DARWIN'S TEACHING OF WOMEN'S INFERIORITY

by Jerry Bergman, Ph.D.*


The racism of evolution theory has been documented well and widely
publicized. It is known less widely that many evolutionists, including
Charles Darwin, also taught that women are biologically inferior to
men.

DARWIN'S TEACHING OF WOMEN'S INFERIORITY

by Jerry Bergman, Ph.D.*

DARWIN'S TEACHING OF WOMEN'S INFERIORITY

by Jerry Bergman, Ph.D.*

The racism of evolution theory has been documented well and widely
publicized. It is known less widely that many evolutionists, including
Charles Darwin, also taught that women are biologically inferior to
men. Darwin's ideas, including his view of women, have had a major
impact on society. In a telling indication of his attitude about women
(just before he married his cousin, Emma Wedgewood), Darwin listed the
advantages of marrying, which included: ". . . constant companion,
(friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, object to be
beloved and played with—better than a dog anyhow—Home, and
someone to take care of house . . ." (Darwin, 1958:232,233).

Darwin reasoned that as a married man he would be a "poor slave, . . .
worse than a Negro," but then reminisces that, "one cannot live the
solitary life, with groggy old age, friendless ... and childless
staring in one's face...." Darwin concludes his discussion on the
philosophical note, "there is many a happy slave" and shortly
thereafter, married (1958:234).

Darwin concluded that adult females of most species resembled the
young of both sexes and from this and the other evidence, "reasoned
that males are more evolutionarily advanced than females" (Kevles,
1986:8). Many anthropologists contemporary to Darwin concluded that
"women's brains were analogous to those of animals," which had
"overdeveloped" sense organs "to the detriment of the brain" (Fee,
1979:418). Carl Vogt, a University of Geneva natural history professor
who accepted many of "the conclusions of England's great modern
naturalist, Charles Darwin," argued that "the child, the female, and
the senile white" all had the intellect and nature of the "grown up
Negro" (1863:192). Many of Darwin's followers accepted this reasoning,
including George Romanes, who concluded that evolution caused females
to become, as Kevles postulated:

. . . increasingly less cerebral and more emotional. Romanes . . .
shared Darwin's view that females were less highly evolved than
males—ideas which he articulated in several books and many
articles that influenced a generation of biologists. Romanes
apparently saw himself as the guardian of evolution, vested with a
responsibility to keep it on the right path. . . . University of
Pennsylvania . . . paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope wrote that male
animals play a "more active pan in the struggle for existence," and
that all females, as mothers, have had to sacrifice growth for
emotional strength . . . (Kevles, 1986:8,9).

One reason nineteenth century biologists argued for women's
inferiority was because Darwin believed that "unchecked female
militancy threatened to produce a perturbance of the races" and to
"divert the orderly process of evolution" (Fee, 1979:415).

Darwin taught that human sex differences were due partly to sexual
selection, specifically because men must prove themselves physically
and intellectually superior to other men in the competition for women,
whereas women must be superior primarily in sexual attraction. Darwin
used examples of cultures that require the men to fight competitors to
retain their wives to support this conclusion. Because "the strongest
party always carries off the prize," the result is that "a weak man,
unless he be a good hunter . . . is seldom permitted to keep a wife
that a stronger man thinks worth his notice" (1896:562).

Other examples Darwin uses to illustrate his conclusion that
evolutionary forces caused men to be superior to women included animal
comparisons. Since humans evolved from animals, and "no one disputes
that the bull differs in disposition from the cow, the wild-boar from
the sow, the stallion from the mare, and, as is well known through the
keepers of menageries, the males of the larger apes from the females,"
the same must be true with human females (Darwin, 1896:563). Further,
some of the traits of women "are characteristic of the lower races,
and anti therefore of a past and lower state of civilization"
(1896:563,564). In summary, Darwin concludes that men attain,

. . . a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can
women—whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or
merely the use of the senses and hands. If two lists were made of the
most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music
(inclusive of both composition and performance), history, science, and
philosophy, with half-a-dozen names under each subject, the two lists
would not bear comparison. We may also infer, from the law of the
deviation from averages, so well illustrated by Mr. Galton, in his
work on "Hereditary Genius" that . . . the average of mental power in
man must be above that of women (Darwin, 1896:564).

