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COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS division of the “eight-hour husband” work- ing outside the home and the “fourteen-hour wife” within it. Feminist intellectual Charlotte Perkins Gilman drew on Darwin’s sexual- TTMANN/CORBIS selection theory to argue that women’s eco- BE nomic dependence on men was unnaturally skewing evolution to promote “excessive sex- ual distinctions”. She proposed that economic and reproductive freedom for women would restore female autonomy in choice of mate — which Darwin posited was universal in nature, except in humans — and put human evolutionary progress back on track. L LIB. OF CONGRESS; R: TIME LIFE PICTURES/GETTY; Darwin himself opposed birth control and Women’s advocates (left to right) Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Antoinette Brown Blackwell and Maria Mitchell. asserted the natural inferiority of human females. The adult female, he wrote in The EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY Descent of Man (1871), is the “intermediate between the child and the man”. Neverthe- less, appeals to Darwinist ideas by birth-con- trol advocates such as Margaret Sanger led Darwin and one critic to bemoan in 1917 that “Darwin was the originator of modern feminism”. Feminism in the late nineteenth century was marked by the racial and class politics the women of the era’s reform movements. Blackwell’s and Gilman’s views that women should work outside the home, for example, depended on Sarah S. Richardson relishes a study of how nineteenth- the subjugated labour of lower-class minor- century US feminists used the biologist’s ideas. ity women to perform household tasks. And Sanger’s birth-control politics appealed to contemporary fears of race and class ‘sui- wo misplaced narratives dominate physician Edward cide’. From Eve to Evolution acknowledges thinking on the historical relationship Clarke’s 1873 Sex in this legacy, but does not dwell on it. between feminism and evolutionary Education, which For example, Hamlin argues that the Tbiology. The first is that nineteenth-century warned that women’s anti-biological determinist arguments of Darwinists presented a chorus of sexist views ‘enfeebling’ men- white nineteenth-century feminists are of women. The second is that feminism and strual cycles legislated more “nuanced and complex” than gener- evolutionary biology are wholly independent against their partici- ally appreciated and were a resource “not intellectual movements. In From Eve to Evo- pation in higher edu- just for white women but for everyone”. On lution, historian Kimberly Hamlin counters cation, they began to Gilman, Hamlin asserts that “at least most these misconceptions with the most compre- From Eve to articulate the need for of the time, Gilman meant the ‘human race’ hensive account so far of how nineteenth- Evolution: Darwin, better science relating when she wrote the ‘race’ and that racism is Science, and century US men and women appropriated Women’s Rights to women. With lively not the defining characteristic of most of her Darwinian ideas to argue for the equality of in Gilded Age examples, Hamlin writings”. Although context is clearly cru- the sexes in the domestic and public spheres. America relates how educated cial to a careful reading of this complicated The US women’s movement gathered KIMBERLY A. HAMLIN middle- and upper- intellectual history, it is hard to evaluate such fresh energy in the decades following the University of Chicago class US women of claims without a more detailed treatment of end of the civil war in 1865, launching calls Press: 2014. the era, such as phy- the words and deeds of these feminist writers for women’s suffrage, access to property sician Mary Putnam on the matter of race and class. rights and education, and the freedom to Jacobi, astronomer Maria Mitchell and Nonetheless, this deeply researched and divorce. Hamlin shows how prominent author and suffragist Helen Hamilton Gar- richly detailed picture of US feminism in the women’s rights advocates enlisted science dener, argued for the importance of training late nineteenth century and early twentieth “as a force for positive change”, even when women in science and for a science of sex century is an important contribution to our excluded from lecture halls, as they often free of misogynistic bias. Gardener’s brain, understanding of the interrelation of gen- were. She demonstrates that evolutionary left to science to prove the equality of male der politics and science. From Eve to Evolu- science offered US feminists a fresh intel- and female intellect, still stands on display tion firmly corrects the mistaken view that lectual framework from which to challenge at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. evolutionary biology and feminism are at the biblical dogma that stipulated women’s Other US feminists summoned the evi- odds. And it reveals a more diverse dialogue inferiority to men and submissive role in dence of biology to argue for more-egalitarian around the science of sexual equality in the domestic life. For social activists such as marriage and child-rearing arrangements, era than is generally appreciated. ■ Elizabeth Cady Stanton, evolutionary theory and for the importance of women’s work out- “provided a new way for women to view the side the home. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Sarah S. Richardson is a science historian universe and their role in it, and a new lan- the first US woman to be ordained a minister, specializing in women, gender and sexuality guage to describe what they saw”. cited Darwin’s evidence of male provisioning at Harvard University in Cambridge, As feminists rallied to respond to anti- and female extra-reproductive labour in ani- Massachusetts. Her latest book is Sex Itself. woman screeds such as Harvard-trained mals to argue against the Victorian domestic e-mail: [email protected] 424 | NATURE | VOL 509 | 22 MAY 2014 © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.

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