From Eve to Evolution offers the 1st full-length research of yank women’s responses to evolutionary conception and illuminates the function technology performed within the nineteenth-century women’s rights circulate. Kimberly A. Hamlin finds how a couple of nineteenth-century ladies, raised at the concept that Eve’s sin eternally mounted women’s subordinate prestige, embraced Darwinian evolution—especially sexual choice conception as defined in
The Descent of Man—as a substitute for the production tale in Genesis.
Hamlin chronicles the lives and writings of the ladies who mixed their enthusiasm for evolutionary technology with their dedication to women’s rights, together with Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Eliza Burt Gamble, Helen Hamilton Gardener, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. those Darwinian feminists believed evolutionary technology proved that girls weren't not as good as males, that it was once common for moms to paintings outdoor the house, and that ladies may still keep watch over replica. the sensible purposes of this evolutionary feminism got here to fruition, Hamlin exhibits, within the early pondering and writing of the yankee contraception pioneer Margaret Sanger.
Much scholarship has been devoted to examining what Darwin and different male evolutionists needed to say approximately girls, yet little or no has been written concerning what girls themselves needed to say approximately evolution. From Eve to Evolution provides much-needed lady voices to the huge literature on Darwin in America.