The Natural Superiority of Women (14 page)

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Authors: Ashley Montagu

Tags: #Social Science, #Anthropology, #Cultural, #Women's Studies, #test

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trade with the aid of a large fleet, extended widely through the Aegean, most notably to the Mycenean and the Greek cultures that succeeded Minos. Part of the legacy of the Minoans lived on in these cultures, as it does in ours, but much amended by a dominator attitude of men toward women, and an addiction to warfare and other male aberrations.
There is strong evidence that from the Near East came yet another powerful influence in replacing a gylany with an androcratic culture. The evidence for this with which we in the Western world are most familiar is found in the Old Testament. This has been ably discussed by Professor David Bakan as well as other scholars.

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The traces of matricentrism, matrineality, and matrilocism are quite clear in the Bible. In every major archaeological excavation in Palestine numerous figurines of goddesses have been discovered, and again, as in the Mediterranean, with a striking paucity of those of males. The eloquent abundance of these female figurines testifies to their significance in the cultures in which they occurred. These figurines are found over a wide area in the Near East. In Israel and neighboring lands, such figurines date back to the fourth millennium B.C. and earlier. The great luxuriance of these figurines in Palestine indicates the probable widespread religious worship of the goddess.
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An interesting thing about the figurines and the various other representations of the goddess is that they were almost certainly made by men, for it can hardly be believed that women would glorify themselves in such a blatant manner, and it speaks to the wisdom of prehistoric men that they recognized the vital creativity of women. As the archaeologist Emmanuel Anati has said,
These Upper Paleolithic men . . . created a feminine figurine apparently representing a goddess or a being of fertility, and probably involving a religious concept which
Homo sapiens
has retained ever since: a pregnant goddess or mother of man (or mother of god) in whom he exalted the mystery of his own creation.
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From the very beginnings of art it is likely that women and men participated equally. Out of these, in later stages of cultural development, such designs had magical and religious significance. And in still later stages of cultural development, such designs were elaborated and put into nonobjective, abstract forms, or into purely representational forms. Whatever the facts,

 

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it cannot be doubted that where pottery decorating, weaving, and, later, basketmaking are concerned, women made their own indispensable contributions to society.
We may conclude, then, that the evidence drawn from many different sources indicates that early societies were in most cases egalitarian, that this is also true of most indigenous societies that exist today, that the subjection of women has not always been the rule, but constitutes a late social phenomenon, and that it was roughshod invaders who conquered the egalitarian societies and imposed upon them government and rule by males, together with the subjugation of women.
It should be clear that it is not in our genes for one sex to establish supremacy over the other. Our biology does not decree that one sex shall rule over the other. What determines that sort of thing is, tradition, culture. The forms of behavior that characterize us as human beings are determined by the socialization process we undergo, the cultural conditioning in which we are molded, the customs by which we are all made. And there's the rub, for we are the most educable of all the creatures on this earth. And since we possess no instincts, everything we come to be, to know, and to do
as human beings
we have to learn from other human beings. Indeed, educability is our species' trait. And that is why to be human is to be in danger, for we can easily be taught many wrong and unsound things, or right and sound ones. And when the sound and the unsound are combined, the result is not intelligence but confusion. And that is the state in which the greater part of humanity has lived for a very long time. This has been particularly true of the traditional views relating to the status and roles of the sexes. And especially of the appeal to biology as the justification for the subjection of women. For that reason let us turn now to an examination of those views in light of the facts.
Males have a metabolic rate that is between 5 and 6 percent higher than that of females, and from the earliest ages males are more active than females. Red blood cells are more numerous in the male: The average red-cell count per cubic millimeter is 5,200,000 in the male and 4,900,000 in the female. The red blood cells carry oxygen on their surface membranes, the hemoglobin, which ranges from about 90 to 100 percent in the male and from 85 to 90 percent in the female. Since the oxygen carried by the

 

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hemoglobin to the tissues of the body is the main supplier of energy, it will be readily understood why the female requires fewer red blood cells than the male: She doesn't need as much fuel. Furthermore, because of her lower metabolic rate, the female doesn't have to eat as much as the male and is also able to adjust more efficiently to extremes and changes in temperature, and perspire less than males in hot weather.
Socially observed differences in activity between the sexes, it cannot be doubted, are to a large extent acquired rather than inherited. In short, activity differences do not represent first nature, though they may become second nature. First nature is the biological equipment of potentialities with which one is born; second nature is what one's culture and society make of one's first nature, the habits and ways of life one acquires. Culture, the human-made part of the environment, is the way of life of a people, its language, institutions, customs, its pots and pans. The division of labor between the sexes represents a cultural expression of what are believed to be biological differences. The variety of cultural forms that this expression may take in different societies is enormous; what may be considered women's work in one society may be deemed men's work in another. In some cultures men and women may engage in common activities that in other cultures are strictly separated along gender lines. The important point to grasp is that the prescribed roles assigned to the sexes are not determined biologically but virtually entirely by culture. As anthropologist Ralph Linton says,
All societies prescribe different attitudes and activities to men and to women. Most of them try to rationalize these prescriptions in terms of the physiological differences between the sexes or their different roles in reproduction. However, a comparative study of the status ascribed to women and men in different cultures seems to show that while such factors may have served as a starting point for the development of a division, the actual ascriptions are almost entirely determined by culture.

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As I have already mentioned, role and status serve to emphasize the character of social expectations and thus control the nature of responses made to them. In societies in which such categorizations are the rule, the cultural perception of what are presumed to be biological sex differences, whether they are in fact so or not, provide the grounds upon which are based the

 

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different social status and roles. But the significance of the biological differences is usually interpreted to convey the impression of a natural connection between conditions that are, in fact, only artificially connected through misinterpretation. For example, in many cultures pregnancy, birth, and nursing are interpreted by both sexes as handicapping experiences; as a consequence women have been made to feel that by virtue of their biological functions they have been naturally placed in an inferior position to men. But as we today well know, these biological functions of women are only minimally, if at all, handicapping.
It is worth paying some attention to the fact that in the societies in which such discriminations are the rule, one would have thought it unequivocally clear that women were superior to men, namely, in their ability to bear and nurture children. Instead women have been made to feel that their life giving roles are a handicap. The evidence relating to the conditions of childbirth and child rearing in indigenous societies is scant enough, but the indications are that women in such societies seem to have an easier time than they do in more complex ones. Unquestionably, under many conditions childbirth and child rearing from a conscious male viewpoint appear to be handicapping conditions. The
unconscious
male viewpoint, there is much factual evidence to show, is of a very different nature. In almost all societies birth has been culturally converted into a much more complicated condition than it in fact is: In general, it would seem that the more complex a society becomes, the more it tends to complicate the process of birth. One result of this is seen in Western cultures where women have, until recently, been made to spend anything from ten days to three weeks in "confinement," as the subjugation to helplessness so appropriately used to be called. Since the advent of natural childbirth, women are finding childbirth far less unpleasant and scarcely handicapping. Childbirth is neither a disease, a disorder, nor a handicap.
Today following the birth of a baby, whether in a family birth center or hospital, if there has been no problem, a woman may rise within a few hours and within a few days resume a normal ambulatory existence. In some nonliterate societies some women take much less time than that to return to their normal domestic activities. In gatherer-hunter cultures, such as those of the Bushman of southern Africa and the Australian aborigines, the

 

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