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14.1 “The instability of a vicious feminine caprice” 14.1 “The instability of a vicious feminine caprice”
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14.2 “My conviction of the power of sexual selection remains unshaken” 14.2 “My conviction of the power of sexual selection remains unshaken”
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14.3 A “delicate and difficult subject” 14.3 A “delicate and difficult subject”
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14.4 “An abnormal excrescence” 14.4 “An abnormal excrescence”
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14.5 Female choice at large 14.5 Female choice at large
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14.6 “The greatest of all possible evils to mankind” 14.6 “The greatest of all possible evils to mankind”
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14.7 New Women, eugenics, and the socialist specter 14.7 New Women, eugenics, and the socialist specter
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14.8 The Woman of the Future meets Ethical Man 14.8 The Woman of the Future meets Ethical Man
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Fourteen The Post-Descent Years: Sexual Selection in Crisis, Female Choice at Large
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Published:April 2017
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Abstract
Chapter 14 explores the response to the Descent through Darwin’s late Victorian readership, not simply his scientific readers, but the wider reading public who variously adopted, adapted, or rejected his theory of sexual selection. The criticisms of its major scientific opponents, St. George Mivart and Alfred Russel Wallace, are assessed. As sexual selection (along with natural selection) went into eclipse, female choice was seized upon by an array of social purists, eugenicists, sexual reformers, birth controllers, feminists and socialists, notably Wallace, who in a volte face in1890 advocated a post socialist world in which free and informed female choice would guide the future direction of humanity. Thomas Henry Huxley’s reaction to all this is analysed through the content and context of his famous Romanes lecture.
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