Obviously, Darwin totally ignored the influence of culture, the
environment, social roles, and the relatively few opportunities that
existed in his day, as well as historically, for both men and women.

The conclusion that women are evolutionarily inferior to men is at the
core of Darwin's major contribution to evolutionary theory: natural
anti-sexual selection. Since selection in the long term prunes out the
weak, all factors which facilitate saving the weak work against
evolution. Males are subjected to more selection pressures than women,
including the supposed tack that, in earlier times, the stronger,
quicker, and more intelligent males were more apt to survive a hunt
and bring back food. Consequently, natural selection would evolve
males to a greater degree than females. Since women historically have
focused primarily on domestic, often menial, repetitive tasks and not
on hunting, they were less affected by selection pressures. Further,
the long tradition of males has been to protect women: only men went
to battle, and the common war norms forbade deliberately killing
women. War pruned the weaker men, and only the best survived to return
home and reproduce. The eminent evolutionist, Topinard, concluded that
men were superior because they fought to protect both themselves and
their wives and their families. Further, Topinard taught that males
have

all of the responsibility and the cares of tomorrow [and are] . . .
constantly active in combating the environment and human rivals, and
thus need] . . . more brains than the woman whom he must protect and
nourish . . . the sedentary women, lacking any interior occupations,
whose role is to raise children, love, and be passive (quoted in
Gould, 1981:104).

Women's inferiority—a fact taken for granted by most scientists
in the 1800s—was a major proof of evolution by natural
selection. Gould claims that there were actually "few egalitarian
scientists" at this time. Almost all believed that "Negroes and women"
were intellectually inferior. These scientists were not repeating
prejudices without extensive work and thought; they were attempting to
verify this major plank in evolutionary theory by trying to prove,
scientifically, that women were inferior.

One approach which was seized upon to substantiate that females were
generally inferior to males was to prove that their brain capacity was
smaller. Researchers first endeavored to demonstrate empirically that
female cranial capacity was smaller, and then that brain capacity was
related to intelligence, a more difficult task (Van Valen,
1974:417-423).

Among the numerous researchers that used craniology to "prove" the
intellectual inferiority of women, one of the most eminent was Paul
Broca (1824-1880). One of Europe's "most prestigious anthropologists"
and a leader in the development of physical anthropology as a science,
Broca, in 1859, founded the prestigious Anthropological Society (Fee,
1979:415). A major preoccupation of the society then was measuring
various human traits, including skulls to "delineate human groups and
assess their relative worth" (Gould, 1981:83). Broca's conclusion was
that human brains are:

. . . larger in mature adults than in the elderly, in men than in
women, in eminent men than in men of mediocre talent, in superior
races than in inferior races . . . other things equal, there is a
remarkable relationship between the development of intelligence and
the volume of the brain (Gould, 1981, p. 83).

And, as Gould notes, Broca's research was not superficial: "One cannot
read Broca without gaining enormous respect for his care in generating
data" (1981:85).

Broca was especially concerned about proving women's inferiority to
men: "Of all his comparisons between groups, Broca collected most
information on the brains of women vs. men . . ." (Gould, 1981:103).
He concluded that ''the relatively small size of the female brain
depends in part upon her physical inferiority and in part upon her
intellectual inferiority" (Gould, 1981:104). Broca also concluded that
the disparity between men's and women's brains was still becoming even
greater, which he explained was the "result of differing evolutionary
pressures upon dominant men and passive women" (Gould, 1981:104).

These views were expounded by many of the most prominent evolutionists
of Darwin's day. The thunder of the field of social psychology and a
pioneer in the collective behavior field was Gustave Le Bon
(1841-1931). This scientist, whose classic study of crowd behavior
(The Crowd; 1895) is familiar to every social science student, wrote
that even in:

. . . the most intelligent races . . . are a large number of women
whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most
developed male brains. This inferiority is so obvious that no one can
contest it for a moment; only its degree is worth discussion. . . .
Women . . . represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and .
. . are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized
man. They excel in fickleness, inconsistency, absence of thought and
logic, and incapacity to reason. Without a doubt there exist some
distinguished women, very superior to the average man but they are as
exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a
gorilla with two heads; consequently, we may neglect them entirely
(Gould, 1981:104,105).

