New Ideas: Science, Culture and Women's Rights, 1789–1900

A century of new ideas

The nineteenth century changed how people understood nature, disease, art and the place of women in society. These ideas could liberate: germ theory saved millions of lives, and women's movements challenged ancient inequalities. They could also be twisted: a scientific theory about biology was misused to justify racism and empire.

Darwin and evolution

In On the Origin of Species (1859), the British naturalist Charles Darwin argued that species change over very long periods through natural selection. Individuals vary; those with traits better suited to their environment tend to survive and have more offspring; over many generations, populations change. Alfred Russel Wallace had reached a similar idea independently, and their papers were presented together in 1858.

Darwin's ideas challenged literal readings of religious creation stories and caused intense debate. Many religious thinkers, then and now, have accepted evolution as compatible with faith.

Social Darwinism was something else. Writers such as Herbert Spencer (who coined the phrase "survival of the fittest") applied ideas of competition to human societies. Some claimed that wealthy classes or certain "races" and nations were naturally "fitter" and deserved to rule. These ideas were used to justify imperialism, racism and opposition to social reform, and they fed into the eugenics movement, which sought to control human reproduction. They were not good science, and they did great harm.

Science, medicine and daily life

• Germ theory: Louis Pasteur showed that microorganisms cause fermentation and disease, and developed vaccines (rabies, 1885). Robert Koch identified the bacteria that cause tuberculosis (1882) and cholera. Joseph Lister introduced antiseptic surgery (1867), greatly reducing deaths after operations.
• Public health: clean water, sewers and vaccination, building on work such as John Snow's (see the lesson on industrial society), slowly reduced death rates in many cities.
• Chemistry and physics: Dmitri Mendeleev organized the periodic table (1869); Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell explained electricity and magnetism, leading to electric power.
• Communication: photography (from 1839), the telegraph, the telephone (patented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, with early experiments at his family's home in Brantford, Ontario), and cheap newspapers spread information faster than ever.

Science also served empire: medicine (quinine), mapping and the telegraph helped conquest, and "race science" was used to rank peoples.

Culture: from Romanticism to Realism, and global exchanges

Romanticism (about 1790s–1840s) reacted against the Enlightenment's emphasis on reason and against industrial ugliness. Romantics valued emotion, nature, the individual genius and the national past. Examples: the poets William Wordsworth and Lord Byron (who died supporting Greek independence); the composer Ludwig van Beethoven; the brothers Grimm, who collected German folk tales partly to celebrate a German national culture; and Eugène Delacroix's painting Liberty Leading the People (1830). Romanticism and nationalism fed each other.

Realism (from the mid-1800s) showed ordinary life, often the lives of workers and the poor: novelists such as Charles Dickens, Émile Zola and Leo Tolstoy, and painters such as Gustave Courbet.

Global exchanges went in many directions:

• Japanese woodblock prints, such as Katsushika Hokusai's Great Wave (about 1831), influenced French Impressionist painters in the 1870s and 1880s ("Japonisme").
• In Bengal, writers and reformers combined Indian and European ideas in a cultural flowering often called the Bengal Renaissance.
• In the Arab world, the Nahda ("awakening") revived Arabic literature and journalism.
• In Latin America, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío launched modernismo with Azul (1888), a movement that later influenced writers in Spain.

Mass culture grew: literacy rose with compulsory schooling in many countries; cheap newspapers and novels reached millions; and modern sports were organized with written rules. Lacrosse, which comes from games played by Haudenosaunee and other First Nations, was given written rules by Montreal players in the 1860s.

The women's rights movement

In 1800, in most societies, married women could not own property in their own name, control their wages, or have legal custody of their children, and no country gave women the vote in national elections. The first wave of feminism challenged this.

• Ideas: Olympe de Gouges (1791) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1792) argued that women were rational beings entitled to education and rights.
• Seneca Falls (1848): in New York State, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and others issued a Declaration of Sentiments, modelled on the US Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal." Many of the activists had also campaigned against slavery.
• Black women's voices: Sojourner Truth, who had escaped slavery, spoke powerfully for both abolition and women's rights. Mary Ann Shadd, whom you met in the abolition lesson, also argued for women's rights.
• Legal reforms: British Married Women's Property Acts (1870 and 1882) let married women own property; similar laws passed in Canadian provinces and US states.
• Education and professions: In 1875, Grace Annie Lockhart graduated from Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, often described as the first woman in the British Empire to earn a bachelor's degree. Emily Stowe, who had to train in the United States because Canadian medical schools excluded women, was licensed to practise medicine in Ontario in 1880 and founded the Toronto Women's Literary Club (1876), usually described as Canada's first suffrage group. In India, Pandita Ramabai founded schools and a home for widows, campaigning for women's education.
• The vote: New Zealand became the first self-governing country to give women the vote in national elections in 1893, after petitions led by Kate Sheppard. In most other countries, including Canada, women won the vote in the twentieth century.

The movement had limits. Many leading activists were middle class and white, and some used racist arguments against Black or immigrant men voting before educated white women. Working-class women focused on wages and conditions. A full history includes all these voices.