... theory on the other. It first considers scientific explanations of women's nature, or womanhood as a subject of science, before turning to research on female choice and the animal/woman divide in the early twentieth century. The chapter also discusses the use of human and animal models of “natural...

.... The more interesting bottom fragment indicates Darwin’s attribution of female choice to the rock manakin, whose “brilliant colours and strange antics” are attractive “to the hens of that bird.” DAR 85B:34r, 25r. By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Figure 11.2. Hummingbirds...

... the issues of female choice, protective colouration and human evolution in the contexts of the Huxley-led drive for Darwinian cognitive and cultural authority, institutional conflict between the Darwinian Ethnological Society and the racialist Anthropological Society of London, the American Civil War...

... 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...

... thoroughgoing identification of the process of aesthetic choice with the discriminating, artistic eye of the breeder was a stumbling block to the notion of analogous female choice in nature. Female choice, already a challenging concept for a Victorian, was made doubly so for Darwin, confronting the seeming...

... understanding confirmed the agency of female choice in animals, powered Darwin’s dispute with Wallace and gave him the confidence and self-belief to write the Descent of Man. As he later recalled, divergence was a “problem of great importance” that Darwin “overlooked” until “long after [he] had come...

... of the genetic mating system, although in some cases, subordinate males father some offspring. These findings suggest that mate selection can involve both male competition and female choice. To estimate the strength of precopulatory and postcopulatory sexual selection, we use measures of sexual dimorphism...

...Chapter four traces the Darwinian concept of “female choice” of sexual partners as it reverberated through feminist and socialist reform circles at the turn of the twentieth century. Darwinian feminists, including Eliza Burt Gamble and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, argued that humans needed to return...