ABSTRACT
Antoinette Blackwell, nee Brown, was the first woman to be ordained as a Protestant minister in the United States, an abolitionist and women’s rights activist, and writer in the fields of theology, science and philosophy. Inspired by the works of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, she nonetheless thought that their interpretation of evolution was shaped by their patriarchal reading of the evidence. Instead, and notably in Sexes Throughout Nature, Blackwell argued that men and women had evolved with different functions but were fully equal, and that this was supported by the science. Both sexual desire and parental love, as an instinct, was significant to explanations in evolutionary theory, and Blackwell argues that studying a variety of animals suggested that sexual love and parental love were two critical emotions that could evolve equally in the male or female of the species, and that both were necessary for human survival.
