Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Darwinism, Feminism, and the Sonnet Sequence: Meredith's Modern Love

Darwinism, Feminism, and the Sonnet Sequence: Meredith's Modern Love John holMeS he place of Darwinism in arguments over the "woman question" in the late nineteenth century was distinctly equivocal. on the one hand, many leading evolutionists including Darwin himself took what they perceived to be the lesser cultural and intellectual achievement of women in Victorian society and across history as a biological datum, thereby naturalizing female inferiority. on the other hand, from the late 1880s leading feminists argued that the education and emancipation of women was either an evolutionary inevitability or a necessary intervention to avoid the degeneration of the race. As evelleen Richards and others have observed, however, even feminists such as olive Schreiner, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Mathilde Blind tended to predicate their arguments on a notion of sexual difference, emphasizing women's maternal and co-operative virtues and arguing for the benefits to society of allowing these to exercise wider influence through politics and the professions. For some, the biological mechanism of social progress expected to kick in once these reforms had taken place was the neo-lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics. For others, like Alfred Russel Wallace, the mechanism was the eugenic process of sexual selection, as women gained the right to choose their own mates http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Victorian Poetry West Virginia University Press

Darwinism, Feminism, and the Sonnet Sequence: Meredith's Modern Love

Holmes, John
Victorian Poetry , Volume 48 (4) – Feb 3, 2010
Download PDF
16 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/west-virginia-university-press/darwinism-feminism-and-the-sonnet-sequence-meredith-s-modern-love-hzHhgYDQHr

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
West Virginia University Press
Copyright
Copyright © West Virginia University Press
ISSN
1530-7190
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

John holMeS he place of Darwinism in arguments over the "woman question" in the late nineteenth century was distinctly equivocal. on the one hand, many leading evolutionists including Darwin himself took what they perceived to be the lesser cultural and intellectual achievement of women in Victorian society and across history as a biological datum, thereby naturalizing female inferiority. on the other hand, from the late 1880s leading feminists argued that the education and emancipation of women was either an evolutionary inevitability or a necessary intervention to avoid the degeneration of the race. As evelleen Richards and others have observed, however, even feminists such as olive Schreiner, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Mathilde Blind tended to predicate their arguments on a notion of sexual difference, emphasizing women's maternal and co-operative virtues and arguing for the benefits to society of allowing these to exercise wider influence through politics and the professions. For some, the biological mechanism of social progress expected to kick in once these reforms had taken place was the neo-lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics. For others, like Alfred Russel Wallace, the mechanism was the eugenic process of sexual selection, as women gained the right to choose their own mates

Journal

Victorian Poetry – West Virginia University Press

Published: Feb 3, 2010

There are no references for this article.