subordination to Adam. For instance, suffragist Catherine Waugh McCulloch cleverly aligned scientific thought and Genesis creation,
reasoning that “scientists of today quite agree with the Genesis parable concerning the
creation”: “creation was in the ascending scale, first the lower creatures, then the higher,
then man, and last at the apex the more complex woman” (page 39). Although McCulloch
overlaid a progressive narrative on evolutionary processes, her point is nevertheless clear:
“from an evolutionary standpoint, Eve’s creation from Adam provided evidence for female
superiority” (page 39). Of course, not all women’s rights activists embraced evolutionary
theory, and Hamlin sets internal controversies among suffragists and others firmly in the
context of larger debates over both evolutionary theory and the role that religion should
play in American culture.
Religious considerations were important, but they were not the only factors influencing the
reception of Darwinian evolution among women activists. In illustration, Hamlin turns in
subsequent chapters to the turbulent twenty-year period after the publication of The Descent of Man (from the 1870s to the 1890s), focusing attention on the “science of feminine
humanity”—and the fierce and highly publicized debates over the physical basis of sex
difference and the “sex” of the mind. Throughout, Hamlin uncovers the links between the
biological study of the human female in the era and the larger issues of women’s access to
higher education and to their greater participation in both formal and informal scientific
networks during the period. She provides valuable information here about women’s engagement in scientific activities, explaining that hundreds of women published (and read)
scientifically oriented articles, enrolled in science classes, and participated in scientific
discussions in women’s clubs after the publication of The Descent of Man (page 60). At
the same time, Hamlin notes that, despite early successes in shaping the ways in which
women’s bodies and experiences should be studied, by the end of the century, the attempts
to establish a “science of feminine humanity” were largely abandoned by women’s rights
activists.
What Darwinian feminists did not abandon, however, was the central theme of equality
versus difference, asking: Was it possible to be both biologically different and politically
equal? As Hamlin aptly demonstrates, the responses to this question from both advocates
and opponents of women’s advancement hinged on the image of woman-as-mother. Significantly, maternity and motherhood, when viewed through the evolutionary lens, reinforced both the argument against women’s education and professional work as well as
supported an evolutionarily tinged redefinition of motherhood (page 23). Rights detractors
argued that maternity was a sacred duty; intellectual, physical, or professional activities,
by threatening the health of the child, “detracted from this sacred duty and imperiled the
human race” leading eventually, they claimed in a panic, to “race suicide” (page 23). But
rights advocates argued differently—they instead used evolutionary theory to blur the
lines between human and non-human, seeing in the domestic and labor arrangements of
the animal world analogues for human behavior. Non-human animals, seen as evolutionary kin, were not permanently disabled by pregnancy, nor were their offspring harmed by
maternal labor. Why, they queried, should humans be?
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Hamlin examines responses to these questions, and to the related issues of female choice
and women’s reproductive autonomy, in illuminating chapters on the lives and work of
such rights pioneers as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Eliza Burt
Gamble, and Margaret Sanger, the nation’s premier birth control advocate. These chapters,
which demonstrate women linking reform platforms to the details of evolutionary theory
are among the most compelling of the book, although a quibble with Hamlin’s text also
arises: a more finely-tuned discussion of the details of Darwinian evolutionary theory,
together with the popular readings and misreadings of that theory, would be very useful
here. Nevertheless, Hamlin’s examples of feminist intellectual engagement with evolutionary theory are fascinating.
For instance, Hamlin not only describes Blackwell’s theoretical examination of “gender
equivalence” and the redistribution of domestic labor, she also outlines the ways in which
Blackwell succeeded in reproducing that theory in her own household. Hamlin also examines the legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who likewise incorporated evolutionary
rhetoric into both her examination and her experience of the economic relationship between men and women and between mother and child. Significantly, these reformers
thought seriously—and positively—about the relationship between human and animal at
the core of Darwinian evolution. For them, “animal–human kinship” became a cornerstone
of feminist calls for fit, healthy, and active pregnancies and the experiences of non-human
mothers provided models for the “reapportionment of domestic duties to enable women to
work outside the home” (page 23).
Hamlin concludes her investigation into the influence of evolutionary theory on women’s
rights reformers with a look at one of the most controversial and provocative ideas in The
Descent of Man: female choice in the selection of male partners. According to Darwin,
female choice shaped evolutionary processes, driving sexual selection, and in turn natural selection. But female choice of male sexual mates, in all its potency, was an agency
Darwin denied human females, a denial that struck many feminist reformers as arbitrary.
Hamlin’s analysis of key feminist texts in the female choice debate, especially Gamble’s
examination of male and female choice in The Sexes in Science and History (1916) and Gilman’s Women and Economics (1898), is a worthy read, as she puts into context the most
vexing (and persistent) issues facing both the historical and contemporary women’s rights
movement: women’s economic and reproductive autonomy. Both Gamble and Gilman conclude, Hamlin tells us, that “female inequality was cultural, not natural” (page 145). Given
“choice”—and the ability to support themselves financially—women would “select better
partners and wisely limit reproduction” (page 145). Such arguments, advanced by many
feminists who also aligned themselves with socialism, as well as freethinking and utopian
communities, proved foundational to the call for “voluntary motherhood” and for the establishment of a birth control movement in America. Although Hamlin notes the uncomfortable affiliation such ideas and activists had with racist eugenic proposals—especially the
virulent fears of “race-suicide” that marked these debates—a more thorough discussion of
the cultural and political context of these ideas is certainly warranted.
Kimberly Hamlin explains to her readers in the opening pages that From Eve to Evolution
not only provides a “useful framework” for examining early feminist responses to Darwinian theory, it also provides a “cautionary tale.” Darwinian feminists made intellectual, if not
explicitly political, gains in the pursuit of women’s rights in the late nineteenth and early
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twentieth centuries. And yet, despite some promising starts, the historical relationship between evolutionary science and feminist thought has been profoundly marked by discord,
misunderstanding, and exclusion. In the end, biological determinism, buttressed by evolutionary theory, remained—and in some measure remains—a powerful tool in arguments
against women’s rights and women’s access to science.
About th e author
Tina Gianquitto is Associate Professor of Literature at the Colorado School of Mines. She is the author of Good Observers of Nature: American Women and the Scientific Study of the Natural World,
1820–1885 (Athens [GA]: University of Georgia Press, 2007) and the editor, with Lydia Fisher, of
America’s Darwin: Darwinian Theory and US Culture (Athens [GA]: University of Georgia Press,
2014).
Author’s address
Tina Gianquitto
Liberal Arts & International Studies
Colorado School of Mines
1005 14th Street
Golden CO 80401
[email protected]
Copyright 2015 by Tina Gianquitto; licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
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