Before Americans encountered and became fascinated with the work of Charles Darwin, another British chronicler of life had long captured the national attention. For much of the 1800s, everyone from California gold miners to Ivy League professors could, and often did, recite by heart the writings of William Shakespeare. Traversing the nation in the 1830s, French scholar Alexis de Tocqueville observed that he had found ‘Shakespeare in the recesses of the forests of the New World’. Not only did Americans read Shakespeare, they also saw Shakespeare performed on stages big and small, in towns and cities from coast to coast. Men and women fashioned the meaning of Shakespeare by acting out his plays, providing feedback on professional performances from their audience seats, and reformulating his work in countless parodies and spoofs. In New York City alone, the 1857–8 theatre season featured no fewer than ten different productions of Hamlet, and in 1875 two rival performances starring two of the most famous actors in the country opened on the very same night. As the historian Lawrence Levine has established, Americans of all sorts loved Shakespeare and, up until the end of the nineteenth century, they understood that Shakespeare was for everyone.Footnote 1 By the close of the century, however, Americans came to understand and experience culture as bifurcated between high and low. The educated elite watched Shakespearean plays in expensive theatres; the masses bought tickets to vaudeville shows.
A similar fate befell the work of American's second-favourite Englishman. When Charles Darwin's books were first published in the US, they were read, in one form or another, by just about everyone, often popularized through new magazines such as Edward Yeoman's Popular Science Monthly, a unique periodical in which leading naturalists published alongside amateur science enthusiasts, including even women.Footnote 2 But Darwin's second major evolutionary work, the Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), revealed fractures and fissures in this broad and diverse group of science readers, especially when those considered radical by the emerging scientific establishment began to claim the Descent – and sexual selection, its cornerstone theory – as part of their intellectual heritage. Because the Descent presented a naturalistic account of romantic love and sex differences among animals, including humans, and because it gave females an active role in the evolutionary process, atheists, socialists, sex reformers and feminists published their own interpretations of sexual selection, often claiming that this evolutionary mechanism provided naturalistic evidence in support of their proposals for social change.
At the same time, as Margaret Rossiter and others have documented, the American scientific establishment closed ranks and defined more precisely what counted as ‘science’ and who could claim to be practising, or even discussing, ‘science’.Footnote 3 In the early to mid-nineteenth century, women and amateur scientists regularly contributed their findings to scientific journals and periodicals such as Popular Science Monthly, and even presented their research at scientific meetings. Readers made little distinction between articles written by those with prestigious training in the natural sciences (in part because there were so few places where one could receive such specific training) and those by individuals with keen observations of the world around them. In Popular Science Monthly, articles by world-renowned scientists ran side by side with those by women few people had ever heard of. In this context, women from the trained astronomer Maria Mitchell to the evolutionary enthusiast Antoinette Brown Blackwell (an ordained minister with no formal scientific training) debated scientific ideas and practices, publishing alongside men like Herbert Spencer. But by the close of the century, women had lost, by and large, this small window of scientific participation. Men had formalized scientific associations to exclude women and others with little formal training; graduate training in scientific fields became required not only for membership in these associations but also for peer-reviewed publishing, and male mentor networks provided the primary means by which individuals could access professional science. As a result, for much of the twentieth century, women's main point of entry to the natural sciences was in helper positions such as secretary or lab assistant (women had slightly more access to the social sciences and many trained with leaders such as John Dewey and Franz Boas).Footnote 4
Pulling together various strands of the popular reception of the Descent of Man, this essay suggests that perhaps these two developments were related and that, following a pattern similar to the one Evelleen Richards has chronicled in England, the radical embrace of sexual selection theory may well have encouraged the American scientific establishment to distance itself not only from women and social radicals but also from sexual selection theory.Footnote 5 By the 1910s, a clear line separated scientists from amateurs and scientific research from other types of scholarship.Footnote 6 The process of institutionalization and the attendant masculinization of science have been well studied, but the role of the highly gendered reception of the Descent of Man in prompting this shift has not yet been explored. Future research needs to fully untangle the multivalent American reception of sexual selection theory; focusing on the popular and feminist responses to the Descent of Man, this essay is a first step in that direction.
For the past 150 years, the overwhelming majority of historical analysis of the American reception of Darwin has focused on the Origin of Species and the theory of natural selection that it introduced. This makes historical and logical sense, of course, but it has obscured the equally rich American reception of the Descent of Man (1871), a work that held a central place in scientific as well as popular culture for decades.Footnote 7 While many readers approached the Origin and the Descent as part of one long argument, the reception of the Descent differed in important ways from that of the Origin. In the twelve years separating the publication of Darwin's two major works, Americans, like their British and European counterparts, familiarized themselves with the basic tenets of natural selection, grappled with the possibility of evolution with or without a divine creator, and turned to science with a popular enthusiasm never before or since experienced. As Alfred Russel Wallace observed in Popular Science Monthly in 1876, ‘Never, perhaps, in the whole history of science or philosophy has so great a revolution in thought and opinion been effected as in the twelve years from 1859 to 1871, the respective dates of publication of Mr. Darwin's “Origin of Species” and “Descent of Man”’.Footnote 8 Thus readers were more intellectually prepared to dissect the Descent of Man and grapple with its main points, especially Darwin's proposition that humans too had evolved through the processes of natural and sexual selection.
