Feminism and Sex-Extinction

What It's About

Written by a qualified physician in the aftermath of the First World War, this book is a sustained polemic against the early feminist movement. Kenealy argues that women entering traditionally male spheres of work and influence represents a form of "Masculinism" that erases the natural differences between the sexes — differences she considers essential to human progress. Drawing on evolutionary biology and Victorian and Edwardian medical theory, she contends that the suppression of distinct masculine and feminine traits leads to biological and social degeneration, ultimately threatening the vitality of the human race.

Key Concepts

Central to Kenealy's argument is the idea that love and the higher human emotions of compassion and charity originate not from sex but from the maternal function, and that this maternal impulse has driven the evolutionary progress of the species. She proposes that both sexes possess latent traits of the other, and that health and social stability depend on each sex expressing its own dominant characteristics rather than adopting the other's. She frames the feminist push for equality as working against this natural order.

About the Author

Arabella Kenealy (1859–1938) was a British physician and writer, the daughter of the barrister and pro-feminist writer Edward Vaughan Kenealy. She trained and practised in medicine before turning increasingly to writing on social and biological questions. A eugenicist and anti-vivisectionist with an interest in the occult, she became one of the more prominent medical voices arguing against the feminist movement of her era.