“It meant a way to be modern,” says historian Kimberly Hamlin, whose 2014 book From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America charts women’s responses to Darwin. Evolution was an alternative to religious stories that painted woman as man’s spare rib. Christian models for female behavior and virtue were challenged. “Darwin created a space where women could say that maybe the Garden of Eden didn’t happen. . .and this was huge. You cannot overestimate how important Adam and Eve were in terms of constraining and shaping people’s ideas about women.”
