Evolution’s Empress: Darwinian Perspectives on the Nature of Women

Definition

An edited book that focusses on women as active agents within the evolutionary process.

Introduction

Evolution’s Empress: Darwinian Perspectives on the Nature of Women was published by Oxford University Press in 2013 and co-edited by Maryanne Fisher, Justin Garcia, and Rosemarie Sokol-Chang. It contains 22 chapters, plus an additional foreword by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, and an Introduction. The chapters span a range of topics such as health and reproduction, competition and cooperation, parenting, and mating and communication. The goal of the editors was to integrate evolutionary and feminist perspectives, showing that they can work together to provide novel insights into behavior.

Integrating Evolutionary and Feminist Perspectives

In the Introduction, the editors of Evolution’s Empresspropose that there can be a meaningful reconciliation between the feminist scholarship and that based on an evolutionary framework. They acknowledge that both of these broad areas are grounded...