The Natural Superiority of Women (19 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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reactions are often very revealing. The violence of the emotion and the irrational behavior that many males have exhibited, and many still continue to exhibit on such occasions, indicates how profoundly they are disturbed by the idea of a woman challenging their supremacy.
The male, in all societies, is at greater risk than the female. As Professor James Ritchie of the University of Wakaito, New Zealand, has pointed out, "The female, as she grows older and develops, has before her in more or less continuous relationship, the model of her mother. The man, as he grows through life, begins his life also in primary relationship to a maternal object but he has to give it up, he has to leave off identification with the mother, he has to take on the full male role. Males have to switch identification during development, and all sorts of things can go wrong in this."

4
And, unfortunately, they frequently do. The male has a much more difficult time than the female in growing up and separating himself from the loving mother and in identifying himself with a father with whom he is nowhere nearly as deeply involved as he remains with his mother. This often puts a strain upon him. The switch in identification he is called upon to make results in an enduring conflict. This he usually seeks to resolve by, in part, rejecting the mother and relegating her to a status inferior to that into which he has, so to speak, been thrust. Masculine antifeminism can be regarded as a reaction-formation designed to oppose the strong unconscious trend toward mother-worship. When the male's defenses are down, when he is
in extremis,
when he is dying, his last, like his first, word, is likely to be "mother," in a resurgence of his feeling for the mother he has never really repudiated, but from whom, at the overt level, he had been forced to disengage himself.

The trauma of rejection and separation from his mother, with whom he was most involved and whom he most trusted, constitutes an enduring frustration, and the reaction to frustration is usually aggressiveness toward the generalized representation of the frustrating object. This for the most part has to be repressed, but may later express itself in many ways toward women. A deep bitterness toward women, expressed in various misogynistic ways, such as contempt, sexual harassment, battering, rape, cruelty, and murder, may result. It is today well established that rape is not a
sexual
crime, but a crime of
violence
against women,

 

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suggesting that the cause of rape is in many cases due to the disordering maternal rejection. Mothers and educators need to be aware of this.
Rape, it has been said, is the only crime for which the victim is on trial. (It is also a frequent cause of family breakups, in which the husband leaves his wife for her crime of having been raped.) For this and other reasons rape is, as the FBI acknowledges, the most underreported of all serious crimes. Furthermore, the police generally throw out about 20 percent of reported rape cases as "unfounded" on the usually mythological ground that women are often vengefully likely to bring the charge against a man when no crime has actually been committed. The opposite is, of course, the truth. Knowing the obloquy and disgrace that will follow any publicity attaching to their plight, many women will nevertheless courageously report the crime.

5
Judges are, of course, mostly male, and are inclined to see that "justice" is done to the individual accused of rape. Was it not Eve who seduced Adam? The prejudiced treatment of the rape victim in a patriarchal society brings out in high relief the internalization of social attitudes toward womeneven by many women toward their own sex.

Marriage, that "ghastly public confession of a strictly private intention," as a typically "ghastly" Victorian once put it, used to be the one institution by means of which the female could be securely kept in her place. Men used to be able to work and create without feeling challenged by their own wives. Wives stayed at home, had babies, and looked after them and the breadwinner too. God was in his Heaven and all was right with the world. As another Victorian male put it, "A man whose life is of any value should think of his wife as a nurse."
Most of the tens of millions of women age sixteen and over in the labor force in the United States at the present time have demonstrated that they can work as hard as men at all occupations and that they do a great deal better at some than men ever did, clerical work, for example, especially work demanding great precision and delicacy, as well as heavy labor. Men, therefore, cannot honestly object to women on the ground of lack of capacity or inefficiency. Women will be the major source of new entrants into the labor force into the next century. Men have resisted the "intrusion" of women into their workaday world

 

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to the last ditch, and many are still doing it. Why? May it not be that such men feel that the working woman constitutes a threat to their belief in themselves as the pillars of society, the creators of civilization? Or do they fear in the face of women's advances they may become merely flying buttresses? May it not be that men don't want their fears and insecurities about women disturbed? In the unconscious, these fears and insecurities are buried so deep beneath the surface of a myriad of repressions and rationalizations that they would seem to be beyond reach. However, when confronted with a serious challenge, such as a woman holding a male-dominated position, the male often loses his balance. Rocking the boat is what it is. The best way, therefore, to avoid such disturbances is to restrict women to the role of the helpless female who wouldn't know what to do with an oar or an engine if her life depended upon it. It's
"man
the boats. Women and children first." And, of course, a certain number of men have to get into the boats; otherwise the women wouldn't be able to manage.
The origin of the English word
woman
indicates that the female's very right to social existence was determined in the light of her secondary relationship to the male, for the word was originally "wifman," that is, "wife-man," the wife of the man; in the fourteenth century the
f
was dropped and the word became "wiman," and later, "woman.'' Men unconsciously have desired to keep women in a secondary position, and all the rationalizations they have offered for keeping her there have avoided the statement of their actual motivation, because in most cases they have not consciously been aware of the nature of that motivation. Men must toil and women must spin, because if women stop spinning and start toiling, man's claim to creativity and indispensability as breadwinner is undermined and this he must resist.
Such motivations seem to be even clearer with respect to achievement or creativity proper. If men cannot conceive children, then they can conceive great ideas and great works, gestate them, and be delivered of them in the form of all the things that make up our complex civilization: art, science, philosophy, music, machinery, bridges, dams, automobiles, kitchen gadgetry, and the million and one things men create and women buy. How often have we heard men exclaim, "That's my baby," when referring to some product of their creation, whether it be an

