ABSTRACT
Women were so strikingly absent from Spencer’s early life that both he and his early biographer Duncan remarked that his fi rst contact with them came at the age of twenty. Contact is emphasized here because it suggests a simple meeting with a stranger of the kind usually recorded by anthropologists; it is used because Spencer’s interactions with women began with a shy awkwardness and seldom developed in such a way that the sexual connotations were clearly present. His relations with women stayed artifi cial and strained throughout his life, and his refl ections on them struck a false and excessively ideological note. Women began as the “opposite sex” and remained so. Typical of this was his comment on the reproduction rate of upper-class girls in England. He thought it was lower than it should have been because they had over-taxed their brains in acquiring a “high-pressure” education. Curiously, this was “an overtaxing which produces a serious reaction on their physique”. Frequently, he continued, such women were sterile, and so fl at-chested as to be unable to breastfeed their own infants. Spencer contrasted this hypothesis with the suggestion that cerebral men did not possess the disadvantage of infertility, although, he added, it was diffi cult to fi nd proof for this. While these comments appeared in one of his scientifi c works, the only rationale they possessed was his personal bias against masculine-looking women, and his sturdy radicalism, which prejudiced him against upper-class luxuries such as the use of wet nurses to suckle the off spring of employers.
