Darwin’s Thoughts on Women
According to Charles Darwin, the central mechanism of evolution is survival of the fittest. In this concept, inferior animals are more likely to become extinct while the superior ones are more likely to thrive.1 The racism that this idea has produced has now been both well-documented and widely publicized.2 Less widely known is the fact that many evolutionists, including Darwin, taught that women were both biologically and intellectually inferior to men.
Reasons for Inferiority
According to Darwinian theory, women were less evolved than men, and because of their smaller brains, they were “eternally primitive,” childlike, less spiritual, more materialistic, and “a real danger to contemporary civilization.”3 The supposed intelligence gap that many leading Darwinists believed existed between human males and females was so large that some leading Darwinists classified them as two distinct species—males as Homo frontalis and females as Homo parietalis.4 The differences were so great that Darwin was amazed “such different beings belong to the same species.”5
Reasons for male superiority included the conclusion that war and hunting pruned the weaker men, allowing only the most fit to return home and reproduce. Women, in contrast, were not subject to these selection pressures but were protected by men, allowing the weak to survive.6
1 Darwin, C., The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, London: John Murry, 1859.
2 Bergman, J., “The History of the Human Female Inferiority Ideas in Evolutionary Biology,” Rivista di Biologia/Biology Forum 95(2):379–412, 2002.
3 Gilmore, D., Misogyny: The Male Malady, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, p. 125, 2001.
4 Love, R., Darwinism and feminism: “The ‘women question’ in The Life and Work of Olive Schreinr and Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” in Oldroyd and Langham, Eds., The Wider Domain of Evolutionary Thought, D:Reidel, Holland, pp. 113–131, 1983.
5 Rosser, S., Biology and Feminism, Twayne, New York, p. 59, 1992.
6 Dyer, G., War, Crown Publishers, New York, p. 122, 1985.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v2/n1/darwin-taught-male-superiority
