The Natural Superiority of Women (30 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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additional valuable suggestions in
The Equality Trap
that deserve to be widely discussed and implemented.
Let us now resume the discussion of the evidence for the greater emotional strength and resiliency of the female. In the first place it should be clearly understood that women are quicker to respond to stimuli, both physical and mental, than men are. In tasks involving the rapid perception of details and frequent shifts of attention, women generally excel. Such aptitude tests as the Minnesota Clerical Test reveal that only about 16 percent of male workers in the general population achieve or exceed the average of female workers in checking similarities or differences in lists of names or numbers. Other investigations show a significant feminine superiority on the same test from the fifth grade through the senior year of high school. It has long been established that women possess a greater sensory acuity for color discrimination than men.
On tests measuring reaction time to a single expected stimulus, males generally do better than females, but this is not the kind of quickness of response to which I referred above. I meant quickness of response to a total complex situation, and tests reveal the superiority of the female in such situations. It is this kind of quickness of response that is often made a peg upon which to hang the myth of greater feminine emotional weakness. Quickness is equated with nervousness or jitteriness or excitability. The fact is that in a psychophysical sense woman is more excitable, and in the physiological sense more irritable or, as Havelock Ellis put it, more affectable. Irritability (perhaps the better word is "affectability"), that is, the ability to respond to a stimulus, is one of the criteria by which living things are distin-guished from nonliving things, and in a very genuine sense it requires to be said that by virtue of her greater affectability, her greater sensitivity, the female of the human species is more alive than the male is. Taken out of context, that might be an amusing sentence for a corner of a page in
The New Yorker,
but what it is intended to convey is that women in our culture are, on the whole, more sensitive to their environments than are men. This may in part be a matter of cultural conditioning, but the recent findings of neuroscientists suggest some biological basis, or perhaps a combination of both. In any event, women do, in general, seem to be "quicker on the uptake" than men.

 

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I do not need to cite the results of the many studies that suggest that women are more emotional than men. It is an incontestable fact; but again, whether it is a matter of cultural conditioning or biological conditioning is not easy to decide. Certainly we know that cultural factors play an enormously important role in producing differences in personality with respect to the expression of emotion as well as other traits, but a biological factor cannot be altogether dismissed. In any event, by the measure of our biological test of superiority, how do the sexes stand concerning the expression, efficient use, and effects of emotionality?
The notion that women are emotionally weak and men are emotionally strong is based on the same kind of reasoning as that which maintains the female is physically inferior to the male because of the latter's greater muscular power. Trained in repression, or in the art of "schooling" his emotions, as it is sometimes called, the male looks with disdain upon the female who expresses her feelings in tears and lamentations. Such behavior is in the male's estimation yet another proof of the female's general weakness; her greater emotionality is proof of her lack of control. His own ability to "control" his emotions the male takes to be a natural endowment which the female lacks. This is gravely to be doubted. In the first place it is more than questionable that women are less able to control their emotions than are men.
What most men and, I fear, women, too, have overlooked is that men and women are taught to control and express different kinds of emotions. Thus, girls are taught that it is perfectly natural for them to cry but that they must never lose their tempers, and if they do, they must on no account swear: "It isn't ladylike." Boys, on the contrary, are taught that it is unmanly to cry, and that while it is not desirable to "fly off the handle" or to "cuss," well, men have always done so. Girls may not express their emotions in violent ways; girls may not fight. Boys may and do. Nineteenth-century ladies permitted themselves to swoon or call for the smelling salts; their twentieth-century scions are obviously not ladies. Twentieth-century ladies still do not curse, but many modern women do, and if they drink, though they are today at perfect liberty to drink what they wish, they still do not drink as men do. Though it is considered manly for men to drink, it is not considered womanly for a woman to do so. Women, in fact, don't

 

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drink nearly as much as men do, and, by comparison with the rates for men, they are seldom drunk. Alcoholism and deaths from alcoholism are considerably more frequent in men than in women. Here, indeed, is a very significant difference in emotional expression, for men drink, whatever they may claim to the contrary, largely for emotional reasons, much of the time because they are unhappy, or in order to reduce stress; and an enormous number of them are unable to control their drinking. Whatever the reasons may be, women are able to, and do, control their drinking incomparably more successfully than men. It is interesting to observe that about the only time many men are able to weep is when they are drunk, and it may be that some of them get drunk in order to be able to do so. Weeping is an effective way of reducing tension; with their inhibitions down men are no longer constrained to abide by macho rules, as they must when they are sober.
Women don't fight, don't curse, don't lose their tempers as often as men do; they don't get drunk as frequently, and exceedingly rarely commit acts of violence against other persons. Though quicker on the uptake, they do not jump to conclusions as hastily and inconsiderately as men. Women tend to avoid the trigger responses of the male; as a result, they do not go off half-cocked as frequently as the male does. Women tend to keep their emotional balance better than men do. In short, women use their emotions a great deal more efficiently than men, and not in the emotional manner that men imply when they use the word disparagingly in connection with women. In this sense women are positively less emotional than men; but in the accurate sense of the word, women are more emotional and have their emotions more effectively under control than do men. I am speaking, of course, in terms of the generality of women and men. There are exceptions to most rules in both sexes. As we shall see, from the biological and social standpoints the female orders her emotions in a manner far superior to that in which the male orders his.
Among the myths perpetuated by men is the canard that women are much more liable to fits of temperament, that they "blow their top" much more easily, and are much less self-possessed. Controlled studies calculated to throw some light on this have been conducted at Oregon State University and at

 

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Columbia University. Under the same given periods of time and under the same conditions, it was found that the average man lost his temper six times to the average woman's three. Studies conducted at Colgate University showed that women have more aplomb than men, that they are less easily flustered and embarrassed, and that they retain this self-possession longer under adverse conditions.

