The Liberating Power of Darwin's Words

In the 1880s, if you were an aficionado of novels about doctors (the ancestors to today’s television shows “ER” or “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” perhaps), you would have had at least four choices from four different writers. The books and their authors may sound familiar, depending on how much literature you studied in college—Dr. Breen’s Practice (1881) by William Dean Howells, Doctor Zay (1882) by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, A Country Doctor (1884) by Sarah Orne Jewett, and The Bostonians (1886) by Henry James.

With the exception of The Bostonians, these books are similar in that each has a woman doctor as the main character. In The Bostonians, a woman doctor, Dr. Prance, is still an important character.

Two authors portray their woman doctors as successful professionals. The other two show their doctors as less capable, with one being an outright failure. The war of ideals falls along gender lines, with women and men novelists on opposite sides. Each side, however, uses the same ammunition—Charles Darwin and his work—but in different ways, according to Bert Bender of the ASU English department.

Bender has traced the differences to how the novelists interpreted Darwinian theories about sexual selection, which they used to support their positions in the debate regarding women’s rights to higher education, the vote, and related issues.

“The men, Howells and James, write novels about women doctors who failed as doctors because their emotional makeup and mental capacity is limited,” Bender says. “Their interpretation of Darwinian theory may be best described as Victorian sexual science, a sexist misinterpretation of Darwinian theory.

“The idea was that if you allow women to go into higher education when their ovaries are developing, this would damage their emotional and mental makeup and render them incapable of mothering the species. It would be a real threat to society to allow women to go into higher education, and especially to become doctors, because they would have to dissect and so forth.”

The women writers, Phelps and Jewett, on the other hand, wrote about women doctors who were excellent in their work. In fact, their patients included men who were characterized as weak and emotionally effeminate, according to Bender.

“Darwinian theory gave women a way to argue for their rights to engage in society—to engage in higher education and especially to enter the professions, like the medical profession.”—Melissa D. Olson