Science journalist Angela Saini profiles five tenacious women whose advocacy and research rocked the scientific establishment and challenged long-held preconceptions about gender and ability
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1 CAROLINE KENNARD BERATED DARWIN FOR HIS SEXIST VIEWS
Amateur scientist Caroline Kennard (1827–1907) was a prominent member of a movement in Boston, Massachusetts, striving to raise the status of women in society. In 1881, she was shocked to hear another woman cite Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, detailed in On the Origin of the Species (1859), in support of the view that “the inferiority of women; past, present and future” was “based upon scientific principles”. Kennard wrote to Darwin, encouraging him to clarify that this was not accurate.
However, the 72-year-old Darwin’s response revealed that he did indeed believe that women were less evolved than men. “I certainly think that women though generally superior to men [in] moral qualities are inferior intellectually,” he wrote. For women to overcome this biological inequality, he added, they would have to become breadwinners – which might damage young children and the happiness of households.
Kennard’s response to Darwin’s note, sent in January 1882, was furious. In it she argued that women contribute just as much to society as men, and that the difference between men and women wasn’t the amount of work they did but the kind of work they were allowed to do. “Let the ‘environment’ of women be similar to that of men,” she wrote, “and with his opportunities, before she be fairly judged, intellectually his inferior, please.”
2 ELIZA BURT GAMBLE CHALLENGED THE INFERIORITY DOGMA
Growing up in Concord, Michigan, Eliza Burt Gamble (1841–1920) had little choice but to be independent. Her father died when she was just two years old, and her mother when she was 16. Left without support, she made her living as a teacher. She later married and had three children, one of whom died in infancy. Gamble could have been a quiet, submissive housewife – but instead she joined the burgeoning suffrage movement and fought for the equal rights of women, organising the first women’s suffrage conference in her home state in