Re-evaluation of the conclusion that females were less intelligent
found major flaws both in the evidence that "proved" women's
inferiority and in major aspects of evolution theory.

Fisher even argues that the whole theory of natural selection is
questionable, quoting Chomsky's words that:

. . . the processes by which the human mind achieved its present state
of complexity . . . are a total mystery. . . . It is perfectly safe to
attribute this development to "natural selection," so long as we
realize that there is no substance to this assertion, that it amounts
to nothing more than a belief that there is some naturalistic
explanation for these phenomena (1972:97).

Another method used to attack the female-inferiority conclusion of
evolution was to attack the evidence of evolutionary theory itself.
Fisher, for example, makes the following observation:

The difficulties of postulating theories about human origins on the
actual brain organization of our presumed fossil ancestors, with only
a few limestone impregnated skulls—most of them bashed,
shattered, and otherwise altered by the passage of millions of
years—as evidence, would seem to be astronomical (1979:113).

Actually, many of the attempts to disprove the evolutionary view that
women are intellectually inferior to men attacked the core of
evolutionary theory because it is inexorably bound with human-group
inferiority, which must exist, from which natural selection may
select. The inferiority-of-women conclusion was so ingrained in
biology, Morgan concludes, that thinkers in this area tended to "sheer
away from the sole subject of biology and origins," hoping they could
ignore it and "concentrate on ensuring that in the future things will
be different" (Morgan, 1972:2). She stresses that we cannot ignore
evolutionary biology, though, because while believing the "jungle
heritage and the evolution of man as a hunting carnivore has taken
root in man's mind as firmly as Genesis ever did." She concludes that
evolution must be reevaluated, and that scientists have "sometimes
gone astray" because of prejudice and philosophical prescriptions. She
argues that the prominent evolutionary view that women are
biologically inferior to men must be challenged, and in this and
scores of other works that preceded her, dozens of writers have
adroitly overturned the conclusion that women are biologically
inferior to men, and, by so doing, have undermined a major plank in
evolutionism.

References
Chomsky, Noam. 1972. Language and Mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and
World.

Darwin, Charles. 1896. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to
Sex. New York: D. Appleton and Company.

-----. (Nora Barlow, Ed.). 1958. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin,
1809-1882. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc.

Dyer, Gwynne. 1985. War. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc.

Fee, Elizabeth. 1979. "Nineteenth-Century Craniology: The Study of the
Female Skull." Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 53:415-433.

Fisher, Elizabeth. 1979. Woman's Creation: Sexual Evolution and the
Shaping of Society. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday.

Gould, Stephen Jay. 1981. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W.
Norton & Company.

Kevics, Beltyann. 1986. Females of the Species: Sex and Survival in
the Animal Kingdom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Morgan, Elaine. 1972. The Descent of Woman. New York: Stein and Day.

Van Valen, Leigh. 1974. "Brain Size and Intelligence in Man." American
Journal of Physical Anthropology, 40:417 423.

* Dr. Bergman is on the science faculty at Northwest State College,
Ohio.

http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-249.htm

DARWIN'S TEACHING OF WOMEN'S INFERIORITY

by Jerry Bergman, Ph.D.*

The racism of evolution theory has been documented well and widely
publicized. It is known less widely that many evolutionists, including
Charles Darwin, also taught that women are biologically inferior to
men. Darwin's ideas, including his view of women, have had a major
impact on society. In a telling indication of his attitude about women
(just before he married his cousin, Emma Wedgewood), Darwin listed the
advantages of marrying, which included: ". . . constant companion,
(friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, object to be
beloved and played with—better than a dog anyhow—Home, and
someone to take care of house . . ." (Darwin, 1958:232,233).

Darwin reasoned that as a married man he would be a "poor slave, . . .
worse than a Negro," but then reminisces that, "one cannot live the
solitary life, with groggy old age, friendless ... and childless
staring in one's face...." Darwin concludes his discussion on the
philosophical note, "there is many a happy slave" and shortly
thereafter, married (1958:234).

