Skip to content
You are not logged in |Login  
     
Limit search to available items
Record:   Prev Next
Resources
More Information
book
BookPrinted Material
Author Hamlin, Kimberly A., author.

Title From Eve to evolution : Darwin, science, and women's rights in Gilded Age America / Kimberly A. Hamlin.

Publication Info. Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Item Status

Location Call No. Status OPAC Message Public Note Gift Note
 Moore Stacks  HQ1191.U6 H36 2014    Available  ---
Description vii, 238 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 177-228) and index.
Contents Introduction: Evolution and the natural order -- Eve's curse -- "The science of feminine humanity" -- Working women and animal mothers -- "Female choice" and the reproductive autonomy of women -- Conclusion.
Summary 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.
Subject Feminism and science -- United States -- History -- 19th century.
Feminism and science.
United States.
History.
Chronological Term 19th century
Subject Evolution (Biology) and the social sciences -- History -- 19th century.
Women's rights -- United States -- History -- 19th century.
Women's rights.
Evolution (Biology) and the social sciences.
Darwin, Charles (Charles Robert), 1809-1882.
Chronological Term 1800 - 1899
Genre/Form History.
ISBN 022613461X (cloth) (alkaline paper)
9780226134611 (cloth) (alkaline paper)
9780226134758 (e-book)