Evolutionary Rhetoric

Provides a comprehensive examination of the relationship between scientific and feminist rhetorics in free-love feminism, studying the movement from its inception in the 1850s to its dark turn toward eugenics in the early 1900s. Hayden organises her study by scientific discipline - evolution, physiology, bacteriology, embryology, and heredity - and explores how free-love feminists adopted that evidence in their arguments for increased sex education, women’s sexual rights, reproductive freedom, and the abolition of a marriage system that repressed the rights of women.