Darwin concluded that adult females of most species resembled the
young of both sexes and from this and the other evidence, "reasoned
that males are more evolutionarily advanced than females" (Kevles,
1986:8). Many anthropologists contemporary to Darwin concluded that
"women's brains were analogous to those of animals," which had
"overdeveloped" sense organs "to the detriment of the brain" (Fee,
1979:418). Carl Vogt, a University of Geneva natural history professor
who accepted many of "the conclusions of England's great modern
naturalist, Charles Darwin," argued that "the child, the female, and
the senile white" all had the intellect and nature of the "grown up
Negro" (1863:192). Many of Darwin's followers accepted this reasoning,
including George Romanes, who concluded that evolution caused females
to become, as Kevles postulated:

.. . . increasingly less cerebral and more emotional. Romanes . . .
shared Darwin's view that females were less highly evolved than
males—ideas which he articulated in several books and many
articles that influenced a generation of biologists. Romanes
apparently saw himself as the guardian of evolution, vested with a
responsibility to keep it on the right path. . . . University of
Pennsylvania . . . paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope wrote that male
animals play a "more active pan in the struggle for existence," and
that all females, as mothers, have had to sacrifice growth for
emotional strength . . . (Kevles, 1986:8,9).

One reason nineteenth century biologists argued for women's
inferiority was because Darwin believed that "unchecked female
militancy threatened to produce a perturbance of the races" and to
"divert the orderly process of evolution" (Fee, 1979:415).

Darwin taught that human sex differences were due partly to sexual
selection, specifically because men must prove themselves physically
and intellectually superior to other men in the competition for women,
whereas women must be superior primarily in sexual attraction. Darwin
used examples of cultures that require the men to fight competitors to
retain their wives to support this conclusion. Because "the strongest
party always carries off the prize," the result is that "a weak man,
unless he be a good hunter . . . is seldom permitted to keep a wife
that a stronger man thinks worth his notice" (1896:562).

Other examples Darwin uses to illustrate his conclusion that
evolutionary forces caused men to be superior to women included animal
comparisons. Since humans evolved from animals, and "no one disputes
that the bull differs in disposition from the cow, the wild-boar from
the sow, the stallion from the mare, and, as is well known through the
keepers of menageries, the males of the larger apes from the females,"
the same must be true with human females (Darwin, 1896:563). Further,
some of the traits of women "are characteristic of the lower races,
and anti therefore of a past and lower state of civilization"
(1896:563,564). In summary, Darwin concludes that men attain,

.. . . a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can
women—whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or
merely the use of the senses and hands. If two lists were made of the
most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music
(inclusive of both composition and performance), history, science, and
philosophy, with half-a-dozen names under each subject, the two lists
would not bear comparison. We may also infer, from the law of the
deviation from averages, so well illustrated by Mr. Galton, in his
work on "Hereditary Genius" that . . . the average of mental power in
man must be above that of women (Darwin, 1896:564).

Obviously, Darwin totally ignored the influence of culture, the
environment, social roles, and the relatively few opportunities that
existed in his day, as well as historically, for both men and women.

The conclusion that women are evolutionarily inferior to men is at the
core of Darwin's major contribution to evolutionary theory: natural
anti-sexual selection. Since selection in the long term prunes out the
weak, all factors which facilitate saving the weak work against
evolution. Males are subjected to more selection pressures than women,
including the supposed tack that, in earlier times, the stronger,
quicker, and more intelligent males were more apt to survive a hunt
and bring back food. Consequently, natural selection would evolve
males to a greater degree than females. Since women historically have
focused primarily on domestic, often menial, repetitive tasks and not
on hunting, they were less affected by selection pressures. Further,
the long tradition of males has been to protect women: only men went
to battle, and the common war norms forbade deliberately killing
women. War pruned the weaker men, and only the best survived to return
home and reproduce. The eminent evolutionist, Topinard, concluded that
men were superior because they fought to protect both themselves and
their wives and their families. Further, Topinard taught that males
have

all of the responsibility and the cares of tomorrow [and are] . . .
constantly active in combating the environment and human rivals, and
thus need] . . . more brains than the woman whom he must protect and
nourish . . . the sedentary women, lacking any interior occupations,
whose role is to raise children, love, and be passive (quoted in
Gould, 1981:104).

