The Natural Superiority of Women (31 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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in males might not have soared? One of the age-old functions of woman has been to provide man with a sympathetic ear into which he can pour his troubles; and woman has always stood by, with the touch of her gentle hands, the calmness, strength, and encouragement of her words, to bring balm and solace and rest to the weary, puzzled, and frustrated masculine soul. Woman has always been the firm rod upon which man can lean for support in time of need, and man has always needed woman. For man, because he is a male, needs a woman not only as a companion but also, upon occasion, to mother him; and a woman, because she is a female, sometimes needs to be a mother to her husband as well as to her children. Thus it is by nature that each ministers to the unique needs of the other.
But men have confused the natural complementary function and beautiful reciprocity of the sexes so that women, too, have become somewhat confused, and much pain and disorder in the world of human relations have thereby been caused. I do not mean that men never grow up to be anything except babies who are utterly dependent upon their mothers for survival, but I do mean that in their dependent relationships to their mothers they subsequently develop an interdependency in which a certain amount of reliance upon the female always fortunately remains. When such dependency functions at the adult level, it elicits those supporting responses from the female which constitute the interdependent relationship that is at the basis of all social functioning. It is highly desirable for the sexes to understand precisely how interdependent they are; but it is even more desirable that men should realize the nature of such
inter
dependency and make life less difficult for women, and easier for everyone concerned, by making the necessary adjustments to the facts. The sexes need each other because they are precariously dependent upon each other for their conduct as healthy human beings. Interdependency is the human condition, and self-sufficiency usually winds up as insufficiency, which is the usual fate of the self-sufficient male. A bachelor is a poor fellow who has no one to blame but himself. Nature abhors a vacuum, but it abhors a bachelor more, and bemoans the fate of those women who (because of the incorrigible weakness of males for succumbing so much more frequently to the insults of the environment than females) fail to find a husband.

 

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Constitutionally stronger and more resistant to disease than men, women are much better shock absorbers; that is, they are better able to handle the severe emotional and psychological stresses and strains of contemporary life. It is a striking fact that though admission rates to mental hospitals vary, on a sexual basis, from time to time, they are, on the whole, higher for men than for women. It is also remarkable that under conditions of siege and heavy bombardment, men break down much more frequently than do women. In an important study made during World War II,
Psychological Effects of War on Citizens and Soldiers
(1942), Dr. R. D. Gillespie reported that in the heavily bombed areas of London and Kent almost 70 percent more men broke down and became psychiatric casualties than women! Shortly after some of the heaviest bombings, the British Library of Information in New York published a bulletin entitled "Women Less Prone to Bomb Shock." It reported the results of a survey that showed that women respond to bombardment with much less emotional shock, hysteria, and psychoneurosis than do men. As Frank D. Long, who reported the survey, says,
It may be true that women are more emotional than men in romance, but they are less so in air raids. Their protective instinct for those they love is actually a shield against the nerve-shattering effects of warfare noises. They perform the job in hand with calmer deliberation than men. Men get through the job all right, but they work in a state of mental excitement often consciously suppressed, which, in time, takes its toll.
Women also recover under psychological treatment quicker than men. Part of the treatment is the re-telling of their experiences, and it has been found that women can recall details with greater ease than men and are willing to talk about them. Repetition in this way invariably tends to rob the experience of its initial horror, which is an important aid to complete recovery of normal self-control.
Reports from other parts of the war-scarred areas of the world are uniformly to the same effect.
Many attempts have been made to explain these facts away, but without success. It has been said that during wartime the strongest, youngest, and healthiest males are at the battlefront, that only the rejected, the sick, and the old remain behind, and that these would tend to succumb with high frequency to the

 

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shock effects of heavy bombings. The answer to this specious argument is that a normal distribution of physically healthy men past military age, middle-aged and older men, constituted by far the largest number of men in the London and Kent surveys. For concentration-camp data I know of no published figures, but it is the opinion of all those who had personal experience of such camps, and with whom I have discussed this matter, that women succumbed less frequently and withstood the rigors of the life more effectively than men. Here, again, it could be argued that women were better treated than men; however, that is not the general opinion.
The strength of the female constitution has been evidenced by famous and terrible tragedies such as those at the Donner Pass in 1846-1847, in which the party was imprisoned by snow for six months, at the end of which time there were 56.6 percent men dead and 29.4 percent women. In 1856 the walking, pushing, and pulling Willie handcart company, also on their way to Salt Lake city, was similarly distressed by snow for three weeks, resulting, at the time of rescue, in 24.9 percent males and 8.5 percent women dead.

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Knowing what we today do about the constitutional differences between the sexes, one would expect women to endure such conditions of stress better than men, and they do.
One of the best indexes of resistance to emotional stress is the suicide rate. Suicide has been described as a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Women don't seem to be as wholeheartedly interested in this permanent solution as men are. At all ages suicide rates are much higher among males than among females. In 1913 Eduard von Mayer showed that in the greater part of Europe, for every female who committed suicide three to four males did so. Louis Dublin and Bessie Bunzel, in their classic study of suicide,
To Be or Not to Be
( 1933), found that in the United States the suicide rate reached the extraordinary figure of ten males to three females. These authorities remark that ''suicide may be called a masculine type of reaction." These statistics remain remarkably unchanged throughout the world today. Most of the governments reporting to the World Health Organization as recently as 1995 found that suicides among men were two to five times as common as among women.

 

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Even in suicide or attempts at suicide, men are more violent than women. Men resort to guns, hanging, and leaping from buildings, while women tend to rely upon the less painful devices, such as sleeping pills, gas, and the like. That women generally don't want to succeed at suicide is evident: Out of the one hundred thousand unsuccessful attempts annually made in the United States 75 percent are by women. The female's attempt often dramatically represents a desperate cry for sympathy and understanding.
Men are more impatient than women, and want to get things over in a hurry, presumably before reason sets in.
The evidence indicates that in all times and in all societies the suicide rates have generally been significantly higher for men than for women. Women value life more than men do. Men, we have already seen, are likely to resort to more violent means of solving problems than women, and obviously this fact doesn't render them the better solvers. Women look to more reasonable means for the solution of their problems, with heart and compassion, completely contradicting the myth that females are emotionally weak.
In the matter of who faces death with greater equanimity and genuine courage, Sergeant John Fiano, who for many years worked on death row at Sing Sing, is on record as saying, "Always, when there was more than one to be executed in one night, the weakest went first. The person with the strongest will goes last. In all my years at Sing Sing, women are always the last to go. They were much stronger emotionally than men."

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In studies of the fear of death that use self-rating scales, it has been found that women have a higher fear of death than men. This has been interpreted at its face value, but as Lester and Levene have pointed out, what may in fact have happened is that on these self-reporting scales men deny their fear of death, whereas women are more honest, or are more conscious of the fear of death than men. In an actual test, women show less fear of death, perhaps because they have less fear than men, or perhaps because, having faced the fear more honestly or consciously, they are able to cope with it more adequately.
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Medical men of considerable experience know that women bear pain much more uncomplainingly than men, and I have heard many surgeons remark that women make better patients

 

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