Inferior

by Angela Saini

  By the middle of the nineteenth century, when Darwin was carrying out his research, the image of the weaker, intellectually simpler woman had hardened into 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,” he wrote. Many thought 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, they turned out to be a particularly toxic mix, one that would poison scientific research for many decades. Prominent scientists made no secret that they thought women were the inferior half of humanity, the same way 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 John Romanes, a friend of Darwin’s, patronizes women with his praise of their “noble” and “lovable” qualities, including “beauty, tact, gayety, devotion, wit.” He also insists, like 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,” he writes.

  Meanwhile, in the popular 1889 book The Evolution of Sex, Scottish biologist Patrick Geddes and naturalist John Arthur Thomson argue that women and men are as different 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 to women who were fighting for their right to vote. Their argument, stretched over more than three hundred pages including tables and line drawings of animals, explains how they see women as being complementary to men, like homemakers are to breadwinners, but certainly not able to achieve the same as them.

  Another example is Darwin’s cousin, the English scientist Francis Galton, remembered by history as the father of eugenics and for his devotion to measuring the differences between people. Among his quirkier projects was a “beauty map” of Britain, produced near the end of the nineteenth century by secretly watching local women 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 even be challenged. Being able to gauge and standardize coated what would otherwise have been seen as ridiculous enterprises with the sweet perfume of scientific respectability.

  Taking on this male scientific establishment wasn’t easy, of course. But for Victorian women—women like Caroline Kennard—everything was at stake. They were fighting for their fundamental rights. They weren’t even recognized as full citizens by their own countries. By 1887 only two-thirds of US states allowed a married woman to keep her own earnings. And it wasn’t until 1882 that married women in the United Kingdom were allowed to own and control property in their own right.

  Kennard and others in the women’s movement realized that the intellectual debate over the inferiority of women could only be won on intellectual grounds. Like the male biologists attacking them, they would also 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 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who authored the feminist short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” turned Darwinism around to argue for reform. She thought that half the human race had been kept down 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 one Victorian thinker took on Darwin on his own turf, writing a 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 fewer 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 had lost her father when she was two, her mother when she was around sixteen. Left without support, she made a living by teaching at local public 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. She could have been a quiet, submissive housewife of the kind celebrated by the poet 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 organized 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 recognized, was that society had come to believe women were built to be lesser than men. Convinced 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, 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 to understand humans. “It meant a way to be modern,” says historian 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 man’s spare rib. Christian models for female behavior 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 realized just how devastating the scientific method could be. If humans were descended from lesser creatures, the same as 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 r
ewritten.

  In reality of course, for all the latent revolutionary power in his ideas, Darwin himself never believed that women were the intellectual equals of men. And 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. “It was shocking,” says Hamlin. Marshalling history, statistics, and science, this was Gamble’s piercing counterargument 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 on the one hand, Darwin suggested that gorillas were too big and strong to become higher social creatures like humans. Yet 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 associated more commonly 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 been allowed the chance to develop their talents.

  Gamble suggested that Darwin hadn’t accounted for the existence of powerful women in some tribal societies either, which might prove that the supremacy of men now was not how it had always been. The ancient Hindu text the Mahabharata, which she picks out as an example, spoke of women being unconfined and independent before marriage was invented. So she couldn’t help but wonder if “the law of equal transmission” applied to men as well as women: might it not be possible that males had been dragged along by the superior female of the species?

  “When a man and woman are put into competition, both possessed of every mental quality in equal perfection, save that one has higher energy, more patience and a somewhat greater degree of physical courage, while the other has superior powers of intuition, finer and more rapid perceptions and a greater degree of endurance,. . .the chances of the latter for gaining the ascendancy will doubtless be equal to those of the former,” she argues.

  Eliza Burt Gamble’s message, like that of other scientific suffragists, proved popular. Their provocative message was that women had been cheated out of the lives they deserved, that equality was in fact their biological right. “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,” Gamble writes in the preface to the revised edition, which came out in 1916.

  But even an army of readers and the support of fellow activists couldn’t help win biologists around to her point of view. Her arguments were doomed to never fully enter the scientific mainstream, only circulate outside it.

  But she never gave up. She marched on in her campaign for women’s rights and continued writing for the press. Fortunately, she lived just long enough to see her own work as well as that of the wider movement gain real strength. In 1893 New Zealand became the first self-governing country to grant women the vote. The battle would take until 1918 in Britain, although only for women over the age of thirty. And when Gamble died in Detroit in 1920, it was just a month after the United States ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, which prohibited citizens from being denied the right to vote because of their sex.

