Book ID: CBB001422038

From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America (2014)

unapi

Hamlin, Kimberly Ann (Author)


University of Chicago Press


Publication Date: 2014
Physical Details: vii + 238 pp.; ill.; notes; index
Language: English

From Eve to Evolution provides the first full-length study of American women's responses to evolutionary theory and illuminates the role science played in the nineteenth-century women's rights movement. Kimberly A. Hamlin 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. Hamlin 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, 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.

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Reviewed By

Review Paul White (2017) Review of "From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America". Archives of Natural History (pp. 179-180). unapi

Review Megan Elias (2015) Review of "From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America". Journal of American History (pp. 266-266). unapi

Review Evelleen Richards (2015) Review of "From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 956-957). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001422038/

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Authors & Contributors
Hamlin, Kimberly Ann
Engels, Eve-Marie
Mazzeo, Marco
Werth, Barry
Stenhouse, John
Sloan, Phillip R.
Concepts
Darwinism
Evolution
Science and religion
Science and gender
Sexual selection
Science and race
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
21st century
Places
Great Britain
United States
Belfast, Ireland
Scotland
Netherlands
New Zealand
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