Darwin's sisters: Darwinian catalysts in late nineteenth-century feminism

This dissertation arises from a simple question: what value did Darwinism hold for late nineteenth century feminists? The answer, I demonstrate, rests in a "Darwinian feminism" that takes advantage of Darwin's destabilization, particularly in The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, of the boundaries between individual and species. For late nineteenth-century women, who were often exhorted to subsume their selves for the sake of the species, Darwin's language could justify what I term "communities of dissent." These communities depended upon female variation so that the group functioned through its differences rather than by establishing utopian coherence. Examining a transnational group of late nineteenth century texts---Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, Mona Caird's The Daughters of Danaus and George Eliot's Middlemarch---I contend that these fictions regularly turn to Darwinian feminist ideas to rethink individual and group identity. Maternity and sorority, two prevalent modes of portraying female communities in public and novelistic discourse, take center stage in each novel and, I suggest, should be understood as models of communities of dissent. Insisting upon the flexibility of group identity allowed these writers a fresh way to approach maternal inheritance and the "sisterhood" of female coalition, in which variation signals success rather than dissolution. With the help of Darwin, I reread the accomplishments of the various female lives depicted in the fiction I study. While individual characters often do not flourish, they create communities of dissent that support variation and offer hope for long term change. Despite some of the conservative uses to which Darwin was put at the turn-of-the-century, the writers in my study actively engaged with his ideas in order to envision what an effective coalition of varying women might look like.