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COPYRIGHT 2005 University of Rhode Island
The Woman Question, which is ultimately a gender and a gendered question, examines the complexity, malleability, and impermanence of gender. Although the question itself is ahistorical--it was not asked and answered at any one specific time in history--it received unprecedented attention during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, not uncoincidentally, when theories of the construction of gender identity were first posited. At the time, questions about gender were questions about sex. The terms were synonymous. Distinctions between them would be made in the next century. In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault historicizes this point and identifies the dawn of theorizing gender/sex: "The society that emerged in the 19th century ... did not confront sex with a fundamental refusal or recognition[;] it put into question an entire machinery for producing true discourses concerning it" (69). Of specific interest to this nineteenth-century society was the role of woman. In the United States from 1873 to 1915, the Woman Question served as a catalyst for understanding woman and her biological, sexological, and sociological differences from man.
Evolution, psychology, eugenics, and domestic science marked the age of science. Biology, at this time, overlapped all these sciences in one way or another just as biology, sexology, and sociology overlapped within and throughout the ongoing debate about woman, her nature, and her sphere. For the purposes of this historical overview, biology will be understood as an overarching term. During the nineteenth century, "science" became the ultimate authority, the vestige of truth, facts, and proof about men and women. This privileging of science was problematic, however, because theories about gender were not based on pure science but on interpretations of nature and society. Science became the focus of the debate even though scientific arguments about women were biased and "Victorian 'scientific reasoning' was obviously circular" (Helsinger, Sheets, and Veeder, 2: 57). For example, Herbert Spencer's bias, promulgated as fact, is evident immediately in his lengthy opening footnote to his pivotal article "Psychology of the Sexes" where he clarifies his "scientific" method. His argument, he explains, is founded on complementary comparisons. To prove his point, he acknowledges that gendered deviance can occur within the sexes: "Either sex under special stimulations is capable of manifesting powers ordinarily shown only by the other" (31). Problematic in the grounding of his argument is the example he uses for each gender's deviance. For men he cites lactation; for women he cites contemplation: "under special discipline, the feminine intellect will yield products higher than the intellects of most men can yield. But we are not to count this as truly feminine if it entails decreased fulfillment of the maternal functions. Only that mental energy is normally feminine which can coexist with the production and nursing of the due number of healthy children" (31). Despite the obvious bias, Spencer's theories--and the theories of his contemporaries--were considered scientific, and to understand the biology argument is to understand the "scientific" argument.
While Charles Darwin's two texts, Origin of the Species (1859) and The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), ushered in theories of evolution and biology, they did not usher in "the debate over woman's developmental potential[. T]wo assumptions important to the Woman Question predate Darwin by many years--that ethnic groups, like everything else in creation, exist on a hieratic scale of increasing perfection, with the white male supreme; and that woman is essentially a reproductive, domestic being" (Helsinger, Sheets, and Veeder, 2: 89). Women and men embraced this theory of biological determinism, finding in this theory proof that women held a critical position within human evolution through reproduction. Evolutionary theory substantiated assumptions that reproduction was woman's preordained purpose and duty. Conservatives and feminists used Darwin's theory to defend their positions. Conservatives found it efficacious in defending the status quo. For feminists, (1) the theory "affirmed their belief in the uniqueness of women and offered reassurance that proposed changes in women's activities would benefit society" (Newman 2). They also accepted, "on their own terms, the evolutionists' theme of women's distinctiveness and complementarity with men" (Kohlstedt and Jorgensen 278). Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a feminist, author, lecturer, and reformed Darwinist, agreed with what Lester Frank Ward termed "Gynecocentric Theory": woman as worker, mother; man as warrior (Magner 121). In her major work Women and Economics, Gilman used an evolutionary perspective to explore women's status within and outside the home. Throughout her famous tract, Gilman questioned social Darwinism, noting that women's "nature" or "essence" had been socially conditioned by Darwin's and others' espousal of evolution. While Gilman included the role of mother within her conception of woman, she did not limit a woman to that position. Rather, Gilman proposed socializing housework so that women could avail themselves of paid positions outside the home where they would contribute to social progress. At this time in history, conservatives and feminists agreed on what woman's nature was: to be a wife and mother. The argument centered on what it could and might become: "[t]he controversy concerned the potential for modifying the feminine character and the probable effect such modification might have on the future development of society" (Newman 2).
Sexual selection operated as the predominant method of ascribing gender roles, in part, because sexual selection depended "'not on a struggle for existence, but on a struggle between males for possession of the females'" (Darwin qtd. in Newman 2-3). Due to sexual selection, Darwin hypothesized and conservatives concurred, some characteristics would be transmitted only to offspring of the same sex; thus "[s]exual selection ..., with its associated law of partial inheritance, accounted for men's physical and mental superiority over women" (Newman 3). Women lacked intelligence, evolutionists argued, because they did not need to think during primitive times, and thus their brains did not develop as men's did. The relevance of physical size and brain weight to equality were two arguments that arose from evolutionary theory. For example, a Miss Hardaker wrote a letter agreeing with the brain-size argument of superiority in an 1882 issue of Popular Science Monthly. She asserted that since men were smarter than women, their brains must be larger. Nina Morais, in direct response to Miss Hardaker's letter, turned Miss Hardaker's logic against her. If bigger is smarter, Miss Morais offered, intellectuals would be large men (Newman 7) (2). Darwin, Spencer, and their proponents pointed to evolution in general and sexual selection in particular as proof of women's fixed position; opponents pointed to evolution as proof that women can change, reasoning that since change is the very foundation of evolution, women's nature and sphere were mutable. Regardless of which side pressed its case, the point was clear: "[t]he question of whether women's nature was biologically fixed or socially modifiable underlay all other debates on the Woman Question" (Newman 10).
Darwin's theory resounds throughout the century as individuals argued the Woman Question, but Spencer was the question's primary influence. His methodology, evident in "Psychology of the Sexes," "is basically comparative: to achieve the ideal of synthesizing the physical and social sciences, principles of evolutionary biology are applied to the workings of the mind and society" (Helsinger, Sheets, and Veeder, 2: 89). The article itself developed from work he began years earlier that articulated his theory of sexual difference in The Principles of Biology (1864). He continued to observe and study men and women in order to ascertain reasons for gender differences. For him evolution was the science that proved his theory that as "evolution proceeds toward increased specialization ... woman will therefore become ever more maternal as man becomes ever more intelligent" (Helsinger, Sheets, and Veeder, 2: 90). As a follower and admirer of Darwin's work Spencer's reintroduction of the Woman Question in Popular Science Monthly arose from Darwin's theories on "woman's nature." By the end of the second paragraph in his article, Spencer establishes...
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