Darwin & gender: a new initiative

In July 2009 The University of Cambridge announced a new iniative on ‘Darwin and Gender’ funded over three years by The Bonita Trust. The initiative is under the direction of the Darwin Correspondence Project and the resources created are being made available through this website. Hear Professor Jim Secord and Dr Alison Pearn discuss the project on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.

The new ‘Darwin and Gender’ research initiative is underway!

Dr Philippa Hardman has been appointed research associate for the gender stream of the Darwin Correspondence Project and is in the process of researching the life, works and achievements of Mary Treat — a nature writer and naturalist from Vineland, New Jersey. Treat corresponded with Charles Darwin more than any other of his women correspondents and is perhaps best known for her 1873 article Controlling Sex in Butterflies in which she made groundbreaking observations about the relationship between the amount of food ingested by butterfly larvae and the sex of adult butterfly. Treat also identified a number of new plant and insect species, including a rare fern, two new species of burrowing spider and the Zephyr Lily which was named Zephyranthes Treatiae in her honour.

Regular progress updates will appear here on our new gender blog.

**Announcing the arrival of our new DarwinWomen Twitter feed (September, 2010)**

The Darwin and Gender Twitter feed is now up and running! It offers the exciting chance to share in comments and observations made by Darwin’s many and varied women correspondents — from ground-breaking women scientists to prominent members of the suffragist movement to Darwin’s wife and daughters. Listen in now!

Among the specific areas that the ‘Darwin and Gender’ project addresses are:

Darwin’s female correspondents (see a complete list)
Darwin’s domestic life
Gender in a scientific context
Gender and society

Researchers funded by The Bonita Trust are providing accurate transcripts of the letters, and researching and writing the contextual material necessary to make them accessible both to scholars and the general public. Working with a dedicated education officer, they will be selecting letters relevant to gender studies and assist in the creation of carefully targeted, chiefly web-based, educational resources for schools and colleges around the world.