Another vital distinction between the reception of Origin of Species and that of the Descent had to do with gender. The Origin of Species was, by and large, a story about males – males battling males, males surviving and males dying. ‘The survival of the fittest’ became a popular catchphrase and even inspired an entire genre of naturalistic manly fiction. The Descent of Man, on the other hand, granted females (except for human females) the leading role in mate selection, which Darwin now claimed was as vital as, if not more vital than, natural selection for the purposes of evolution. The Descent especially resonated with female readers because, in the 1870s, American women began attending college in record numbers after nearly 700,000 men died during the Civil War, leaving universities in need of new sources of tuition. While many schools offered feminized courses such as domestic science and home economics, others provided middle- and upper-class women the chance to learn about science through introductory courses and even special science courses just for women, such as Harvard's School of Natural History at Penikese Island or the brand-new Lily Hall of Science erected at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1886, the nation's first laboratory building exclusively for women.Footnote 9 Women eagerly engaged with science, and what better place to start than with a book by the world's most famous naturalist in which females determined the evolutionary process?
Furthermore, whereas both the Origin and Descent invoked familiar and obscure species to explain change over millions of years, the Descent of Man centred beauty and sexual attraction – topics about which readers, regardless of scientific expertise, felt prepared to offer opinions. Many Americans who wrote about the Descent of Man were not necessarily attempting to spread the literal ideas of Darwin. Rather, they were voicing their own takes on what they understood to be Darwin's ideas, often reformulating them in the process and using the imprimatur of ‘Darwin’ to advance agendas that, in some cases, would have been anathema to Darwin himself. After the passage of the Comstock Laws in 1873, it became illegal to write or circulate material related to sex, even instructional textbooks, because such work was now defined as ‘obscene’. As a result, the Descent of Man provided an acceptable, and better yet ‘scientific’, framework for writing and publishing about sex, as many free-love advocates, sex reformers and radicals immediately recognized.Footnote 10 In fact, the new field of sexology began, in large part, in conversation with the Descent of Man, drawing on its terminology and debating its main claims.Footnote 11
To date, most work on the US reception of Darwin has focused on ferreting out the links between Darwin's actual words and those of his popularizers and correspondents: who interpreted his ideas ‘correctly’, who disagreed and who strayed from the party line. What, then, to make of this additional layer – the popular, the bawdy, the radical – of readership and reception? Does it matter whether what people attributed to Darwin had anything to do with what Darwin intended? Or, more specifically, in what ways and to whom does it matter?
At the end of the nineteenth century, Shakespeare's plays moved from the province of the many to the purview of the few, just as Darwin's ideas moved from the tavern and women's club to the scientific establishment. While cultural elites and scientific experts were not necessarily one and the same (though sometimes they were and they surely encountered each other at places such as Ivy League universities and men's clubs), the creation of these hierarchies proceeded in much the same fashion. Shakespeare's plays began to be performed for and studied exclusively by the cultured and educated elite, whereas Darwin's ideas became the property of the emerging scientific establishment. Who were regular Americans to offer insights about either? Boundary work, to borrow the phrase coined by Thomas Gieryn and elaborated by Daniel Patrick Thurs, characterized the trajectories of the sciences as well as the fine arts and it may be instructive to consider the two processes in tandem.Footnote 12
To better understand the popular reception and radical embrace of the Descent of Man and sexual selection theory in the US, historians might borrow more intentionally from cultural historians and from historians of British science who have done so much to unravel the relationships between the scientific enterprise and its cultural reception.Footnote 13 In Darwin, Literature, and Respectability, for example, Gowan Dawson persuasively argues that ‘perhaps the most significant impediment to establishing a naturalistic worldview’ was ‘Darwin's surprisingly recurrent connection with sexual immorality’, a connection cemented by British literary writers’ many references to the Descent.Footnote 14 Many of Darwin's critics in England went so far as to claim that the Descent not only ‘transgressed Victorian standards of respectability’ but also the ‘acceptable boundaries of nineteenth-century scientific publishing’ because the book dealt so frankly with sex.Footnote 15 Surely, then, sex and gender are vital to understanding the US reception of the Descent as well as the British reception.
