It was thought, for example, that black women had to evolve up to the condition of private cisheteropatriarchal gender, before they moved onto anything else. The feminist novelist and eugenicist Charlotte Perkins Gilman detested the gender division of spheres when it came to white people, but also believed, on the basis of new evolutionary science that the housewife-breadwinner dyad was the highest ambition befitting all “primitives.”
