Evolutionary biology and feminism

Evolutionary biology and feminism share a variety of philosophical and practical concerns. I have tried to describe how a perspective from both evolutionary biology and feminism can accelerate the achievement of goals for both feminists and evolutionary biologists. In an early section of this paper I discuss the importance of variation to the disciplines of evolutionary biology and feminism. In the section entitled “Control of Female Reproduction” I demonstrate how insight provided by participation in life as woman and also as a feminist suggests testable hypotheses about the evolution of social behavior—hypotheses that are applicable to our investigations of the evolution of social behavior in nonhuman animals. In the section on “Deceit, Self-deception, and Patriarchal Reversals” I have overtly conceded that evolutionary biology, a scientific discipline, also represents a human cultural practice that, like other human cultural practices, may in parts and at times be characterized by deceit and self-deception. In the section on “Femininity” I have indicated how questions cast and answered and hypotheses tested from an evolutionary perspective can serve women and men struggling with sexist oppression. Patricia Adair Gowaty studies the evolution of social behavior, particularly mating systems and sex allocation, primarily in birds. She is most well-known for her long-term studies of eastern bluebirds, which began in 1977 and are on-going. She was an undergraduate at H. Sophie Newcomb College of Tulane University (1963–1967). In the late sixties and early seventies, while employed at the Bronx Zoo (New York Zoological Society), she belonged to a feminist “consciousness-raising” group. She started graduate school in 1974 at the University of Georgia and received her Ph.D. from Clemson University (1980). She had a postdoctoral position at the University of Oklahoma (1982–1983) and a visiting faculty position at Cornell University through the Visiting Professorships for Women NSF program (1983–1984) before returning to her bluebird study sites at Clemson in 1985. She has supported herself and her research efforts throughout her academic career on a series of awards and grants. She is currently (1990–1995) supported by a Research Scientist Development Award from The National Institute of Mental Health.