Likewise, much has been written about the American reception of natural selection and its application by social scientists such as Herbert Spencer, but curiously little has been written about the Descent, despite its prominence in the scientific, academic and popular cultures of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.Footnote 16 Indeed, few scientific works sold more copies or inspired more broad-based conversations than did the Descent of Man, perhaps in part because, with its focus on sex differences and reproduction, it could be enlisted to answer pressing questions about changing gender roles and the growing independence of women following the Civil War. For decades, women and social reformers had looked to scientific and pseudo-scientific theories such as phrenology to bolster their claims about equality and social change, but from the 1870s until the early 1900s the scientific theory they drew on most frequently was sexual selection.Footnote 17
While one of Darwin's motivations for writing the Descent was to provide an evolutionary basis for racial differences that discounted polygenists’ claims that different races ought to be viewed as, essentially, different species, the Descent of Man still placed white men at the top of the evolutionary ladder and naturalized white racial superiority as part of the evolutionary process, limiting the radical potential of this work and prompting many Darwinian radicals to embrace highly racialized, if not outright racist, ideologies, including what would come to be eugenics.Footnote 18 Moreover, the reviews analysed in this essay appeared in mainstream and radical US periodicals, which published white writers nearly exclusively, thus African Americans’ responses to the Descent of Man require future study and research.Footnote 19
Some scholars have argued that questions about the evolution of different races prompted Darwin to write the Descent, but it is the evolution of sex differences that motivates and propels this landmark work, as Evelleen Richards has established in her definitive study.Footnote 20 In terms of sex, Darwin's explanation of human and animal kinship enabled individuals, especially those already inclined to challenge the status quo, to question whether or not patriarchy, monogamy, female domesticity and even heterosexuality were ‘natural’ when so many varieties of domestic and sexual arrangements could be found among other animal species. Focusing on the US reception of the Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex reveals the multiple and motley ways in which men and women responded to and revised Darwin's theory of sexual selection as well as the varied registers in which scientific ideas trafficked. After all, the motive agent of sexual selection theory was female choice of sexual partners and, as a result, many readers interpreted the Descent in terms of gender and sex. Moreover, the Descent's foregrounding of female reproductive agency and autonomy inspired many readers to challenge sexual power dynamics among humans and demand a return to a more ‘natural’ system in which human females determined mating choices. This essay maps the sundry, popular, bawdy and entirely unauthorized reception of the Descent of Man and suggests that these responses gendered sexual selection theory as feminine in the eyes of many naturalists, diminishing their interest in engaging with it as a ‘real’ scientific theory, and shaped ordinary Americans’ perceptions about what is ‘natural’ in terms of gender and sex.
The Descent of Man in American print and popular culture
Nineteenth-century American naturalists, by and large, remained sceptical, if not dismissive, of sexual selection theory. But this does not appear to have diminished the popular appeal of the Descent of Man. Indeed, perhaps the most striking aspect of the American reception of the Descent of Man was how widespread it was. Reviews of the book, including the first and second volumes individually as well as the second edition, which included both volumes, appeared in hundreds of local and national newspapers from coast to coast, major magazines, small reform magazines, literary publications and professional journals. The Descent of Man also inspired several spoofs, short stories, novels, commencement addresses and cartoons which likewise appeared in magazines and newspapers from Macon, Georgia to Honolulu.Footnote 21 Referring to sexual selection, the New York Times reported that ‘nothing that Darwin has written is so ingenious or suggestive than the long, minute, and careful investigation in this field’.Footnote 22
Compared to the shock that greeted the publication of Origin of Species, many naturalists noted with surprise the calm acceptance with which readers and editorialists met the Descent of Man. Darwin himself mused, ‘everyone is talking about it without being shocked’.Footnote 23 Shortly after the Descent's publication, Darwin's friend Joseph Hooker told him, ‘I dined out three days last week, and at every table heard evolution talked of as an accepted fact, and the descent of man with calmness’.Footnote 24 One literary notice observed that ‘the very general discussion by the press of Darwin's “The Descent of Man” has, instead of exhausting public interest in this latest scientific question, greatly stimulated it. The sale of Darwin's work is almost unprecedented in scientific literature’.Footnote 25 Shortly after the American publication of the Descent, Edward L. Youmans excitedly wrote to Herbert Spencer exclaiming, ‘things are going here furiously. I have never known anything quite like it. Ten thousand Descent of Man have been printed, and I guess they are nearly all gone’.Footnote 26 By May of 1872, Youmans had inaugurated Popular Science Monthly to spread exciting new scientific ideas, such as those in the Descent, to the masses of eager readers and science enthusiasts.