Women's inferiority—a fact taken for granted by most scientists
in the 1800s—was a major proof of evolution by natural
selection. Gould claims that there were actually "few egalitarian
scientists" at this time. Almost all believed that "Negroes and women"
were intellectually inferior. These scientists were not repeating
prejudices without extensive work and thought; they were attempting to
verify this major plank in evolutionary theory by trying to prove,
scientifically, that women were inferior.

One approach which was seized upon to substantiate that females were
generally inferior to males was to prove that their brain capacity was
smaller. Researchers first endeavored to demonstrate empirically that
female cranial capacity was smaller, and then that brain capacity was
related to intelligence, a more difficult task (Van Valen,
1974:417-423).

Among the numerous researchers that used craniology to "prove" the
intellectual inferiority of women, one of the most eminent was Paul
Broca (1824-1880). One of Europe's "most prestigious anthropologists"
and a leader in the development of physical anthropology as a science,
Broca, in 1859, founded the prestigious Anthropological Society (Fee,
1979:415). A major preoccupation of the society then was measuring
various human traits, including skulls to "delineate human groups and
assess their relative worth" (Gould, 1981:83). Broca's conclusion was
that human brains are:

.. . . larger in mature adults than in the elderly, in men than in
women, in eminent men than in men of mediocre talent, in superior
races than in inferior races . . . other things equal, there is a
remarkable relationship between the development of intelligence and
the volume of the brain (Gould, 1981, p. 83).

And, as Gould notes, Broca's research was not superficial: "One cannot
read Broca without gaining enormous respect for his care in generating
data" (1981:85).

Broca was especially concerned about proving women's inferiority to
men: "Of all his comparisons between groups, Broca collected most
information on the brains of women vs. men . . ." (Gould, 1981:103).
He concluded that ''the relatively small size of the female brain
depends in part upon her physical inferiority and in part upon her
intellectual inferiority" (Gould, 1981:104). Broca also concluded that
the disparity between men's and women's brains was still becoming even
greater, which he explained was the "result of differing evolutionary
pressures upon dominant men and passive women" (Gould, 1981:104).

These views were expounded by many of the most prominent evolutionists
of Darwin's day. The thunder of the field of social psychology and a
pioneer in the collective behavior field was Gustave Le Bon
(1841-1931). This scientist, whose classic study of crowd behavior
(The Crowd; 1895) is familiar to every social science student, wrote
that even in:

.. . . the most intelligent races . . . are a large number of women
whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most
developed male brains. This inferiority is so obvious that no one can
contest it for a moment; only its degree is worth discussion. . . .
Women . . . represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and .
.. . are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized
man. They excel in fickleness, inconsistency, absence of thought and
logic, and incapacity to reason. Without a doubt there exist some
distinguished women, very superior to the average man but they are as
exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a
gorilla with two heads; consequently, we may neglect them entirely
(Gould, 1981:104,105).

Re-evaluation of the conclusion that females were less intelligent
found major flaws both in the evidence that "proved" women's
inferiority and in major aspects of evolution theory.

Fisher even argues that the whole theory of natural selection is
questionable, quoting Chomsky's words that:

.. . . the processes by which the human mind achieved its present state
of complexity . . . are a total mystery. . . . It is perfectly safe to
attribute this development to "natural selection," so long as we
realize that there is no substance to this assertion, that it amounts
to nothing more than a belief that there is some naturalistic
explanation for these phenomena (1972:97).

Another method used to attack the female-inferiority conclusion of
evolution was to attack the evidence of evolutionary theory itself.
Fisher, for example, makes the following observation:

The difficulties of postulating theories about human origins on the
actual brain organization of our presumed fossil ancestors, with only
a few limestone impregnated skulls—most of them bashed,
shattered, and otherwise altered by the passage of millions of
years—as evidence, would seem to be astronomical (1979:113).