  While the political battle was a success, the war to change people’s minds was taking much longer. “Gamble’s ideas were praised in reform magazines and her writing style was generally praised, but the scientific and mainstream press balked at her conclusions and at her pretensions to write about ‘science,’” says Hamlin. The Evolution of Woman was quite widely reviewed in newspapers and academic journals, but scarcely left a dent on science. “They were just like, ‘Those silly women and their silly ideas.’”

  A scathing book review in the American Journal of Sociology in 1915 reveals just how desperately some scientists clung to their prejudices, even when society around them was changing. “It must have been a sense of humor which led the publishers to put this volume in their ‘Science Series,’” wrote the Texas University sociologist and liberal thinker Albert Wolfe about Sex Antagonism, the latest work of the respected British biologist Walter Heape. Heape had taken his considerable scientific knowledge of reproductive biology and applied it somewhat less objectively to society, arguing that equality between the sexes was impossible because men and women were built for different roles.

  Many biologists at the time agreed with Heape, including Scottish naturalist and coauthor of The Evolution of Sex, John Arthur Thompson, who gave the book a positive review. But Wolfe immediately saw the danger in scientists like him overstepping their expertise. “It is a fine illustration of the sort of mental pathology a scientist, especially a biologist, can exhibit when, with slight acquaintance with other fields than his own, he ventures to dictate from ‘natural law’ (with which Mr Heape claims to be in most intimate acquaintance) what social and ethical relation shall be,” Wolfe mocked in his review. “He sees only disaster and perversion in the modern woman movement.”

  Parts of science remained doggedly slow to change. Evolutionary theory progressed pretty much as always, learning few lessons from critics such as Albert Wolfe, Caroline Kennard, and Eliza Burt Gamble. It’s hard to picture the directions in which science might have gone if in those important days when Charles Darwin developed his theories of evolution, society hadn’t been as sexist as it was. We can only imagine how different our understanding of women might be now if Gamble had been taken more seriously. Historians today have regrettably described her radical perspective as the road not taken.

  In the century after Gamble’s death, researchers became only more obsessed by sex differences, how they might pick them out, measure and catalogue them, enforcing the dogma that men are somehow better than women.

  “Finding gold in the urine of pregnant mares.”

  It’s perhaps appropriate that one of the next breakthroughs in the science of sex differences came courtesy of a castrated cock.

  In the 1920s a fresh string of discoveries in Europe would alter the way science understood the differences between women and men just as much as Charles Darwin and evolutionary theory had. They were foreshadowed by a strange experiment in 1849, carried out by a German medical professor, Arnold Adolph Berthold. He had been studying castrated cockerels, commonly known as capons. It was known that by removing their testes, these birds were left with deliciously tender meat, which made them a popular delicacy at the time. Aside from their meat, live capons looked different from normal cocks. They were more docile. They could also be spotted by a characteristic red comb on top of their heads and unusually droopy red wattles.

  The question for Berthold was, why?

  He took the testes from normal cockerels and transplanted them into capons to see what happened. Remarkably, he found the capons started to look and sound like cocks again. The testes were surviving inside them, and growing. It was a startling result, but still nobody at the time understood why. What was it in the testes helping the capons seemingly come back from castration?

  Progress came slowly. In 1891 another unusual experiment, this time in France by university professor Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, finally began to get to the root of the mystery. He suspected that male testes might contain some unknown substance that influenced masculinity. He proved his hypothesis the hard and fast way, by repeatedly injecting himself wit
h a concoction made out of the blood, semen, and juices from the crushed testicles of guinea pigs and dogs. He claimed (although his findings were never replicated) that this cocktail increased his strength, stamina, and mental clarity.

  The British Medical Journal reported Brown-Séquard’s findings with excitement, describing the substance he had found as the “pentacle of rejuvenescence.” Later, researchers carrying out similar experiments using female juices from guinea pig ovaries claimed to see a parallel feminizing effect. Over time, the secret juices inside all these male and female gonads were understood to be a specific set of chemicals, named “hormones.”

  We now know that sex hormones, found in the gonads, are just a handful of the fifty or more hormones produced across the human body. We can’t live without them. They are the grease to our wheels. They’ve been described as “chemical messengers,” delivering memos throughout the body to make sure it does the things it’s supposed to do, including growing and keeping a stable temperature. From insulin to thyroxine, they helpfully regulate the functions of all sorts of organs. The sex hormones in particular regulate sexual development and reproduction. The two main female ones are estrogen and progesterone. Estrogen is what causes a woman’s breasts to develop, among other things, while progesterone helps her body prepare for pregnancy. Male sex hormones are known as “androgens,” of which the most well known is testosterone.