Print reviews of the Descent of Man generally remained neutral with regard to its content, but nearly all signalled to readers that the book was required reading. Even the negative reviews recommended that people read the Descent for themselves. The Galaxy enthused, ‘whatever may be thought of Mr. Darwin's conclusions as to the origin of man, his book will be found a rich mine of facts, entertaining and curious on the highest questions of natural history’.Footnote 27 Godey's Lady's Book, the most popular nineteenth-century women's magazine, noted that the book ‘will call forth discussion and dissent among the masterminds of the age’, but demurred in conclusion, ‘we are not yet an avowed convert to Darwin's theories, but we find his book exceedingly interesting’.Footnote 28 Old and New concluded that the Descent was ‘as exciting as any novel’.Footnote 29 Appleton's declared that the book was the literary sensation of the month, while Harper's proclaimed that ‘few scientific works have excited more attention’ than the Descent. As proof, the reviewer observed that it was impossible to open a magazine without reading about it.Footnote 30 Readers of all backgrounds and interests were encouraged to read the Descent, and by all accounts they did.
Many American periodicals indicated that Darwinian evolution explained the origins of organic life on Earth but rejected Darwin's hypothesis about human–animal kinship. Several also included critical comments from St George Mivart and Alfred Russel Wallace, two leading scientific critics of sexual selection. Scribner's review began with an overview of human genealogy according to Darwin, from the ‘monkeys of the Old World’ back to the ‘son of a reptile, which was the son of a fish’, to ‘the son of an amoeba, which was the son of – we don't know what’. The reviewer observed that this was certainly ‘quite a different genealogy from the biblical one, ending with “Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God”’, and expressed relief that other naturalists retained their belief in the idea that humans had been specially created by God.Footnote 31 After all, it was Darwin's alternative human-origin story – one that did not hinge on who said what to whom in the Garden of Eden – that initially endeared him to freethinkers and feminists.Footnote 32
In addition, numerous mainstream reviews focused on what sexual selection might mean for human gender roles and sexual relations. For example, Overland Monthly published a lengthy analysis of sexual selection in the article ‘The Darwinian Eden’. This review pointed out that sexual selection could not possibly pertain to modern society, where ‘the most likely young fellow that ever trod the earth does not stand the ghost of a show beside the rich man, though the latter should be humped as to his back, gnarled and twisted as to his limbs, lean, withered, and decrepit’.Footnote 33 In the age of the Comstock laws, other publications skirted outright discussions of sex, especially among humans. Appleton's explained sexual selection theory in two consecutive articles but only in terms of birds, avoiding all mention of humans.Footnote 34 ‘We scarcely know how to deal with Sexual Selection … It is both a delicate and a difficult subject, and cannot be discussed within moderate limits’, declared the Albion. This reviewer objected to Darwin's hypothesis that sexual selection accounted for women's relative lack of body hair; something so miraculous, the reviewer insisted, must have been instigated by a divine creator.Footnote 35
Print reviews reveal just one layer of the Descent's American reception and wide appeal. In fact, the Descent remained on book lists for women's and girls’ clubs until the turn of the twentieth century, and the New York Times reported that it was among the most popular books checked out of Manhattan public libraries as late as 1895.Footnote 36 The book also featured prominently in popular culture, in political speeches and in common parlance until well into the twentieth century. News reports described a popular party game in which participants selected a book title and represented it ‘by a picture, by a drawing, or by some arrangement of objects so that it could be guessed’. One entrant depicted the Descent of Man as a ‘little ladder, with a toy monkey on top round, and a toy man at the foot’.Footnote 37 In his 1912 speech at the memorial for those who had died aboard the Titanic, the legendary preacher and three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, the man who would later lead the anti-evolutionary crusade resulting in the Scopes trial of 1925, thundered, ‘Let no man bring to my deathbed for my consolation Darwin's “Descent of Man”’.Footnote 38 The next month a round table of ‘Well known Duluthians’ discussed the ‘dancing problem’ and invoked the Descent of Man as evidence that young people dancing need not necessarily be sexual.Footnote 39
Visual images also highlight the key role that gender played in popular interpretations of the Descent of Man. Harper's Bazaar published two cartoons, originally printed in the British magazine Punch, in response to the publication of this watershed work.Footnote 40 In the cartoon ‘A logical refutation of Mr. Darwin's theory’, a husband read passages from the Descent to his wife, ‘whom he adores, but loves to teaze’. In the illustration, the bearded husband knelt in front of his wife in their well-appointed Victorian parlour and read to her while she cuddled their baby. The wife, however, rejected the assertion that their baby was ‘descended from a Hairy Quadruped with Pointed Ears and a Tail’. ‘Speak for yourself, Jack! I'm not descended from anything of the kind’, she responded. ‘I beg to say; and Baby takes after Me. So there!’Footnote 41 The illustration depicts the wife in a buttoned-up, fashionable Victorian dress, holding tightly to her young child, the paragon of nineteenth-century femininity, seated in a chair above her kneeling, bearded husband. While brute and hairy man may have evolved from ape-like progenitors, surely his decorous, civilized wife did not.