Actually, many of the attempts to disprove the evolutionary view that
women are intellectually inferior to men attacked the core of
evolutionary theory because it is inexorably bound with human-group
inferiority, which must exist, from which natural selection may
select. The inferiority-of-women conclusion was so ingrained in
biology, Morgan concludes, that thinkers in this area tended to "sheer
away from the sole subject of biology and origins," hoping they could
ignore it and "concentrate on ensuring that in the future things will
be different" (Morgan, 1972:2). She stresses that we cannot ignore
evolutionary biology, though, because while believing the "jungle
heritage and the evolution of man as a hunting carnivore has taken
root in man's mind as firmly as Genesis ever did." She concludes that
evolution must be reevaluated, and that scientists have "sometimes
gone astray" because of prejudice and philosophical prescriptions. She
argues that the prominent evolutionary view that women are
biologically inferior to men must be challenged, and in this and
scores of other works that preceded her, dozens of writers have
adroitly overturned the conclusion that women are biologically
inferior to men, and, by so doing, have undermined a major plank in
evolutionism.

References
Chomsky, Noam. 1972. Language and Mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and
World.

Darwin, Charles. 1896. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to
Sex. New York: D. Appleton and Company.

DARWIN'S TEACHING OF WOMEN'S INFERIORITY

by Jerry Bergman, Ph.D.*


The racism of evolution theory has been documented well and widely
publicized. It is known less widely that many evolutionists, including
Charles Darwin, also taught that women are biologically inferior to
men. Darwin's ideas, including his view of women, have had a major
impact on society. In a telling indication of his attitude about women
(just before he married his cousin, Emma Wedgewood), Darwin listed the
advantages of marrying, which included: ". . . constant companion,
(friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, object to be
beloved and played with—better than a dog anyhow—Home, and
someone to take care of house . . ." (Darwin, 1958:232,233).

Darwin reasoned that as a married man he would be a "poor slave, . . .
worse than a Negro," but then reminisces that, "one cannot live the
solitary life, with groggy old age, friendless ... and childless
staring in one's face...." Darwin concludes his discussion on the
philosophical note, "there is many a happy slave" and shortly
thereafter, married (1958:234).

Darwin concluded that adult females of most species resembled the
young of both sexes and from this and the other evidence, "reasoned
that males are more evolutionarily advanced than females" (Kevles,
1986:8). Many anthropologists contemporary to Darwin concluded that
"women's brains were analogous to those of animals," which had
"overdeveloped" sense organs "to the detriment of the brain" (Fee,
1979:418). Carl Vogt, a University of Geneva natural history professor
who accepted many of "the conclusions of England's great modern
naturalist, Charles Darwin," argued that "the child, the female, and
the senile white" all had the intellect and nature of the "grown up
Negro" (1863:192). Many of Darwin's followers accepted this reasoning,
including George Romanes, who concluded that evolution caused females
to become, as Kevles postulated:

. . . increasingly less cerebral and more emotional. Romanes . . .
shared Darwin's view that females were less highly evolved than
males—ideas which he articulated in several books and many
articles that influenced a generation of biologists. Romanes
apparently saw himself as the guardian of evolution, vested with a
responsibility to keep it on the right path. . . . University of
Pennsylvania . . . paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope wrote that male
animals play a "more active pan in the struggle for existence," and
that all females, as mothers, have had to sacrifice growth for
emotional strength . . . (Kevles, 1986:8,9).

One reason nineteenth century biologists argued for women's
inferiority was because Darwin believed that "unchecked female
militancy threatened to produce a perturbance of the races" and to
"divert the orderly process of evolution" (Fee, 1979:415).

Darwin taught that human sex differences were due partly to sexual
selection, specifically because men must prove themselves physically
and intellectually superior to other men in the competition for women,
whereas women must be superior primarily in sexual attraction. Darwin
used examples of cultures that require the men to fight competitors to
retain their wives to support this conclusion. Because "the strongest
party always carries off the prize," the result is that "a weak man,
unless he be a good hunter . . . is seldom permitted to keep a wife
that a stronger man thinks worth his notice" (1896:562).