 

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idea or an object? True enough, it is a way of speaking and may represent merely an analogy, or a metaphor. Perhaps, and perhaps not. "This is my brainchild," is another such expression. "I want to nurse this idea," is yet another. And there are many more. Why, it may be asked, should men use such expressions when in practically every other instance they use purely masculine phraseology and take great pains to avoid anything suggestive of the feminine? To be ''pregnant" with ideas, to be "delivered" of a great idea, to "give birth" to a plan may not these and other obstetrical expressions possibly indicate, when used by males, an unconscious desire to imitate the biological creativity of the female? The conversion process takes the form: "Well, if I can't create and give birth to biological babies, I can, at least, create and give birth to their social equivalents."
Man's drive to achievement can, at least in part, be interpreted as an unconsciously motivated attempt to compensate for the lack of biological creativity. Witness how men have used their creativeness in the arts, sciences, and technologies as proof of their own superiority and the inferiority of women! The fact is that men have had far greater opportunities for cultural creativities than have women, and in this respect they have a far more profoundly motivated drive to achieve than women. The evidence strongly suggests that were women motivated by as strong drives to achieve as men, and afforded equal opportunities to do so, they would be at least every bit as successful as men. Because women are for some time yet likely to remain, on the whole, less strongly motivated than men, I think it probable that men will continue to show a higher frequency of achievement, not because they are naturally superior, but because their opportunities will for some time remain greater, and because among other things, they may be overcompensating for a natural incapacity to bear babies.
The female's inability to cope with the physically more powerful male obliges her, from an early age, to develop traits that will enable her to secure her ends by other means. Being forced to sharpen her wits upon the whetstone of the male's obduracy, the female develops a sharper intelligence. From their earliest years, girls find it necessary to pay attention to nuances and small signs of which the male rarely recognizes the existence. Such small signs and signals tell the girl what she wants to know, and she is usually ready with her plan for action before the male has begun to think.

 

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The evidence proves that women naturally have better brains than men (see chap. 4). Women pick up the nuances in life, the different shades of meaning, in seeing and getting to the point quickly. Let men ask themselves the question, and frankly answer it: Which is the superior sex? Let it be remembered that I am not speaking about all women any more than I am speaking about all men; I am speaking about women and men in general. There are slowwitted members of both sexes just as there are quick-witted ones. My point is that women are, on the whole, more quick-witted than men, because they are born that way, but in addition to their natural endowment they are culturally forced to develop a sharpness of attention to small detail and hardly perceptible cues, of which the less sensitive male remains quite unaware. Thus "woman's intuition" is something more than merely man's transparency, constituting a comment on man's comparative opacity.
Woman's training in picking up such subliminal signs, which by comparison seldom impinge upon the consciousness of the male, is in part responsible for her greater thoughtfulness, tact, and discretion. There are, however, many other factors that contribute to form these qualities in women. When faced with the varying intractabilities of the average male, women early on developed a strategy of devices, tactics, and artful dodges for dealing with this problem. Swooning, weeping, hysteria, the vapors, and other emotional simulations of "feminine weakness" were, up to the beginning of the twentieth century, standard equipment. The utterly dependent, "clinging vine" syndrome or pose was, in many cases, an adaptive response to an otherwise impossible situation. The "little woman" attitude was anything put a pose. Such females had often been rendered so infantile that they were governed by a powerful need to feel dependent upon a strong person, usually but not necessarily always a male, who not infrequently referred to them as "baby." And, of course, a large number of females were brought up to believe that their natural state was to be dependent upon a male; in fact, many of them were taught to avoid all evidence in themselves of independence and to cultivate those traits that would appeal to the ''protective instincts" of the male. Such females often acquired so high a competence in the use of the "appropriate" behavior that they themselves came to believe it to be natural. In many women these responses have become almost second

 

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nature, and it is often difficult to distinguish between what is primary and what is secondary or acquired in human nature.
How strong the clinging-vine syndrome was in some women was forcibly brought home to me years ago in the case of a very attractive young woman of about twenty-five who had already been married and divorced twice. She wished to marry again; she could see no purpose to her life other than marriage, an idea upon which she was thoroughly concentrated. I suggested to her that she had a good mind and that while she was waiting to marry again she might improve her interest in anthropology. Her answer was: "I'm the clinging-vine type. I couldn't be any good at studies." Striking a bargain with her, I sent her to take a course with a brilliant colleague at a neighboring university. The essence of our agreement was that if she could prove to herself that she really had brains, she was to continue her studies, take her degree, and possibly think of making a profession of the subject in which she declared some interest. At the end of the year she was very near the top of a class of sixty students! My colleague took special pains to discuss her abilities with me and thanked me for sending him so bright a student. The sequel to the story is that as soon as the results of the examinations were announced, she immediately disappeared, and neither my colleague nor I saw her again until many years later. The shock of discovering that she really had the necessary abilities and that she could, if she wanted to, rely upon her own merits was more than she could bear; it was a fact that she refused to face, for its consequences were unpleasant to her even in contemplation. She married a third time, and I lost touch with her. I hope she finally came to rest.
The varieties of techniques women have been forced to develop in response to the challenges presented by men have reflected more upon the male's deficiencies, than upon the female's responses. The result of this was unavoidable development. Women have to keep an eye on the main chance; they have to be constantly on their guard, with their antennae always unobtrusively extended, operating on the appropriate wavelength and picking up the proper signals without anyone noticing, as it were. All this makes for a certain artfulness. Elegantly decorated, such artificiality is not displeasing to men, even when they are able to distinguish it as such, any more than the

 

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