That the Descent provided a template through which readers puzzled over human gender roles was particularly evident in the spoofs parodying its main ideas. One of the most popular was a song, to the tune of ‘Greensleeves’, first published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and reprinted in numerous US periodicals. Among the ‘very queer things’ that happened as humans descended from animals was that ‘women plainly had beards and big whiskers at first; While the man supplied milk when the baby was nursed; And some other strong facts I could tell – if I durst – Which nobody can deny’. For those raised on the twinned ideas that God made Eve from Adam's rib and that men and women inhabited separate spheres, Darwin's suggestion that all organic life had descended from a single-celled hermaphroditic organism proved unsettling. This song, however, rejected the notion that people might one day be expected to make mating choices based on ‘fitness’ because in Gilded Age America, everyone knew wealth trumped looks: ‘The Bad may be pretty, the Good may be plain; and sad matches are made from the lucre of gain; so perhaps as we are we shall likely remain – which nobody can deny’.Footnote 42
While upholding traditional gender roles had initially served as a reason why many readers dismissed the Descent of Man, by the end of the century, feminism and evolution came to be conflated in popular imagination as two linked, modern causes, which proved a boon to feminism and a detriment to sexual selection theory. One review highlighted Darwin's remarks about ancestral beards on women and nipples on men, commenting tongue-in-cheek, ‘it is consoling to obtain here some scientific basis for the women's rights movement. It is, evidently, a blind and instinctive reversion to a primitive condition in which domestic cares were equally shared by both parents’.Footnote 43 And, in 1899, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a cartoon titled ‘The New Woman speculating on the descent of man’, featuring three well-dressed ladies admiring a monkey in a cage, intimating that New Women and the acceptance of evolutionary theory went hand in hand, perhaps at the expense of traditional male roles.Footnote 44
Just as Americans had read Shakespeare as a poet and playwright of the people, so too did they read the Descent of Man as form of literature to be freely interpreted by all. The most colourful response to the Descent of Man was the satire entitled The Fall of Man: Or, the Loves of the Gorillas, published anonymously by the Shakespeare scholar and essayist Richard Grant White. Billed as a ‘popular scientific lecture upon the Darwinian theory of development by sexual selection, by a learned gorilla’, this spoof lampooned Darwin's assertion that female choice of mates had determined the evolution of species.Footnote 45 The ‘learned gorilla’ organized a public lecture to explain to his neighbours how their distant cousin man had ‘descended from monkey-hood to humanity’. Reminiscent of the Genesis creation story, the narrator began by highlighting that monkeys had ‘fallen’ through ‘the frailty and fickleness of the female sex’. In contrast to the biblical account of the fall through female curiosity, however, gorillas fell through female choice. Long ago, the narrator explains, a female fell in love with a mutant, hairless gorilla, but he refused the advances of hairy females. So his admirer concocted a clever solution: she adhered herself to a gum tree to remove her unwanted body hair and succeeded in winning her beloved's affections. Shortly thereafter, the hairless male gorilla encouraged his other female admirers to similarly remove their hair, and, through these hairless pairings, man evolved from gorilla.Footnote 46 To readers like White, Darwin's suggestion that female reproductive agency was ‘natural’ sounded as preposterous as the existence of hairless men.
Literature, too, reveals how readers interpreted the Descent of Man as a commentary on nineteenth-century gender roles and heterosexual romance. In 1873, critic Philip Quilibet described the literary scene in terms of Darwin: ‘the novel-writer's province bears witness to the Darwinian ferment. Tracing simian propensities in society must henceforth be invariably the story-wright's leading business’.Footnote 47 For example, in her novel My Wife and I; or Harry Henderson's History (1871), Harriet Beecher Stowe commented on women's limited choices in courtship by using the Descent of Man as a literary prop. To distract herself from obsessing over a crush, Eva sat down to read her friend Ida's copy of The Descent of Man. However, she soon realized that this book was entirely about sexual attraction, fuelling her thoughts about Harry Henderson. Ida, her proudly single friend, encouraged Eva to remain open-minded and finish the book, noting that the main reason she could think only of her beloved was that she had little else to do.Footnote 48
Edith Wharton wrote the short story ‘The descent of man’ to parody a man like Darwin, enmeshed in his scientific work, who had ‘eloped with his idea’. Professor Linyard despised the popularizers and pseudo-scientists and wrote a book to mock them. Much to his chagrin, his publisher marketed the book as ‘real’ science and it became a huge bestseller with a mostly female readership, a sub-theme that may well testify to Wharton's knowledge of the popularity of the Descent among women. Next, the professor began publishing ‘Scientific sermons’ in the Woman's World magazine (freethinkers did, in fact, host regular ‘scientific sermons’ in New York in the 1880s).Footnote 49 Having a largely female readership, it would seem, foreshadowed the end of any real scientific career.
