The Natural Superiority of Women (17 page)

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Authors: Ashley Montagu

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

BOOK: The Natural Superiority of Women
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they are recreating and reinforcing the universal perception that males are more important and therefore superior to females, more deserving, better in every way. We accept, even warmly embrace, patronymy as if it were a natural law.

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Another of the many channels through which such ideas are transmitted is the formal processes of education. In a study of children's textbooks and personality development, Drs. I. L. Child, E. H. Potter, and E. M. Levine found that the third-grade-level primers they examined presented females in an unfavorable and indifferent light. Females were nurturing and gentle but seldom active, adventurous, constructive, achieving, or worthy of recognition. Girls and women are thus being shown as sociable, kind, and timid but inactive, unambitious, and uncreative. The characters in the stories who were nurtured and given support were generally female, suggesting that females are in a relatively helpless position. On the other hand, the knowledgeable people were males. Males, in short, are being portrayed as the bearers of knowledge and wisdom. In some instances females were portrayed as being morally inferior to the male. They were portrayed as acquiring things in socially disapproved ways much more often than were males, and less often by the socially approved means of effort and work. They were shown as lazy twice as often as males. In addition to females being slighted, males were predominantly the heroes of stories73 percent of the time. The implication, write the authors of this study, is that being female is a pretty bad thing, and the only people in everyday life who are worth writing and reading about are boys and men.
If the content of these readers is typical of other social influences, small wonder that girls might develop for this reason alone an inferiority complex about their sex. The many schoolgirls who will at some future time have to make their own living are failing, if they identify with female characters, to receive the same training in the development of motives for work and achievement that boys are receiving. To the extent that this distinction is characteristic of many other aspects of the training the child receives from the environment, it should cause little wonder that women are sometimes less fitted for creative work and achievement than men of similar aptitude, for there is certainly much difference in the motivational training they receive for it.

 

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It is the general rule throughout the animal kingdom that wherever one sex is larger or physically more powerful than the other, the larger or physically more powerful sex will occupy the position of dominance. Humans, we know, are something more than animal, but not all men have quite realized that fact. If, as Plato said, civilization is the victory of persuasion over force, it may be that men may yet be persuaded to consider some of the origins of their sexual dominance, and even to learn that the force of argument is eventually stronger and more beneficial in its effects than the argument of force.
It has already been pointed out that there is a remarkable parallel between the phenomenon of race prejudice and prejudice against women. This is nicely illustrated by an editorial comment on a woman's suffrage meeting held in Syracuse, New York. The editorial appeared in the
New York Herald,
in the September 1852 issue, and was probably written by the elder James Gordon Bennett, the
Herald's
founder and owner. Among other things, the editorial said,
How did woman first become subject to man, as she now is all over the world? By her nature, her sex, just as the negro is and always will be to the end of time, inferior to the white race and, therefore, doomed to subjection; but she is happier than she would be in any other condition, just because it is the law of her nature!
Everything that has been said about almost any alleged "inferior race" has been said by men about women. We have already heard that their brains are smaller, that their intelligence is lower, that they are not very good at mathematics, that one can't trust them to govern their own affairs, that they are like children, emotional, unoriginal, uncreative, unintellectual, with a severely limited attention span, and so on, through the whole dreary calendar of fables. These are the familiar arguments of the racists, their stock in trade; and every one of them has been urged as a fact in racist contexts, as well as against women in general.
I hope that no reader of this book is naive enough to imagine that proof of the erroneousness of these beliefs would be sufficient to eliminate either race prejudice or the prejudice against women; for just as the "race" problem is in reality a problem in human

 

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relations, so the prejudice against women is therefore also a problem in human relations. Until we solve the human relations problem, we shall solve neither these nor any other difficulties of human beings. It is part of the purpose of this book to show how this problem may be solved.
Man is himself a problem in search of a solution, and the prejudices of some against minority groups and women in itself constitutes a social problem. That problem may, in a sense, be understood as groping expressions, at least in part, of confused attempts to solve the problem. When men understand that the best way to solve their own problem is to help women solve those that men have created for women, they will have taken one of the first significant steps toward its solution. And what is woman's greatest problem? Man. For man has created and perpetuated her principal difficulties, and until man solves his own difficulties there can be no wholly satisfactory solution of woman's. Once again it is like the black's problem, that is, the white man. Until the white man solves his personal hangups, blacks will continue to afford a convenient scapegoat. These difficulties in human relations are not simply problems in the communication of facts. One doesn't help anyone suffering from delusions by telling them that they are playing tricks with reality, or that the facts are other than they believe them to be. Deep and complex psychological conditions are involved; we must make the creators aware of them before we can hope for any possibility of relief. Prevention is so much better than cure, so painless, and so much less costly in the service of the greater health of our society, that it is worth hanging a big question mark on some of the things we take most for granted.

 

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3
The Social Determinants of Biological "Facts" and Social Consequences
In all societies women have played a much more important role than their menfolk have been generally inclined to admit. After all, if one is afflicted with feelings of inferiority, especially unadmitted ones, as the male is with respect to the female, strong overcompensatory tendencies develop. It is difficult to admit, even though the dark suspicion may have dawned on one, that women are one's equalsand perish the thought they certainly are not one's superiors. After all, is not the evidence, the biological evidence, of male superiority unequivocally clear? The answer is that it is far from clear that man is biologically superior to women, and that, on the contrary as we shall see, the evidence indicates that woman is, on the whole, biologically superior to man.
Since we have already used the term
superior
without having defined it, and since it is a significant term for our discussion, we had better define it now. The term is used in its common sense meaning as being of higher nature or character. Of higher nature or character in respect to what? The question is a crucial one, and upon its correct answer turns the whole theme of the book. The answer is: Superiority in any trait, whether biological or social, is measured by the extent to which that trait confers survival benefits upon the person and the group. If you function

 

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in such a way as to live longer, be more resistant, healthier, and behave in a manner generally calculated to enable you and your progeny to survive more efficiently than others who do not function as efficiently, then by the measure of the definition of superiority you are superior to the others. The reference here is not simply to immediate survival but to the long-term survival of the group.

1
And by group, for the purposes of this discussion, I mean the immediate family, and then the social group of which the family is part, and finally, the whole of humanity.

Allowing for the usual variability, men, for example, are bigger and physically more powerful than women. Are these, then, traits in which men are superior to women? In other words, do greater size and muscular power increase the probability of survival? The comparison is between men and women, not between men and other men. There can be no doubt that culturally we value tall men and powerful ones, but we may legitimately entertain the suspicion that this, too, is a male-determined value. In fact, we place a negative value upon unusually tall and powerful women. Women almost always prefer a man who is taller than themselves. Why? Can it be that women have been taught to look up to men so that (to give the unexpressed corollary) men may look down upon them? May not the bruited advantages of larger size and muscular power constitute yet another of the male-made myths foisted upon an unsuspecting feminine world? Are larger size and greater muscular power biological advantages? The dinosaurs had a long run for their money, but eventually size and muscular power may have proved their undoing, and the creatures vanished from the face of the earth. Man, by means of the development of size and power, finds himself in a dangerous position, in a deadly parallel with the long-extinct dinosaurs.
My reference is not simply to misuse of size and power; it is intended to suggest that the very existence of size and power seems to constitute in itself an incentive and an irritant to man to make use of them. With the accumulation of armaments there is a strong tendency not to control them but to employ them. In terms of size and muscular power man has exercised a physical and psychological dominance over woman. However, that is a very different thing from saying that from the sociobiological point of view such supremacy endows man with a superiority over woman.

 

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