On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man

In 1871, Charles Darwin asserted—under the authority of science—that women were intellectually inferior to men. Four years later, a woman answered him so thoroughly that he never publicly replied. Her name was Antoinette Brown Blackwell.

I picked this article for “Women’s Month” to expose just how long women have been diminished and the prejudices that have remained. Women’s work is never done, and we are all better because of them! Today it seems almost silly to even believe we are not there yet with equal rights!

By the time she took on Darwin, she was already a trailblazer. In 1853, at just 28 years old, she became the first woman ordained as a minister in the United States, stepping into a role long reserved for men. But Antoinette refused to be confined to a single sphere. Her interests spanned theology, philosophy, and the emerging scientific debates of her era—especially evolutionary theory.

When On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859, she studied it carefully. A decade later, she published Studies in General Science (1869), one of the earliest substantial American engagements with Darwin’s ideas—and an extraordinary achievement for a largely self-taught woman scholar. Darwin himself wrote to thank her for her thoughtful analysis.

Then came The Descent of Man in 1871. In it, Darwin argued that evolution had produced men who were more courageous, inventive, and intellectually advanced, while women were naturally more emotional and less capable of abstract reasoning. These differences, he maintained, were biological—not cultural.

Victorian society embraced the claim. Academics cited it. Physicians repeated it. Opponents of women’s higher education and suffrage wielded it as scientific validation.

Longstanding prejudice now carried the weight of evolutionary theory.
This is a cautionary tale of understanding what is written and by whom. And why history gets rewritten with new findings!

Antoinette would not let that stand.

For four years, she examined Darwin’s reasoning and assembled a meticulous rebuttal. In 1875, she published The Sexes Throughout Nature, a systematic challenge to his conclusions. She argued that Darwin had selectively emphasized species in which males were larger or more ornamented, treating those examples as universal patterns. In reality, she noted, many species—from certain insects to birds of prey—featured females who were larger, stronger, or more dominant.

More significantly, she exposed the cultural assumptions underlying his science. Darwin, she contended, had mistaken Victorian gender norms for biological inevitability. If women appeared less accomplished in certain intellectual arenas, it was not because evolution had stunted them—but because society had denied them education, professional opportunity, and participation in scientific life.

“It is the special philosophic problem of the ages,” she wrote, “to account for anomalies in human society created not by nature, but by the artificial conditions imposed on women.”

Her critique cut to the heart of what would later be called scientific sexism: conclusions shaped as much by social bias as by data. Darwin did not publish a response.

Although largely ignored by the male scientific establishment, her work circulated among suffragists, educators, and early women scholars. She demonstrated that even the era’s most celebrated scientific authority could be challenged—through careful evidence and disciplined reasoning.

And she did not stop there.

Antoinette continued writing and lecturing on science, philosophy, and women’s rights while raising five children. She had attended the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls in 1850. Seventy years later, in 1920, at age 95, she cast her first vote after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment—becoming the only woman from that original convention still alive to witness its triumph.

Born in 1825 and living to 96, Antoinette Brown Blackwell spent nearly a century dismantling the idea that women’s intellect was limited by nature. When Darwin claimed otherwise, she did more than protest.

She answered him—with scholarship, precision, and resolve.