In the story ‘Madcap Violet’ by William Black, Violet North, the beautiful and single protagonist, did not want to marry because she liked her independence. She went out ‘adventuring’ and stopped by a bookstore where she informed the bookseller that she needed the best book on philosophy for a ‘gentleman who has studied nearly everything’. She saw the new copies of the Descent of Man and immediately decided that it was the perfect gift. She selected this book for her love interest both as a sign of affection and to send an important message about herself: she was open-minded and modern, not bound by traditional ideas regarding gender or courtship.Footnote 50 Indeed, for nineteenth-century men and women, the phrase ‘sexual selection’ and the title The Descent of Man often functioned as shorthand for new ideas about gender roles and courtship.
Prescriptive literature promotes the evolutionary power of female beauty
As further proof of the Descent of Man's far-ranging influence in American culture, references to the book pervaded prescriptive literature. In the pages of advice books, popular interpretations of sexual selection theory upended long-held truisms about courtship. In his popular book Happy Homes and How to Make Them (1870), John William Kirton, for example, had advised men to seek ‘the daughter of a good mother’ with a ‘suitable temperament’, who knew ‘the worth of money’ and possessed a ‘religious character’.Footnote 51 Advice books published after 1870, however, generally offered drastically revised guidance to those hoping to wed. Ignoring personal, intellectual and spiritual traits, books published after the Descent of Man tended to advise women and men to select their partners based on physical appearance and to develop their own good looks if they hoped to one day wed. As Mrs H.R. Haweis cautioned in The Art of Beauty (1878), there were two types of women: the visible and the invisible. ‘The distinguishable ones marry – those who are beautiful, or magnetic in some way, whose characters have some definite colouring, and who can make their individuality felt’.Footnote 52
Several courtship and beauty guides made explicit reference to the Descent of Man, while others relied on Darwinian terms, such as ‘sexual selection’, ‘coloring’ and ‘charm’, which would have been readily identifiable to contemporary readers familiar with Popular Science Monthly or Nature. A consensus emerged that beauty was the most importance feature to look for in any potential mate. Reviewing the Descent in Nature in 1871, P.H. Pye Smith observed that Darwin had established that ‘though in the lists of Love the battle is often to the strong, even more frequently it is to the beautiful’.Footnote 53 Henry T. Finck, music editor of the New York Evening Post, drew heavily on Darwin's writing and his theory of sexual selection in his advice book Romantic Love and Personal Beauty (1887). Finck compared various nations in terms of the beauty of their female citizens, concluding that the sway of natural selection was on the decline. As a result, he contended, ‘Sexual Selection has freer scope to modify the human race into harmony with aesthetic demands’, ushering forth the age of ‘Romantic Love and Personal Beauty’.Footnote 54 Similar arguments were later adopted by positive eugenicists who urged Americans that strategic marital choices offered the best way to improve the national character. Several of the feminists and radicals who incorporated sexual selection theory into their programmes for social reform were likewise drawn to eugenics both in the US and in England, as Evelleen Richards has documented, not because of its emphasis on beauty but because it offered the possibility of female reproductive agency.Footnote 55 Though it is beyond the scope of this essay, the links between the popular embrace of sexual selection theory and the growing prominence of eugenics in the US are vital to understanding the overall eugenics movement.Footnote 56
In the late nineteenth century, marriage experts further asserted that external beauty indicated internal fertility and health. Beauty was no longer an aesthetic criterion; rather it became an evolutionary imperative. The ominously titled The Ugly Girl Papers (1875) reminded readers that looks alone attracted mates: ‘How dexterously Nature inserts the reward of beauty before the self-denials needed to gain health!’ A beautiful woman's ‘magnetism attracts every creature who comes within its influence’.Footnote 57 Mrs Haweis clarified that she did not necessarily agree with Darwin's suggestion that different races had different standards of beauty, but she wholeheartedly endorsed his claim that female beauty served important evolutionary purposes and warned that ‘those [women] who are completely negative, unnoticeable, colourless, formless, invisible – are left behind’.Footnote 58
Popular courtship manuals elevated the importance of female beauty by emphasizing its evolutionary function and demanded that good looks be ‘natural’. Physical-culture expert and inventor of the penis-scope Bernarr MacFadden warned of a ‘false sexual selection’ through which men had been socialized to appreciate artificial beauty (fancy clothes, padded bras and make-up), rather than natural, maternal traits (wide hips and natural bosoms) which true sexual selection favoured.Footnote 59 Similarly, social scientist W.I. Thomas reminded readers, ‘Man is naturally one of the most unadorned of animals, without brilliant appearance or natural glitter, with no plumage, no spots or stripes, no naturally sweet voice, no attractive odor, and no graceful antics’, and implored women to trade in their fancy clothes for plain ones, lest they confuse men and deter the evolutionary process.Footnote 60
