Meanwhile, in their popular 1889 book The Evolution of Sex, Scottish biologist Patrick Geddes and naturalist John Arthur Thomson argue that women and men are as distinct from each other as passive eggs and energetic sperm. ‘The differences may be exaggerated or lessened, but to obliterate them it would be necessary to have all the evolution over again on a new basis. What was decided among the prehistoric Protozoa cannot be annulled by Act of Parliament,’ they state, in an obvious dig at women who were fighting for their right to vote. Geddes and Thomson’s argument, stretched out over more than three hundred pages, and including tables and line drawings of animals, outlines how they see women as being complementary to men – as homemakers to the male breadwinners – but certainly not able to achieve the same as them.
Another example is Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, remembered by history as the father of eugenics, and for his devotion to measuring the physical differences between people. Among his quirkier projects was a ‘beauty map’ of Britain, produced around the end of the nineteenth century by secretly watching women in various regions and grading them from the ugliest to the most attractive. Brandishing their rulers and microscopes, men like Galton hardened sexism into something that couldn’t be challenged. By gauging and standardising they coated what might otherwise have been seen as ridiculous enterprises with the appearance of scientific respectability.
Taking on this male scientific establishment wasn’t easy. But for nineteenth-century women – women like Caroline Kennard – everything was at stake. They were fighting for their fundamental rights. They weren’t even recognised as full citizens. It wasn’t until 1882 that married women in the United Kingdom were allowed to own and control property in their own right. And in 1887 only two-thirds of US states allowed a married woman to keep her own earnings.
Kennard and others in the women’s movement realised that the intellectual debate over the inferiority of women could only be won on intellectual grounds. Like the male biologists attacking them, they would have to deploy science to defend themselves. English writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who lived a century earlier, urged women to educate themselves: ‘… till women are more rationally educated, the progress of human virtue and improvement in knowledge must receive continual checks’, she wrote in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. Prominent Victorian suffragists made similar arguments, using what education they were allowed to have to question what was being written about women.
The new and controversial science of evolutionary biology became a particular target. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, believed to be the first woman ordained by an established Protestant denomination in the United States, complained that Darwin had neglected sex and gender issues. Meanwhile, American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of the feminist short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, turned Darwinism around to put the case for reform. She thought that half the human race had been kept at a lower stage of evolution by the other half. With equality, women would finally have the chance to prove themselves equal to men. She was ahead of her time in many ways, arguing against a stereotyped division of toys for boys and girls, and foreseeing how a growing army of working women might change society in the future.
But there was one Victorian thinker who took on Darwin on his own turf, writing her own book that passionately and persuasively argued on scientific grounds that women were not inferior to men.
‘It seemed clear to me that the history of the life on the earth presents an unbroken chain of evidence going to prove the importance of the female.’
Unconventional ideas can appear from anywhere, even the most conventional of places.
The township of Concord in Michigan is one of those places. Home to scarcely more than three thousand people, it’s an almost entirely white corner of America. The area’s biggest attraction is a preserved post-Civil War house covered in pale clapboard siding. In 1894, not long after this house was built, a middle-aged schoolteacher from right here in Concord published some of the most radical ideas of her age. Her name was Eliza Burt Gamble.
We don’t know much about Gamble’s personal life, except that she was a woman who had no choice but to be independent. She lost her father when she was two, her mother when she was sixteen. Left without support, she made a living by teaching at local schools. According to some reports, she went on to achieve impressive heights in her career. She also married and had three children, two of whom died before the century was out. Gamble’s life could have been mapped out for her, the way it was for most middle-class women of her time. She could have been a quiet, submissive housewife of the kind celebrated by Coventry Patmore. Instead, she joined the growing suffrage movement to fight for the equal rights of women, becoming one of the most important campaigners in her region. In 1876 she organised the first women’s suffrage conference in her home state of Michigan.
Gamble believed there was more to the cause than securing legal equality. One of the biggest sticking points in the fight for women’s rights, she recognised, was that society had come to believe that women were born to be lesser than men. Convinced that this was wrong, in 1885 she set out to find hard proof for herself. She spent a year studying the collections at the Library of Congress in the US capital, scouring the books for evidence. She was driven, she wrote, ‘with no special object in view other than a desire for information’.
Evolutionary theory, despite what Charles Darwin had written about women, actually offered great promise to the women’s movement. It opened a door to a revolutionary new way of understanding humans. ‘It meant a way to be modern,’ says Kimberly Hamlin, whose 2014 book From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America charts women’s responses to Darwin. Evolution was an alternative to religious stories that painted woman as merely man’s spare rib. Christian models for female behaviour and virtue were challenged. ‘Darwin created a space where women could say that maybe the Garden of Eden didn’t happen … and this was huge. You cannot overestimate how important Adam and Eve were in terms of constraining and shaping people’s ideas about women.’
Although not a scientist herself, through Darwin’s work Gamble realised just how devastating the scientific method could be. If humans were descended from lesser creatures, just like all other life on earth, then it made no sense for women to be confined to the home or subservient to men. These obviously weren’t the rules in the rest of the animal kingdom. ‘It would be unnatural for women to sit around and be totally dependent on men,’ Hamlin tells me. The story of women could be rewritten.
But, for all the latent revolutionary power in his ideas, Darwin himself never believed that women were the intellectual equals of men. This wasn’t just a disappointment to Gamble, but judging from her writing, a source of great anger. She believed that Darwin, though correct in concluding that humans evolved like every other living thing on earth, was clearly wrong when it came to the role that women had played in human evolution.
Her criticisms were passionately laid out in a book she published in 1894, called The Evolution of Woman: An Inquiry into the Dogma of Her Inferiority to Man. Marshalling history, statistics and science, this was Gamble’s piercing counter-argument to Darwin and other evolutionary biologists. She angrily tweezed out their inconsistencies and double standards. The peacock might have had the bigger feathers, she argued, but the peahen still had to exercise her faculties in choosing the best mate. And while on the one hand Darwin suggested that gorillas were too big and strong to become higher social creatures like humans, at the same time he used the fact that men are on average physically bigger than women as evidence of their superiority.
He had also failed to notice, Gamble wrote, that the human qualities more commonly associated with women – cooperation, nurture, protectiveness, egalitarianism and altruism – must have played a vital role in human progress. In evolutionary terms, drawing assumptions about women’s abilities from the way they happened to be treated by society at that moment was narrow-minded and dangerous. Women had been systematically suppressed over the course of human history by men and their power structures, Gamble argued. They weren’t naturally inferior; they just seemed that way because they hadn’t