Other examples Darwin uses to illustrate his conclusion that
evolutionary forces caused men to be superior to women included animal
comparisons. Since humans evolved from animals, and "no one disputes
that the bull differs in disposition from the cow, the wild-boar from
the sow, the stallion from the mare, and, as is well known through the
keepers of menageries, the males of the larger apes from the females,"
the same must be true with human females (Darwin, 1896:563). Further,
some of the traits of women "are characteristic of the lower races,
and anti therefore of a past and lower state of civilization"
(1896:563,564). In summary, Darwin concludes that men attain,

. . . a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can
women—whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or
merely the use of the senses and hands. If two lists were made of the
most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music
(inclusive of both composition and performance), history, science, and
philosophy, with half-a-dozen names under each subject, the two lists
would not bear comparison. We may also infer, from the law of the
deviation from averages, so well illustrated by Mr. Galton, in his
work on "Hereditary Genius" that . . . the average of mental power in
man must be above that of women (Darwin, 1896:564).

Obviously, Darwin totally ignored the influence of culture, the
environment, social roles, and the relatively few opportunities that
existed in his day, as well as historically, for both men and women.

The conclusion that women are evolutionarily inferior to men is at the
core of Darwin's major contribution to evolutionary theory: natural
anti-sexual selection. Since selection in the long term prunes out the
weak, all factors which facilitate saving the weak work against
evolution. Males are subjected to more selection pressures than women,
including the supposed tack that, in earlier times, the stronger,
quicker, and more intelligent males were more apt to survive a hunt
and bring back food. Consequently, natural selection would evolve
males to a greater degree than females. Since women historically have
focused primarily on domestic, often menial, repetitive tasks and not
on hunting, they were less affected by selection pressures. Further,
the long tradition of males has been to protect women: only men went
to battle, and the common war norms forbade deliberately killing
women. War pruned the weaker men, and only the best survived to return
home and reproduce. The eminent evolutionist, Topinard, concluded that
men were superior because they fought to protect both themselves and
their wives and their families. Further, Topinard taught that males
have

all of the responsibility and the cares of tomorrow [and are] . . .
constantly active in combating the environment and human rivals, and
thus need] . . . more brains than the woman whom he must protect and
nourish . . . the sedentary women, lacking any interior occupations,
whose role is to raise children, love, and be passive (quoted in
Gould, 1981:104).

Women's inferiority—a fact taken for granted by most scientists
in the 1800s—was a major proof of evolution by natural
selection. Gould claims that there were actually "few egalitarian
scientists" at this time. Almost all believed that "Negroes and women"
were intellectually inferior. These scientists were not repeating
prejudices without extensive work and thought; they were attempting to
verify this major plank in evolutionary theory by trying to prove,
scientifically, that women were inferior.

One approach which was seized upon to substantiate that females were
generally inferior to males was to prove that their brain capacity was
smaller. Researchers first endeavored to demonstrate empirically that
female cranial capacity was smaller, and then that brain capacity was
related to intelligence, a more difficult task (Van Valen,
1974:417-423).

Among the numerous researchers that used craniology to "prove" the
intellectual inferiority of women, one of the most eminent was Paul
Broca (1824-1880). One of Europe's "most prestigious anthropologists"
and a leader in the development of physical anthropology as a science,
Broca, in 1859, founded the prestigious Anthropological Society (Fee,
1979:415). A major preoccupation of the society then was measuring
various human traits, including skulls to "delineate human groups and
assess their relative worth" (Gould, 1981:83). Broca's conclusion was
that human brains are:

. . . larger in mature adults than in the elderly, in men than in
women, in eminent men than in men of mediocre talent, in superior
races than in inferior races . . . other things equal, there is a
remarkable relationship between the development of intelligence and
the volume of the brain (Gould, 1981, p. 83).

And, as Gould notes, Broca's research was not superficial: "One cannot
read Broca without gaining enormous respect for his care in generating
data" (1981:85).

Broca was especially concerned about proving women's inferiority to
men: "Of all his comparisons between groups, Broca collected most
information on the brains of women vs. men . . ." (Gould, 1981:103).
He concluded that ''the relatively small size of the female brain
depends in part upon her physical inferiority and in part upon her
intellectual inferiority" (Gould, 1981:104). Broca also concluded that
the disparity between men's and women's brains was still becoming even
greater, which he explained was the "result of differing evolutionary
pressures upon dominant men and passive women" (Gould, 1981:104).

