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pushing to raise the status of women (once making a case for police departments to hire female agents). She also had an interest in science. In her note to Darwin, she has one simple request. It is based on a shocking encounter she’d had at a meeting of women in Boston. Someone had taken the position, Kennard writes, that ‘the inferiority of women; past, present and future’ was ‘based upon scientific principles’. The authority that encouraged this person to make such an outrageous statement was no less than one of Darwin’s own books.

      By the time Kennard’s letter arrived, Darwin was only a few months away from death. He had long ago published his most important works, On the Origin of Species in 1859, and The Descent of Man, which came out twelve years later. They laid out how present-day humans could have evolved from simpler forms of life by developing characteristics that made it easier to survive and have more children. This was the bedrock of his theories of evolution based on natural and sexual selection, which blasted through Victorian society like dynamite, transforming how people thought about the origins of humankind. His legacy was assured.

      In her letter, Kennard naturally assumes that a genius like Darwin couldn’t possibly believe that women are naturally inferior to men. Surely his work had been misinterpreted? ‘If a mistake has been made, the great weight of your opinion and authority should be righted,’ she entreats.

      ‘The question to which you refer is a very difficult one,’ Darwin replies the following month from his home at Downe in Kent. His letter is written in a scrawling hand so difficult to read that someone has copied the entire thing word for word onto another sheet of paper, kept alongside the original in the Cambridge University archives. But the handwriting isn’t the most objectionable thing about this letter. It’s what Darwin actually writes. If polite Mrs Kennard was expecting the great scientist to reassure her that women aren’t really inferior to men, she was about to be disappointed. ‘I certainly think that women though generally superior to men [in] moral qualities are inferior intellectually,’ he tells her, ‘and there seems to me to be a great difficulty from the laws of inheritance, (if I understand these laws rightly) in their becoming the intellectual equals of man.’

      It doesn’t end there. For women to overcome this biological inequality, he adds, they would have to become breadwinners like men. And this wouldn’t be a good idea, because it might damage young children and the happiness of households. Darwin is telling Mrs Kennard that not only are women intellectually inferior to men, but they’re better off not aspiring to a life beyond their homes. It’s a rejection of everything Kennard and the women’s movement at the time were fighting for.

      Darwin’s personal correspondence echoes what’s expressed quite plainly in his published work. In The Descent of Man he argues that males gained the advantage over females across thousands of years of evolution because of the pressure they were under in order to win mates. Male peacocks, for instance, evolved bright, fancy plumage to attract sober-looking peahens. Similarly, male lions evolved their glorious manes. In evolutionary terms, he implies, females are able to reproduce no matter how dull their appearance. They have the luxury of sitting back and choosing a mate, while males have to work hard to impress them, and to compete with other males for their attention. For humans, the logic goes, this vigorous competition for women means that men have had to be warriors and thinkers. Over millennia this has honed them into finer physical specimens with sharper minds. Women are literally less evolved than men.

      ‘The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain – whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands,’ Darwin explains in The Descent of Man. The evidence appeared to be all around him. Leading writers, artists and scientists were almost all men. He assumed that this inequality reflected a biological fact. Thus, his argument goes, ‘man has ultimately become superior to woman’.

      This makes for astonishing reading now. Darwin writes that if women have somehow managed to develop some of the same remarkable qualities as men, it may be because they were dragged along on men’s coat-tails by the fact that children in the womb inherit attributes from both parents. Girls, by this process, manage to steal some of the superior qualities of their fathers. ‘It is, indeed, fortunate that the law of the equal transmission of characters to both sexes has commonly prevailed throughout the whole class of mammals; otherwise it is probable that man would have become as superior in mental endowment to woman, as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen.’ It’s only a stroke of biological luck, he implies, that has stopped women from being even more inferior to men than they are. Trying to catch up is a losing game – nothing less than a fight against nature.

      To be fair to Darwin, he was a man of his time. His traditional views on a woman’s place in society don’t run through just his scientific works, but those of many other prominent biologists of the age. His ideas on evolution may have been revolutionary, but his attitudes to women were solidly Victorian.

      We can guess how Caroline Kennard must have felt about Darwin’s comments from the long, fiery response she sent back. Her second letter is not nearly as neat as her first. She argues that, far from being housebound, women contribute just as much to society as men do. It was, after all, only in wealthier middle-class circles that women tended not to work. For many Victorians, women’s incomes were vital to keeping families afloat. The difference between men and women wasn’t the amount of work they did, but the kind of work they were allowed to do. In the nineteenth century, women were barred from most professions, as well as from politics and higher education.

      As a result, when women worked, it was generally in lower-paid jobs such as domestic labour, laundry, the textile industries and factory work. ‘Which of the partners in a family is the breadwinner,’ Mrs Kennard writes, ‘when the husband works a certain number of hours in the week and brings home a pittance of his earnings … to his wife; who early and late with no end of self sacrifice in scrimping for her loved ones, toils to make each penny.’

      She ends on a furious note: ‘Let the “environment” of women be similar to that of men and with his opportunities, before she be fairly judged, intellectually his inferior, please.’

      I don’t know what Darwin made of Mrs Kennard’s reply. There’s no more correspondence between them in the library’s archives.

      What we do know is that she was right – Darwin’s scientific ideas mirrored society’s beliefs at the time, and they coloured his judgement of what women were capable of doing. His attitude belonged to a train of scientific thinking that stretched back at least as far as the Enlightenment, when the spread of reason and rationalism through Europe changed the way people thought about the human mind and body. ‘Science was privileged as the knower of nature,’ Londa Schiebinger explains to me. Women were portrayed as belonging to the private sphere of the home, and men as belonging to the public sphere. The job of nurturing mothers was to educate new citizens.

      By the middle of the nineteenth century, when Darwin was carrying out his research, the image of the weaker, intellectually simpler woman was a widespread assumption. Society expected wives to be virtuous, passive and submissive to their husbands. It was an ideal illustrated in a popular verse of the time, The Angel in the House, by the English poet Coventry Patmore: ‘Man must be pleased; but him to please/is woman’s pleasure.’ Many thought that women were naturally unsuited to careers in the professions. They didn’t need to have public lives. They didn’t need the vote.

      When these prejudices met evolutionary biology the result was a particularly toxic mix, which would poison scientific research for decades. Prominent scientists made no secret of the fact that they thought women were the inferior half of humanity, in the same way that Darwin had.

      Indeed, it’s hard today to read some of the things that famous Victorian thinkers wrote about women and not be shocked. In an article published in Popular Science Monthly in 1887, the evolutionary biologist George Romanes, a friend of Darwin’s, patronisingly praises women’s ‘noble’ and ‘lovable’ qualities, including ‘beauty, tact, gayety, devotion, wit’. He also insists, as Darwin had, that women can never hope to reach the same

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