Advice book authors and advertisers stressed to their female readership that the ultimate barrier to beauty was facial hair. Changing perceptions of the cultural significance of facial and body hair, on both men and women, were another ramification of the popular reception of sexual selection theory, as I have argued elsewhere.Footnote 61 In the Descent of Man, Darwin posited that male beards had developed because females preferred them, whereas he explained that women had lost facial hair as men selected the least hairy mates.Footnote 62 Darwin's hypothesis about the evolution of female hairlessness was among the most debated aspects of the Descent, reframing popular and scientific understanding of the significance of facial and body hair.Footnote 63 While women, no doubt, have been battling chin hair and moustaches for centuries, visible facial hair did not become a disease until 1878 when dermatologists described the disease of hypertrichosis, ‘superfluous hair’, in women, which reportedly traumatized their female patients. In the decades that followed, physicians devoted undue attention to the study and treatment of this new disease that had no other symptoms or health implications beyond unsightliness. A popular 1896 dermatological textbook, for example, devoted twenty pages and seven images ‘representing freaks of nature with respect to hairiness’, while much more prevalent diseases such as ringworm ‘occupie[d] less than two pages’.Footnote 64 Desperate for relief from superfluous hair, women helped inaugurate and sustain the new field of dermatology by making regular appointments for electrolysis, invented in 1869, a costly and impermanent solution to unwanted hair that could only be administered by a dermatologist. Those who did not encounter female facial hair in the mirror paid good money to see it on display at the circus sideshow. The most popular sideshow exhibit from the 1870s until 1925 was the bearded woman named Krao who had been kidnapped from her home in Laos as a young girl so that circus promoters could display her as ‘Darwin's Missing Link’.
The radical potential of female choice
Perhaps the most unintended of all responses to the Descent of Man was the popularity of female choice among radicals and feminists, as I have analysed in detail in other publications.Footnote 65 From the pages of freethought, sex reform and feminist periodicals (including Lucifer the Light-Bearer, the Woman's Tribune and Socialist Woman) to the most widely read reformist fiction of the era (including Edward Bellamy's bestselling Looking Backward (1888) and many works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman), female choice, unfettered by economic inequality, redeemed society and saved the human race. To these reformers and writers, lower down the hierarchy of civilization than the members of the American and British Associations for the Advancement of Science but no less interested in evolution, animal kinship provided compelling evidence for social change. Animals arranged themselves sexually and domestically in many more interesting patterns than did humans, and the animal evidence for female choice promised a natural precedent for revising reproductive and domestic practices among humans. If humans were indeed part and parcel of the animal kingdom, then who could rightly argue that Gilded Age domestic and sexual practices among humans were ‘natural’?
As naturalists on both sides of the Atlantic debated the existence and efficacy of both natural and sexual selection, ‘reform Darwinists’ embraced sexual selection theory, and especially female choice, to prove the ‘naturalness’ of their proposed reforms and grant them scientific imprimatur.Footnote 66 Feminists, in particular, enlisted the Descent of Man as evidence of female superiority and to argue that human gender roles were ‘unnatural’. Most reformers who invoked sexual selection did so by quoting Darwin in the original, either disregarding or not recognizing the many scientific debates surrounding sexual and natural selection at the end of the nineteenth century. Reformers may not have cared whether sexual selection was demonstrably verifiable or scientifically accepted. To them, it was enough that it might be true and that one of the most respected scientific minds of all time had articulated it. Sexual selection offered the promise of an official, scientific sanction for goals long seen as antithetical to civilized life in majority-Christian nations like the US, including birth control, the demise of patriarchal marriage and the economic autonomy of women.
The influence of Darwin on the emerging birth control movement was first publicly demonstrated during the famous ‘Fruits of Philosophy’ trial in England in 1877, which galvanized the movement on both sides of the Atlantic. In pleading their case, birth control pamphlet publishers Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant wanted to establish that birth control was natural, not obscene, and that it accorded with evolutionary principles regarding population growth. To establish the movement's scientific legitimacy, Bradlaugh and Besant invited Darwin to take the stand.Footnote 67 Darwin politely asked to be excused from testifying on account of his ill health and the fact that he disagreed with artificial checks to fertilization. In his reply to Bradlaugh's invitation, Darwin explained that he opposed birth control because he feared ‘any such practices would in time spread to unmarried women & wd destroy chastity, on which the family bond depends; & the weakening of this bond would be the greatest of all possible evils to mankind’.Footnote 68 Even though Darwin refused to take the stand in defence of Bradlaugh and Besant, the Descent of Man circulated among sex reformers on both sides of the Atlantic and his theories of reproduction and population remained associated with the birth control movement, diminishing the scientific legitimacy of sexual selection in England (as Dawson has established) and quite possibly in the US.
