The sexist Charles Darwin

 

He called women intellectually inferior.

She proved he wasn’t just wrong — he was unscientific.

In 1871, Charles Darwin claimed that women were biologically less intelligent than men.

Doctors repeated it.

Politicians used it.

Universities justified exclusion with it.

Darwin’s authority made sexism sound like science.

Four years later, Antoinette Brown Blackwell — a woman with no formal scientific training, barred from universities, dismissed by the establishment — dismantled his argument with such precision that he never dared respond.

Antoinette wasn’t new to breaking barriers.

In 1853, she became the first woman ordained as a minister in the United States, stepping into a pulpit no woman had ever been allowed to stand in.

But her mind refused to stay within one field.

She devoured philosophy, theology, and eventually evolutionary science — the very ideas Darwin had used to justify inequality.

She read his work carefully.

She understood it deeply.

And she saw what he could not: that his conclusions about women were not evolution…

but Victorian bias dressed up as biology.

For four years she gathered evidence.

Species where females were larger, stronger, or more complex.

Birds of prey with fiercer females.

Spiders where the female dominated.

Insects where males lived shorter, simpler lives.

Nature that refused to match Darwin’s story.

In 1875, she published The Sexes Throughout Nature — a calm, methodical, devastating rebuttal.

She showed where Darwin cherry-picked data, where he confused culture with biology, where he interpreted women’s limited opportunities as limited ability.

She exposed the circular logic shaping “objective” science: assume male superiority → interpret nature through that lens → claim nature proves the assumption.

Darwin never answered her.

He couldn’t.

Her evidence was too strong, her reasoning too clear, her scholarship too precise.

Male scientists ignored her because she was a woman.

Women reformers embraced her because she was right.

And Antoinette kept going — writing, lecturing, raising five children, and fighting for women’s rights for seventy years.

She lived long enough to cast a vote in 1920 at age 95, the only woman from the first Women’s Rights Convention in 1850 to live to see suffrage become reality.

She didn’t ask men like Darwin to believe women were equal.

She demonstrated it — relentlessly, brilliantly, undeniably.

Fun Fact:

Antoinette Brown Blackwell’s 1875 book is considered the first scientific critique of evolutionary sexism ever written.

Because sometimes it only takes one mind — one determined, unignorable mind — to expose the bias an entire world mistakes for truth.

#historyuntold #womeninscience #learnsomethingnew #equalitymatters #didyouknow

Sources:

American Philosophical Society – Antoinette Brown Blackwell Papers

Smithsonian Magazine – “The Woman Who Took On Darwin”

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – Entry on Antoinette Brown Blackwell

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