These views were expounded by many of the most prominent evolutionists
of Darwin's day. The thunder of the field of social psychology and a
pioneer in the collective behavior field was Gustave Le Bon
(1841-1931). This scientist, whose classic study of crowd behavior
(The Crowd; 1895) is familiar to every social science student, wrote
that even in:

. . . the most intelligent races . . . are a large number of women
whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most
developed male brains. This inferiority is so obvious that no one can
contest it for a moment; only its degree is worth discussion. . . .
Women . . . represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and .
. . are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized
man. They excel in fickleness, inconsistency, absence of thought and
logic, and incapacity to reason. Without a doubt there exist some
distinguished women, very superior to the average man but they are as
exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a
gorilla with two heads; consequently, we may neglect them entirely
(Gould, 1981:104,105).

Re-evaluation of the conclusion that females were less intelligent
found major flaws both in the evidence that "proved" women's
inferiority and in major aspects of evolution theory.

Fisher even argues that the whole theory of natural selection is
questionable, quoting Chomsky's words that:

. . . the processes by which the human mind achieved its present state
of complexity . . . are a total mystery. . . . It is perfectly safe to
attribute this development to "natural selection," so long as we
realize that there is no substance to this assertion, that it amounts
to nothing more than a belief that there is some naturalistic
explanation for these phenomena (1972:97).

Another method used to attack the female-inferiority conclusion of
evolution was to attack the evidence of evolutionary theory itself.
Fisher, for example, makes the following observation:

The difficulties of postulating theories about human origins on the
actual brain organization of our presumed fossil ancestors, with only
a few limestone impregnated skulls—most of them bashed,
shattered, and otherwise altered by the passage of millions of
years—as evidence, would seem to be astronomical (1979:113).

Actually, many of the attempts to disprove the evolutionary view that
women are intellectually inferior to men attacked the core of
evolutionary theory because it is inexorably bound with human-group
inferiority, which must exist, from which natural selection may
select. The inferiority-of-women conclusion was so ingrained in
biology, Morgan concludes, that thinkers in this area tended to "sheer
away from the sole subject of biology and origins," hoping they could
ignore it and "concentrate on ensuring that in the future things will
be different" (Morgan, 1972:2). She stresses that we cannot ignore
evolutionary biology, though, because while believing the "jungle
heritage and the evolution of man as a hunting carnivore has taken
root in man's mind as firmly as Genesis ever did." She concludes that
evolution must be reevaluated, and that scientists have "sometimes
gone astray" because of prejudice and philosophical prescriptions. She
argues that the prominent evolutionary view that women are
biologically inferior to men must be challenged, and in this and
scores of other works that preceded her, dozens of writers have
adroitly overturned the conclusion that women are biologically
inferior to men, and, by so doing, have undermined a major plank in
evolutionism.



References
Chomsky, Noam. 1972. Language and Mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and
World.

Darwin, Charles. 1896. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to
Sex. New York: D. Appleton and Company.

-----. (Nora Barlow, Ed.). 1958. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin,
1809-1882. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc.

Dyer, Gwynne. 1985. War. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc.

Fee, Elizabeth. 1979. "Nineteenth-Century Craniology: The Study of the
Female Skull." Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 53:415-433.

Fisher, Elizabeth. 1979. Woman's Creation: Sexual Evolution and the
Shaping of Society. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday.

Gould, Stephen Jay. 1981. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W.
Norton & Company.

Kevics, Beltyann. 1986. Females of the Species: Sex and Survival in
the Animal Kingdom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Morgan, Elaine. 1972. The Descent of Woman. New York: Stein and Day.

Van Valen, Leigh. 1974. "Brain Size and Intelligence in Man." American
Journal of Physical Anthropology, 40:417 423.


* Dr. Bergman is on the science faculty at Northwest State College,
Ohio.




http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-249.htm

Women's inferiority;a fact taken for granted by most scientists
in the 1800s;was a major proof of evolution by natural
selection. Gould claims that there were actually "few egalitarian
scientists" at this time. Almost all believed that "Negroes and women"
were intellectually inferior.