...The central epistemological struggles of the day centered on the rival claims of theology, political philosophy, and science to be the pre-eminent mode of thought and authority. The furor over Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was both symbolic of the struggle and its main event. By the second half of the nineteenth century, science was moving toward ascendancy. In the eighteenth century, science had had to respect theological boundaries concerning, for example, the age of the earth; a century later their positions were reversed and theology was having to adapt to the scientific world view. Scientists then attacked Liberalism as vague, groundless, a mere logical game that adhered to none of the proper canons of scientific proof and evidence. Science pronounced its methodology superior; in particular it provided an approach to the great social questions which was calm, unimpassioned, and objective....
    ...Scientists in areas as diverse as zoology, embryology, physiology, heredity, anthropology, and psychology had little difficulty in proving the pattern of male-female relations that characterized the English middle classes was natural, inevitable, and progressive. The very existence of the genteel lady, moreover, proved the decided superiority of bourgeois culture over that of the working class.

Most of the diverse sociobiological sciences [c. 1860-1890] shared a common intellectual framework -the evolutionary orientation.... [Darwin’s] relatively precise assumptions swiftly blurred and evolution became a concept that stood for the inevitability and preferability of any slow, progressive change from a simple to an ever more complex state.
    The popularity of the concept of evolution reflected the accuracy with which it described and justified to the English middle class the position in which they found themselves. The latter half of the nineteenth century saw them at their economic and political peak of strength and security, both at home, vis a vis the working class, and abroad, vis a vis other capitalist nations....
    One of the “social problems” which the scientists tackled vigorously was the newly raised Woman Problem; quite often their investigations explicitly sought to rebut feminist claims to equality of rights. Their general approach was to define the genteel lady... as the acme of civilization, the product of the a long evolutionary process. They were particularly concerned to show that the removal of women from the work force was one of the clearest signs of social progress; the working-class woman (and by implication her entire class) they defined as either an evolutionary anomaly or a clear throwback to barbarism....
    ...As with the lower [animals], so, Darwin tentatively suggested, with mankind. The processes of sexual differentiation and natural selection proceed apace among “the half-human progenitors of man, and amongst savages.” The males developed not only size and strength but “reason, invention, or imagination.” “Thus man has ultimately become superior to woman.” Darwin, in fact, thought it fortunate that the male improvements were passed on in some measure to both sexes, “otherwise it is probable that man would have become as superior in mental endowment to woman as the peacock is in ornamental plumage to the peahen.”
    ...the notion that evolution itself dictated an increasing sexual differentiation -that each sex perfected the characteristics most suitable to its role and function, that male traits so generated included superior courage, intelligence and resourcefulness, that female traits so generated included a passive maternalism- this complex of ideas was seized upon by Darwin’s contemporaries...
    One of the early uses of sexual evolutionary theory in this way appeared in the work of Herbert Spencer.... In his 1873 article, “Psychology of the Sexes”, he advanced his new arguments in a particularly straightforward (yet circular) manner.
    Spencer began with his conclusion:  men and women were as unalike mentally as they were physically. For anyone to deny this self-evident and inevitable truth, he said, would be “to suppose that here alone in all Nature there is no adjustment of special powers to special functions.” Woman’s function was to raise children. Intellectual attributes were not necessary for that task, therefore they had not been developed over the course of evolution. Spencer went further: they should not be developed. To be sure, "under special discipline" the feminine intellect could equal or surpass the intellectual output of most men. But this would entail “decreased fulfillment of the maternal functions.” “Only that mental energy,” Spencer insisted, “is normally feminine which can coexist with the production and nursing of the due number of healthy children. Obviously a power of mind which, if general among the women of a society, would entail disappearance of the society, is a power not to be included in an estimate of the feminine nature as a social factor.”
    In general, Spencer argued, women were a case of arrested evolutionary development. Their individual development, too, halted short of the level attained by the average male. This was explained functionally: women had to reserve some quantity of vital energy [for reproduction]....
    Finally, Spencer proposed that women’s “love of the helpless, which in her maternal capacity woman displays in a more special form than man, inevitably affects all her thoughts and sentiments.” This trait Spencer thought conducive to social disaster -that is to say, to welfare legislation. Women would no doubt tend to aid the poor and the incompetent out of public funds, thus undermining their will to independence and individual responsibility....