American women socialists, in particular, were drawn to reformist readings of evolution. According to Mark Pittenger's research on evolutionary thought in American socialism, male socialists tended to use evolutionary rhetoric as a way to justify the status quo and, especially, the second-class status of women and African Americans because they favoured ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ narratives that placed white men at the top of the evolutionary ladder.Footnote 69 To female socialists, however, evolutionary science offered an appealing alternative to the status quo because the Descent of Man redefined the roles of females in nature. In the pages of Socialist Woman, authors quoted the Descent and the work of reform Darwinian Lester Frank Ward to highlight the feminist implications of evolutionary science and argue for female economic self-sufficiency. In fact, the very first issue of Socialist Woman (June 1907) included a note instructing subscribers to ‘Read Darwin's “Descent of Man”. It will give you a pretty good idea of the part the feminine principle has played in the animal kingdom’.Footnote 70 Subsequent articles in Socialist Woman denounced marriage rooted in economic necessity, criticized church and state for regulating marriage and compared marriage to prostitution. For solutions to the marriage problem, these women looked to the animal kingdom. As Sara Kingsbury noted in ‘The lady-like woman: her place in nature’ (1908), the modern ladylike woman ‘violates the habit of every other female in the animal kingdom … She is the only female in the animal kingdom who seeks to charm the male’. She then observed that ‘Darwin, in his “Descent of Man”’, had established the natural pattern of courtship whereby the males must earn access to the females. ‘In the animal world there is no economic dependence on the part of the female to drive her to accept the advances of the amorous male, whether she desires them or not’. Kingsbury ended on a hopeful note, however, observing that ‘there are those of us who are awakening. We have science for an ally’.Footnote 71 Evolutionary arguments for female economic self-sufficiency reached an apex in the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, arguably the most influential feminist thinker of the Progressive Era, first in her landmark book Women and Economics (1898) and later in her fiction and the countless articles she published in her magazine the Forerunner.Footnote 72
Yet it was precisely these same feminist implications that limited sexual selection's plausibility among naturalists for generations, as Erika Milam and Evelleen Richards have established.Footnote 73 First Mivart and then Wallace cited the ‘instability of a vicious feminine caprice’ as prima facie evidence for the absurdity of female choice as an evolutionary agent, though Wallace later did champion female choice not because he saw evidence for it in nature but because he thought it might improve conditions for humans.Footnote 74 But it was not just that scientists could not fathom females (or animals in general) as choosers; they also did not want to associate with the people who thought women should exercise reproductive autonomy. In England, as Richards has explicated in her landmark study Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection (2017), the radical and feminist interpretations of sexual selection theory were closely monitored and policed, first by Darwin himself and after his death by Thomas Huxley and other official Darwinians. In the US, however, Darwin had no such bulldog (Asa Gray, for example, did not mention sexual selection in his influential Darwiniana). The Darwinian radicals in the US were not as centrally organized as they were in England (around Annie Besant and, later, the Men's and Women's Club), nor was the emerging American scientific establishment aligned around a Darwinian axis as closely as it was in England, leaving the Darwinian radicals and reformers more leeway (though they were often checked by the Comstock Laws). Between 1900 and 1930, Milam notes, the New York Times regularly ran articles espousing the societal benefits of female choice among humans, promising that women's intelligent selection of mates would surely increase future health and prosperity. Most of these articles appear to have been written by laypeople, not scientists, but they were nevertheless widely read.Footnote 75 For nearly fifty years, sexual selection resonated with members of what David Stack has termed ‘the Darwinian left’ in England – socialists, feminists, freethinkers and sex reformers – though no comprehensive study of the Darwinian left in the US has yet been published.Footnote 76
One primary question raised by this research, then, is the extent to which the radical and feminist embrace of sexual selection theory in the US may have tainted its appeal among naturalists who were, at the very same time, creating the institutions that marked ‘science’ as a separate and special form of knowledge for experts, who were nearly always white men. Just as Tocqueville was shocked to hear lumberjacks recite Shakespeare, perhaps naturalists recoiled at the sight of Darwin's name in the pages of Lucifer the Light-Bearer or Socialist Woman. Indeed, the elements of sexual selection theory that enticed reformers and feminists to embrace the concept – that it linked human love with animal mating and granted females reproductive autonomy – were the very same premises that made the theory so difficult for naturalists to accept. Perhaps the more that radicals, non-scientists and feminists invoked sexual selection, the less ‘scientific’ the theory seemed and the more official science sought to distance itself both from the masses and from women. This essay is a first attempt to chart the wide-ranging reception of the Descent of Man in the US and, hopefully, prompt future research which will more fully investigate the links between the feminist adoption of sexual selection theory and scientific ambivalence toward it at the turn of the twentieth century.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Erika Milam and Suman Seth for their feedback on multiple drafts of this essay and for convening the Descent of Darwin Symposium at Princeton in 2018. This essay is greatly improved by their suggestions, along with those of the symposium's participants and discussants (especially Keith Tuma, Angela Creager and Jenna Tonn) and the two anonymous peer reviewers.
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