On the origin of an inferior species
Charles Darwin’s low opinion of the female brain was intriguingly contradicted by his relationships with women, finds Helen Brown
Weighing the pros and cons of marriage at 29, Charles Darwin concluded that a wife would probably be “better than a dog”. Home from his adventures aboard HMS Beagle and suffering heart palpitations while labouring long hours over his theories of evolution, the young man needed somebody to look after his house, be “interested in one” and serve as an “object to be beloved and played with”.
In his scientific studies, he sought confirmation of his received opinion of men’s “higher eminence”, arguing that this perceived discrepancy was due to sexual selection, which drove the evolution of the male brain, while females, who just needed to maintain their basic desirability, retained brains “analogous to those of animals”.
“No one disputes that the bull differs in disposition from the cow,” he wrote in 1896, bizarrely concluding that any evolutionary ground made by successful men would only be passed on to their sons, not daughters. Elsewhere, he wrote that many traits of women “are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization”.
It is surprising that Darwin, an original-thinking man – and a devotee of Jane Austen – should have remained so blinkered. And the latest book to emerge from Cambridge University’s Darwin Correspondence Project, which shows the warm, engaged and respectful letters he wrote to the many clever, independent women in his life, shows how deep the cognitive dissonance ran between his Victorian theories and his lived experience.
This magpie-eyed selection, organised by subject, illuminates his relationships with the women in his family and social circle, as well as those who were engaged in similar scientific studies. Although etiquette required women scientists to keep their contributions anonymous, female observers and collectors – particularly in botany, which was more open to women – were crucial to Darwin’s work. In lively letters, we see him confidently outsourcing experiments. Assuming no feminine sentimentality, he asks Mary Treat, the American entomologist, to place victims on the leaves of carnivorous plants for him; she writes back in crisp detail about pinning flies to their predators and watching the leaves bend toward them, the impaled insects “held captive until they died; the bright pink flowers and glistening dew-like substance luring them on to sure death. After death the larger insects fall around the roots of the plants as if to fertilize them.”
We also read letters women wrote to Darwin with careful descriptions of blushing, or the age at which babies’ eyes fill with unshed tears. Too softhearted to provoke infants to distress himself, Darwin told a friend how “a dear young lady near here plagued a very young child for my sake, till it cried, & saw the eyebrows for a second or two beautifully oblique, just before the torrent of tears began”.
At home, Darwin was a supportive husband, attending gently to his wife, Emma, during her 10 pregnancies and easing her pain with chloroform when she was in labour, writing to a friend in 1850 that, during the birth of their seventh child, Leonard: “I kept her in a state of insensibility of 1 & 1/2 hors & she knew nothing from first pain till she heard the child was born. — It [chloroform] is the grandest and most blessed of discoveries.”
Although Emma and their daughter Henrietta were not at the forefront of the emerging feminist movement, editor Samantha Evans reveals that they were “intrigued by what was going on”. Henrietta boldly smoked cigarettes with campaigners for women’s education, and in 1867 expressed strong views on men in a letter to her cousin: “I think they are selfish & therefore I judge ’em by a diff. standard […] without public schools and universities and other inventions of the Devil they wdn’t be found so v.m. worse than we are.”
Some of Darwin’s friends, such as the suffragist Frances Power Cobbe, harnessed his theories in support of causes he opposed, like the banning of vivisection. “Darwin’s books had stressed the continuity of humans with the rest of the animal kingdom,” writes Evans; Darwinians could not see “animals as soulless machines that only appeared to feel pain”. Darwin still believed that vivisection was essential, but was forced to concede that women must be allowed to study it if they were to understand why.
Perhaps the greatest surprise of the book comes in a letter Darwin wrote to Emma in 1844, asking her to publish his work if he died early. Henrietta went on to help him edit it. We are left to wonder whether these two inferior beings were ever tempted to add a few corrective footnotes.