Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong – and the New Research That’s Rewriting The Story. Angela Saini
that Darwin hadn’t taken into account the existence of powerful women in some tribal societies, which might suggest that the present supremacy of men now was not how it had always been. The ancient Hindu text the Mahabharata, which she picked out as an example, speaks of women being unconfined and independent before marriage was invented. So she couldn’t help but wonder, if ‘the law of equal transmission’ applied to men as well as women, might it not be possible that males had been dragged along by the superior females of the species?
‘When a man and woman are put into competition,’ she argued, ‘both possessed of every mental quality in equal perfection, save that one has higher energy, more patience and a somewhat greater degree of physical courage, while the other has superior powers of intuition, finer and more rapid perceptions and a greater degree of endurance … the chances of the latter for gaining the ascendancy will doubtless be equal to those of the former.’
Eliza Burt Gamble’s message, like that of other scientific suffragists, proved popular. Their provocative implication was that women had been cheated out of the lives they deserved, that equality was in fact their biological right. ‘It seemed clear to me that the history of the life on the earth presents an unbroken chain of evidence going to prove the importance of the female,’ Gamble wrote in the preface to the revised edition of The Evolution of Woman, which came out in 1916.
But her army of readers, and the support of fellow activists, couldn’t win biologists around to her point of view. Her arguments were doomed never to fully enter the scientific mainstream, only to circulate outside it.
But she never gave up. She marched on in her campaign for women’s rights, and continued writing for the press. Fortunately, she lived just long enough to see her own work, as well as that of the wider movement, gain real strength. In 1893 New Zealand became the first self-governing country to grant women the vote. The battle would take until 1918 in Britain, although even then the franchise was extended only to women over the age of thirty. And when Gamble died in Detroit in 1920, it was just a month after the United States ratified the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibited citizens from being denied the right to vote because of their sex.
While the political battle was – eventually – successful, the war to change people’s minds was taking even longer. ‘Gamble’s ideas were praised in reform magazines and her writing style was generally praised, but the scientific and mainstream press balked at her conclusions and at her pretensions to write about “science”,’ says Kimberly Hamlin. The Evolution of Woman was quite widely reviewed in newspapers and academic journals, but it scarcely left a dent on science.
A scathing review of Sex Antagonism, the latest work of the respected British biologist Walter Heape, in the American Journal of Sociology in 1915 reveals just how desperately some scientists clung to their prejudices, even when society around them was changing. ‘It must have been a sense of humor which led the publishers to put this volume in their “Science Series”,’ wrote the Texas University sociologist and liberal thinker Albert Wolfe. Heape had taken his considerable scientific knowledge of reproductive biology and applied it somewhat less objectively to society, arguing that equality between the sexes was impossible because men and women were built for different roles.
Many biologists at the time agreed with Heape, including the co-author of The Evolution of Sex, John Arthur Thomson, who gave the book a positive review. But Albert Wolfe saw the danger in scientists overstepping their expertise. ‘It is a fine illustration of the sort of mental pathology a scientist, especially a biologist, can exhibit when, with slight acquaintance with other fields than his own, he ventures to dictate from “natural law” (with which Mr Heape claims to be in most intimate acquaintance) what social and ethical relation shall be,’ he mocked in his review. ‘He sees only disaster and perversion in the modern woman movement.’
Parts of science remained doggedly slow to change. Evolutionary theory progressed pretty much as before, learning few lessons from critics like Albert Wolfe, Caroline Kennard and Eliza Burt Gamble. It’s hard to picture the directions in which science might have gone if, in those important days when Charles Darwin was developing his theories of evolution, society hadn’t been quite as sexist as it was. We can only imagine how different our understanding of women might be now if Gamble had been taken a little more seriously. Historians today have regretfully described her radical perspective as the road not taken.
In the century after Gamble’s death, researchers became only more obsessed by sex differences, and by how they might pick them out, measure and catalogue them, enforcing the dogma that men are somehow better than women.
‘… finding gold in the urine of pregnant mares.’
It’s perhaps appropriate that one of the next breakthroughs in the science of sex differences came courtesy of a castrated cock.
In the 1920s a fresh string of discoveries in Europe would alter the way science understood the differences between women and men just as much as Charles Darwin and evolutionary theory had. They were foreshadowed by a strange experiment in 1849, carried out by a German medical professor, Arnold Adolph Berthold. He had been studying castrated cockerels, commonly known as capons. The removal of their testes left these birds with deliciously tender meat, which made them a popular delicacy. Aside from their meat, live capons looked different from normal cocks. They were more docile. They could also be spotted by a smaller than usual comb on top of their heads and particularly droopy red wattles underneath their jaws.
The question for Berthold was: why?
He took the testes from normal cockerels and transplanted them into capons to see what happened. Remarkably, he found the capons started to look and sound like cocks again. The testes were surviving inside them, and growing. It was a startling result, but nobody at the time understood the reasons for it. What was it in the testes that was helping the capons seemingly come back from castration?
Progress came slowly. In 1891 another unusual experiment, this time in France by university professor Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, finally began to get to the root of the mystery. He suspected that male testes might contain some kind of unknown substance that influenced masculinity. Attempting to prove his hypothesis the hard way, he repeatedly injected himself with a concoction made out of blood, semen and juices from the crushed testicles of guinea pigs and dogs. He claimed (although his findings were never replicated) that this cocktail increased his strength, stamina and mental clarity.
The British Medical Journal reported Brown-Séquard’s findings with excitement, describing the substance he had found as the ‘pentacle of rejuvenescence’. Later, researchers carrying out similar experiments using female juices from guinea pig ovaries claimed to see a parallel feminising effect. Over time, the secret juices inside all these male and female gonads were understood to be a specific set of chemicals, named ‘hormones’.
We now know that sex hormones, found in the gonads, are just a handful of the fifty or more hormones produced across the human body. We can’t live without them. They are the grease to our wheels. They’ve been described as chemical messengers, delivering memos throughout the body to make sure it does the things it’s supposed to do, including growing and keeping a stable temperature. From insulin to thyroxine, they helpfully regulate the functions of all sorts of organs. The sex hormones regulate sexual development and reproduction. The two main female ones are oestrogen and progesterone. Oestrogen is what causes a woman’s breasts to develop, among other things, while progesterone helps her body prepare for pregnancy. Male sex hormones are known as androgens, of which the most well-known is testosterone.
Even before birth, sex hormones play a crucial role in determining how male or female a person looks. In the womb, it’s interesting to note, all foetuses start out physically female. ‘The default blueprint is female,’ says Richard Quinton, consultant endocrinologist at hospitals in Newcastle upon Tyne. About seven weeks after the egg has been fertilised, testosterone produced by the testes begins physically turning the male foetuses into boys. ‘Testosterone says: “Make me externally male,”’ adds Quinton. Meanwhile another hormone stops this freshly male foetus from growing a uterus, fallopian tubes and other female parts. As we grow older, hormones again