The historiography of the sociobiology debate has focused almost exclusively on men. Ullica Segerstrale’s Defenders of the Truth (2000) mentioned Ruth Hubbard in passing but did not allude to the many other women who published and participated in the discussion. In a review of Defenders of the Truth, biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling pointed out that the book documented “he said—she said,” except that there was barely any “she said” at all.1 This historiography reflects the reception at the time: E. O. Wilson did not engage with feminist critiques of sociobiology and even many male critics of sociobiology in the 1970s failed to take them seriously. Although many women took issue publicly with Wilson’s claims, the sociobiology debate became framed as a battle between men. Media coverage focused on debates between E. O. Wilson and Harvard evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin and barely engaged with the feminist analysis of sociobiology.
But women members of the Sociobiology Study Group (SSG) of Science for the People recognized immediately that sociobiology was trouble for women. They wrote and spoke out about their concerns regarding gender bias and sexism in sociobiology. These included Harvard biologist Ruth Hubbard; the first woman on the chemistry faculty at Boston University, Marian Lowe; an associate professor of anthropology at Northeastern University, Lila Leibowitz; as well as UMass Boston physicist Freda Salzman.2 Two women who attended one of the first meetings of the SSG in August 1975,3 Hubbard and high school teacher Barbara Beckwith, were among the sixteen people who signed a letter to the New York Review of Books, dated November 13, 1975, expressing their concerns about sociobiology.4 Hubbard, Beckwith, Lowe, Leibowitz, Salzman, and others went on to write about sexism in sociobiology and to speak about it on multiple platforms.5 Despite their immediate reaction to sociobiology and continuing work on feminist critiques of evolutionary theory their efforts received little attention in scholarly circles or in the media.
At an SSG meeting on a Tuesday evening in the autumn of 1976, Salzman read aloud from a letter to Wilson.6 An anthropology graduate student had read Sociobiology and was struggling with one paragraph in the closing chapter. According to Wilson, human females are unique in the “heavy sloughing of the wall of the ‘disappointed womb.’”7 The student wrote:
You must have had good reasons for putting the words “disappointed womb” in quotation marks. Whether or not you personally sympathize with that sulky organ I have no way of knowing. What I do know is that you have drawn my attention to the plight of billions upon billions of “disappointed sperm” dying like so many teensy-weensy beached whales on the sands of a bedsheet. Honestly, I couldn’t sleep a wink all night for thinking about them.8
The women at the meeting thought the letter was hilarious, but they also agreed it pointed to Wilson’s bias.9 He wrote: “What we can conclude with some degree of confidence is that primitive men lived in small territorial groups, within which males were dominant over females.”10 While his book did not explicitly advocate patriarchy, he presented heterosexuality, the nuclear family, male aggression, and passive females as the norm, and also as behaviors that resulted from natural selection and evolution. But despite the women’s best efforts, the men in the SSG did not embrace a feminist analysis, which eventually led to several women leaving the group. They preferred meetings where their views were taken seriously.
SSG was not the only group to critique Sociobiology on feminist grounds. Another group that developed independently in New York City in 1977 was the Genes and Gender Collective.11 Dorothy Burnham, a molecular biologist and civil rights activist, had experienced both racism and sexism. Speaking at the first conference hosted by the Collective, she fought against the scientific myths regarding women. She argued that the qualities that scientists suggested differentiated women from men as a result of evolution and made them suited only for caring for homes and children “apparently did not apply to the Afro-American slave woman.” She reminded white women scientists that they had to consider myths about race as well as gender.12
Despite a lack of comparable media coverage, women’s voices provided a loud and clear critique of sociobiology in the 1970s, but their important contributions have yet to be fully analyzed. Our Science, Ourselves: How Gender, Race and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science (2024) is one contribution to that ongoing project.13
Notes
Anne Fausto-Sterling, review of Defenders of the Truth, by Ullica Segerstrale, Genomics News (Celera) (2001): 1/16; Fausto-Sterling published Myths of Gender (New York City: Basic Books) in 1985, which included an entire chapter on sexism in sociobiology: “Putting Woman in her (Evolutionary) Place,” 156–204.
Lila Leibowitz Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University; Sandra Korn, “Sex, Science, and Politics in the Sociobiology Debate” (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2014), 78; Marion Lowe, “Sociobiology and Sex Differences,” Signs 4, no 1 (1978), 118–125; Ruth Hubbard and Marian Lowe eds., Genes and Gender: Pitfalls in Research on Sex and Gender (New York City: Gordian Press, 1979).
Jon Beckwith, Making Genes, Making Waves: A Social Activist in Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 139–140.
Elizabeth Allen et al., “Against Sociobiology,” New York Review of Books, 13 Nov 1975; Hubbard went on to critique sociobiology for decades. See, for example, Ruth Hubbard, “Sexism and Sociobiology,” Psychology Today (1978); Ruth Hubbard, “From Termite To Human Behavior,” Psychology Today 12, no 5 (1978): 124–34; Ruth Hubbard, “Do Only Men Evolve,” in Women Look at Biology Looking at Women (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing, 1979), 7–36; Ruth Hubbard and Marian Lowe, “Sociobiology and Biosociology: Can Science Prove the Biological Basis of Sex Differences in Behavior,” Genes and Gender II, ed. Ruth Hubbard and Marian Lowe (New York: Gordian Press, 1979); Ruth Hubbard, “Facts and Feminism,” Science for the People 18, no. 2 (1986): 16–20; Ruth Hubbard, The Politics of Women’s Biology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 107–18.
Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America, vol. 2, Before Affirmative Action, 1940–1972, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1995), 122–48; Marian Lowe, interview by author, 18 Mar 2021; On how the nepotism law shaped Freda Salzman’s career, see Maggie Chen, “Wives, Physics, and Nepotism in Academica,” Lady Science, 18 Aug 2020, www.ladyscience.com/essays/wives-physics-nepotism-academia-freda-salzman-2020; Cora Stuhrmann, “Sociobiology on Screen. The Controversy through the Lens of Sociobiology: Doing What Comes Naturally,” Journal of the History of Biology 56 (2023): 365–97.
Soon after it was established, the Sociobiology Study Group affiliated with Science for the People. For more on the SSG and who attended meetings, see Neil Jumonville, “The Cultural Politics of the Sociobiology Debate,” Journal of the History of Biology 35, no. 3 (2002): 569–93; see also, Freda Salzman Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2000), 547.
Doris O’Donnell to E. O. Wilson, 27 May 1976, box 4, folder 119, Freda Salzman Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
Freda Salzman, “Are Sex Roles Biologically Determined?” Science for the People 9, no. 4 (1977): 27–32; Freda Salzman, “Sociobiology: The Controversy Continues,” Science for the People 11, no. 2 (1979): 20–27.
Wilson, Sociobiology, 553.
Ruth Hubbard was not involved with the founding of GGC, but she did provide a link between the SSG and the GGC, as she edited a volume with the Genes and Gender series, and GGC later published papers presented at the 1978 AAAS conference by women from the SSG
Dorothy Burnham, “Biology and Gender,” in Genes and Gender: On Hereditarianism and Women, ed. Ethel Tobach and Betty Rosoff (New York: Gordian, 1978), 55.
The research for this paper was done while writing Our Science, Ourselves: How Gender, Race and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2024).
University of California Press