Abstract

The essay analyzes the works of three American authors, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Eliza Burt Gamble and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who in the second half of the nineteenth century theorized a feminist critique of evolutionism using the theoretical tools of evolutionary theory. By reconstructing the historical power of sexual difference and the transformations of the patriarchal relationship between the sexes, these feminist evolutionists questioned the «survival of the fittest» as inescapable law of nature, resignify the very concept of nature. While they use evolutionary science to criticize the progenitors of evolutionism and refute the dogma of women’s inferiority, their works also show the possibility of claiming a relative autonomy of the social sciences from the burden of biology. These feminist «reform Darwinists», moreover, go beyond just criticizing the misogyny of the science of their time and go so far as to propose new conceptions of history, sexual difference, and society.