Abstract

In the late 19th century United States, some key concepts of evolutionist theories by Herbert Spencer are systematically employed by the rising social sciences to describe the racial and sexual hierarchies shaping American society as the output of a biological order governed by the law of the «survival of the fittest». As a «Black Woman of the South», Anna Julia Cooper develops a critical version of this use of the evolutionary paradigm, highlighting the ideological nature concealed by its claim to scientific neutrality, and attacking the foundation of the racist and patriarchal domination system that it aims to legitimize.