Willa Cather and the Upside-Down Politics of Feminist Darwinism

Abstract

Of all the revolutionary ideas contained in Th e Origin of Species, none was more so than its account of women’s natural suff rage. Such was the power of the female vote, Darwin observed, that it drove men to “display with the most elaborate care, and show off in the best manner, their gorgeous plumage; they likewise perform strange antics before the females, which, standing by as spectators, at last choose the most attractive partner.”1 Men, that is, looked and behaved the way they did to suit female taste, so that it was women who defi ned masculinity. Indeed, on the logic of natural selection, this defi nition was literal: by choosing which men could breed, women determined the physical character of subsequent generations of males.2 As the nineteenthcentury Darwinist Ernest Haeckel put it: “the outcome of sexual selection [is] the beard of man, the antlers of the stag, the beautiful plumage of the birds of paradise.”3 Th is discovery that men owed their beards to female votes was a jarring one for Victorian males. In an age in which women were denied the franchise, it threatened to turn the existing order upsidedown, and Darwin and his male followers hurriedly moved to quell this possibility by claiming that in the case of humans female nature was entirely domestic.4 Yet even as men were trying to conceal the consequences of their own theory, a number of suff ragettes seized on Darwinism as a potent justifi cation for their cause.5 If nature had enfranchised women, they argued, then it was perverse for human society to do the opposite. In fact it might actually be dangerous: since betterchoosing women produced hardier off spring, natural selection must have worked over time to improve female judgment. To deny women the vote was thus to risk the future of the species, and in America this argument helped swing a crucial voting bloc of men to support the suff rage.6 In the squalor of frontier towns and the violence of World War I, these men saw confi rmation of the suff ragettes’ claim that masculinity had lost its way, and so it was that when Woodrow Wilson appealed the Senate to pass the