In my last article I showed how The Descent of Man ranked whole peoples as biologically lower and forecast their elimination. Today I want to look at what the same book, and the same man, had to say about half the human race. I will start not with the science but with a list.
A list in his own hand
In 1838 Charles Darwin was trying to decide whether to marry. He approached the question the way he approached everything: he drew up a written list of costs and benefits. The document survives among his papers at Cambridge, and it is worth reading slowly.
Under the arguments in favor of a wife, he wrote that she would be an “object to be beloved and played with.” Then he added, in his own hand, “better than a dog anyhow.” On the other side of the ledger he recorded the costs: “less money for books” and the “terrible loss of time.”
He married his cousin Emma the following year.
From private joke to public science
Was the dog remark a private joke? Perhaps. People write foolish things in private, and I would not build a case on a single line in a notebook. But Darwin did not leave the sentiment in the notebook. In 1871, in The Descent of Man, he promoted it to science.
In chapter nineteen, his conclusion, he writes:
The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman.
This holds, he says, whether the field requires “deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands.” From this he concludes that the average mental power of man “must be above that of woman.” Not might be. Must be.
The last year of his life
Perhaps he softened with age? In 1882, the final year of his life, the American reformer Caroline Kennard wrote to ask him directly whether he truly held women to be intellectually inferior. His reply is preserved at Cambridge. Women, he answered, are superior in moral qualities but inferior intellectually, and “there seems to me to be a great difficulty from the laws of inheritance” in their ever becoming man’s equal.
Look closely at that phrase: the laws of inheritance. He did not blame custom. He did not blame a lack of schooling, which could have been remedied. He blamed biology. In his view the inferiority of women was built in, and his theory declared it unfixable.
Spare me “a man of his time”
The usual defense arrives on schedule: he was a man of his time, and we should not judge him by ours. I would accept that defense if his time had offered him no alternative. It did. John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women, arguing the exact opposite, in the same country, twelve years before The Descent of Man appeared. The case for the equality of women was in print and in English. Darwin chose the other view. It was a choice, not a fate.
Notice the pattern that connects this article to the last one. Whether the subject was race or sex, Darwin’s theory supplied a biological ranking, and Darwin, a man capable of moral reflection, accepted the ranking because the theory required it. That is what I mean by the dark side of Darwin. It is not that he was unusually wicked. It is that his idea, taken seriously, led a thoughtful man to conclusions he should have recoiled from, and he did not recoil.
Next time I will take up the paragraph in The Descent of Man about asylums and the “weak members” of society, and how Darwin’s own cousin forged it into a movement that sterilized tens of thousands of Americans.
Sources
Darwin’s marriage memorandum, 1838, Darwin Papers, Cambridge. The Descent of Man (1871), chapter 19. Darwin to Caroline Kennard, 9 January 1882, Darwin Correspondence Project. J. S. Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869).
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