Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong – and the New Research That’s Rewriting The Story. Angela Saini

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СКАЧАТЬ on a furious note: ‘Let the “environment” of women be similar to that of men and with his opportunities, before she be fairly judged, intellectually his inferior, please.’

      I don’t know what Darwin made of Mrs Kennard’s reply. There’s no more correspondence between them in the library’s archives.

      What we do know is that she was right – Darwin’s scientific ideas mirrored society’s beliefs at the time, and they coloured his judgement of what women were capable of doing. His attitude belonged to a train of scientific thinking that stretched back at least as far as the Enlightenment, when the spread of reason and rationalism through Europe changed the way people thought about the human mind and body. ‘Science was privileged as the knower of nature,’ Londa Schiebinger explains to me. Women were portrayed as belonging to the private sphere of the home, and men as belonging to the public sphere. The job of nurturing mothers was to educate new citizens.

      By the middle of the nineteenth century, when Darwin was carrying out his research, the image of the weaker, intellectually simpler woman was a widespread assumption. Society expected wives to be virtuous, passive and submissive to their husbands. It was an ideal illustrated in a popular verse of the time, The Angel in the House, by the English poet Coventry Patmore: ‘Man must be pleased; but him to please/is woman’s pleasure.’ Many thought that women were naturally unsuited to careers in the professions. They didn’t need to have public lives. They didn’t need the vote.

      When these prejudices met evolutionary biology the result was a particularly toxic mix, which would poison scientific research for decades. Prominent scientists made no secret of the fact that they thought women were the inferior half of humanity, in the same way that Darwin had.

      Indeed, it’s hard today to read some of the things that famous Victorian thinkers wrote about women and not be shocked. In an article published in Popular Science Monthly in 1887, the evolutionary biologist George Romanes, a friend of Darwin’s, patronisingly praises women’s ‘noble’ and ‘lovable’ qualities, including ‘beauty, tact, gayety, devotion, wit’. He also insists, as Darwin had, that women can never hope to reach the same intellectual heights as men, however hard they try: ‘From her abiding sense of weakness and consequent dependence, there also arises in woman that deeply-rooted desire to please the opposite sex which, beginning in the terror of a slave, has ended in the devotion of a wife.’

      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 СКАЧАТЬ