Book review: Cat Bohannon's Eve traces the evolution of women's bodies

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

Author: Cat Bohannon

Publisher: Penguin

Price: Rs 699   
Pages: 624

Evolution is a journey in time. Our biological features, chemical composition, psychological make-up and social skills are all a result of a back-and-forth tryst with science as is evident in theories of deep time and the fossil remains from pre-history. At a time when the norm in biological and medical research is to study the male body as the standard indicator of growth and development of the species, scholar Cat Bohannon places the female body – which is largely missing from the discussion – at the centre of this evolution that has occurred over millions of years, in her riveting debut book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.
 

From milk-producing mammillae, enabling mothers to nourishing their babies from their own bodies; to foetus-carrying wombs that grow and give birth to “live young”; to rotating ankles; to developing legs and spine that can walk upright to fetch and carry more food; to the emergence of coherent speech and communication; to collectively accepting monogamy at the cost of patriarchy; for each such feature – which are mostly biological or serve a biological purpose despite their social or cognitive nature – Bohannon traces an “Eve”, the evolutionary source. “We don’t have one mother; we have many. And to each Eve, her particular Eden,” she writes in a book that figured in the final list of the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Writing and has been long-listed for the first edition of Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction.
 

Bohannon writes her book in search of a “no-nonsense, hard-hitting, seriously researched (but readable) account of what we are… Something that would rewrite the story of womanhood”. In her own words, “Eve  traces the evolution of women’s bodies, from tits to toes, and how that evolution shapes our lives today.” Following the patterns set by historian Yuval Noah Harari and biologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, Bohannon views the evolution of the female body from a combined lens of anthropology, paleontology, medicine, biology, sociology, and technology. 
 

Much like the subtitle of Bill Bryson’s The Body,  Bohannon’s book is “a guide for occupants”. She asks questions that have been long neglected in the scientific pursuit of human history: How did wombs develop? Why do women menstruate? Where does  choice? Why are midwives important? What are the costs — as compared to the advantages — of the features of the 

female body?
 

The answers to these questions are not conclusively settled. This book is but a beginning of the discourse on female bodies, their origin, evolution, purpose and potential; much like the Dutch writer Mineke Schipper opened the cultural discourse on the female body — in art, literature, cinema— in her 2023 book Hills of Paradise, French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir opened the discourse on a woman’s social and political stature in her pioneering work The Second Sex (1949) or Caroline Criado-Perez opened the statistical debate for the lack of space occupied by women in the currency of the modern world – data – in her book, Invisible Women .
 

Bohannan’s writing has a uniquely cinematic quality. She openly discusses topics we avoid talking about — nipples, fat, menstrual blood, armpits and more— uninhibitedly, as academics and writers should. Quoting Susan Sontag in her introductory chapter — “any large-scale picturing of women belongs to the ongoing story of how women are presented, and how they are invited to think of themselves” — Bohannan sets the tone and intent of her book-length research.
 

Experts may identify gaps in her research; for the common reader, there is much to learn and be impressed with — first, by finding new ways of looking at female anatomy along with male anatomy that co-evolved with the changes in the female body. Best of all, Bohannan accommodates the gender spectrum in her understanding of our “body plan”, or at least tries to, since there are more questions than answers available on the topic.
 

 In the history of the universe and of our planet, “we are the descendants of the survivors, of whatever managed to adapt” — a “complicated dance of development” indeed. As we continue to impact natural forces with our industrial temperament and contribute exponentially to climate change with every small and big decision we make as a species, this book serves as a reminder that our journey has been long and, for all that, the human body has endured and developed.

The reviewer is an independent feature writer. Instagram @read.dream.repeat