From Eve to Evolution provides the first full-length study of American women's responses to evolutionary theory and illuminates the role science played in the nineteenth-century women's rights movement. Kimberly A. Hamlin reveals how a number of nineteenth-century women, raised on the idea that Eve's sin forever fixed women's subordinate status, embraced Darwinian evolution--especially sexual selection theory as explained in The Descent of Man--as an alternative to the creation story in Genesis.

Hamlin chronicles the lives and writings of the women who combined their...

From Eve to Evolution provides the first full-length study of American women's responses to evolutionary theory and illuminates the role science played in the nineteenth-century women's rights movement. Kimberly A. Hamlin reveals how a number of nineteenth-century women, raised on the idea that Eve's sin forever fixed women's subordinate status, embraced Darwinian evolution--especially sexual selection theory as explained in The Descent of Man--as an alternative to the creation story in Genesis.

Hamlin chronicles the lives and writings of the women who combined their...