6

In the nineteenth century, women very frequently responded to psychological shocks by swooning. The swoon served many functions: It drew attention to a lady much in need of attention; it elicited concern for her which she otherwise frequently failed to receive; and while recovering she might often secure concessions from her "superior" mate which might not, under other circumstance, be forthcoming. In other words, a capacity for swooning in the nineteenth-century female was a positive accomplishment of considerable value, a constructive use of emotion or simulated emotion that the bewildered male never really quite fathomed, for he always considered it a mark of inferiority in women. Weeping often served a similar purpose; as a contemporary wit remarked, a woman's idea of a good cry was one that secured the desired results.
Under conditions of shock men kept a stiff upper lip, and that was supposed to be the long and the short of it. After all, women were the emotional creatures. Though nineteenth-century statistics are not always reliable, they indicate that there were many mental homes, and most of them seem to have been populated largely by males. For the twentieth century, the statistics are far more accurate.
Boys as behavior problems far outnumber girls. In one study covering ten cities, the ratio of boys to girls in the problem group was four to one.
7
Some of the types of undesirable behavior reported as occurring much more frequently in boys than in girls were truancy, destruction of property, stealing, profanity, disobedience, defiance, cruelty, bullying, and rudeness. And what is even more significant, a larger number of undesirable behavior manifestations per child were reported for boys than for girls. Boys are much less in control than girls.
An investigation of 579 nursery school children revealed that, among those from two to four years of age, boys more often grab toys, attack others, rush into danger, refuse to comply,

 

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ignore requests, laugh, squeal, and jump around excessively. Girls are quieter, more frequently exhibit introverted and withdrawing behavior, such as avoiding play, staying near an adult from whom they seek praise, and "giving in too easily." All investigators agree that boys at all school ages are more quarrelsome and aggressive than girls.
In the present state of our knowledge, it is quite impossible to settle the question: Is the greater aggressiveness of the male largely or in part due to an inborn factor, or it is it a result of the conditioning the boy receives from the earliest age? It is quite possible that a boy, in our culture, becomes much more frustrated during the process of socialization than a girl does and that this difference already expresses itself at nursery school age. The evidence, so far as I have been able to study it, suggests that a combination of factors, biological and cultural, is responsible for the differences in aggressiveness between male and female. I should not wish this statement to be taken to mean that the male is born with a greater amount of aggressivenessthe evidence is, to me, quite clear that no one is born aggressive at all. I have discussed this subject in great detail in my book,
The Nature of Human Aggression .

8
The fact is indisputable that the male tends to be more aggressive because he has a lower threshold for frustration than does the female, tending to respond with aggressiveness where under similar conditions the female tends to exercise more restraint. But this is undoubtedly socially conditioned: Boys, among other things, receive far less tactile stimulation in their preschool years than do girls.
9

At nursery-school age, from three to five, boys tend to be more interested in things, while girls are more interested in personal relationships. Even at this age girls exhibit more responsibility and "motherly" behavior toward other children than do boys. Indeed, the evidence at
all
ages shows that the female is both socially more competent and socially more interested in human relationships than is the male. W. B. Johnson and Lewis M. Terman found that even in persons between seventy and ninety years of age, happiness for the woman was highly correlated with sociability, whereas in men the correlation was insignificant. In other words, in the basically most essentially desirable of human traits, namely, sociality, women at all ages notably surpass men. This difference and its significance will

 

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be discussed at length later in the present book; the difference is mentioned here because it gives some point to the female's manifesting from the earliest age a marked superiority in the most fundamental of all emotional qualities.
Professors Johnson and Terman, in a review of the studies that have been made on the comparative emotionality of the sexes, found that on the whole these studies agreed that the female was emotionally more "unstable" than the male.

10
This conclusion is incontestable and constitutes additional corroboration of the superiority of the female to the male. What males (even male professors) call "the emotional instability" of the female is simply evidence of the female's superior resiliency, her possession of a resource that permits her to absorb the shocks of life, to tolerate the stresses and strains to which she is subjected much more efficiently than the male. Scheinfeld aptly offers the analogy of a car equipped with soft, resilient springs and one with harder, firmer springs.

The resilient springs (like the female's emotional make-up) would be more sensitive to all the bumps in the road, would give and vibrate more, but at the same time would take the bumps with less strain, prolonging the life of the car; the harder, more rigid springs (like the male's emotional mechanism) would not feel and respond to the minor bumps as readily but would cause more serious jolts over rough places and be more likely to result in an earlier crack-up of the car.
11
In short, woman bends and survives, man keeps a stiff upper lip and breaks.
Emotionally unstable woman has been the support of emotionally stable man, I suspect, from the beginning of human history. Women have had to be emotionally well equipped to withstand the stresses and strains that in the course of a lifetime assault the mind and body not only of one person but at least of two. One of the principal functions of a wife has been to serve not only as a recipient of her husband's emotional responses to life's situations but also, unfortunately, as a scapegoat upon which her husband's frustrations expressed in unexpended aggressiveness can exhaust themselves, thus offering him the psychological relief from tension in the only place he can find ithis home. Were it not for this convenient arrangement, who knows to what new heights the frequency of mental breakdown

 

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