The Natural Superiority of Women (33 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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this that gives their novels and other writings an enduring vitality and attractiveness. One may say of all these gifted women what Rosamond Lehmann wrote of three of them:
They believed, all of them, that love is of paramount significance in human affairs; that what gives life dignity and importance is the amount of love expended in personal relationships; the amount in each individual of that quality without which the human specimen, in print or out of it, is apt to look both small and dull, a predatory fragment.

17

It is not without significance that the first two great psychological novels of Japan and of the West should have been written by women, the Lady Murasaki's
The Story of Prince Genji,
completed about the year 1004, and Madame de la Fayette's
The Princess of Clèves,
which appeared in the year 1678.
Women have many firsts as innovators in literature.
18
Thus Marie of France, who flourished during the latter half of the twelfth century, is said to have invented the genre known as the Breton lay. Dame Juliana of Norwich wrote the earliest mystical prose autobiography (1342), and Dame Juliana Berners, the abbess of Sopwell priory, near St. Albans, wrote the earliest English treatise on fishing,
The Boke of St . Albans
(1486). Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, wrote her autobiography (1655) and a biography of her husband (1667) which was added as an appendix to her
Observations on Experimental Philosophy,
in addition to writing the earliest English prose romance,
The Blazing World
(1666). This remarkable woman was also the author of
211 Sociable Letters,
an epistolary novel, preceding Richardson's
Pamela
(1740) in the same genre by years. The Restoration playwright Mrs. Aphra Behn was also the author of the famous novel
Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave
(1688), which was distinguished, among other things, for its sympathetic view of blacks. The Gothic, or horror, novel was the invention of Ann Radcliffe whose
The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794) is perhaps her most famous work. Mrs. Susannah Centlivre whose many plays were a great success, wrote,
The Wonder! A Woman Keeps a Secret
(1714), which furnished David Garrick with one of his best roles. Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein
(1818) was the first science fiction story, about a monster who ultimately kills the scientist who created him.

 

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As Grace Shulman points out, women were leaders in the revolution that overthrew romantic flaccidity during the twentieth century. Harriet Monroe founded the magazine
Poetry
in 1912, and Margaret Anderson founded
The Little Review
in 1915. It was a woman, Sylvia Beach, who, in 1922, had the courage to publish James Joyce's
Ulysses .
In the past, and to some extent persisting into the present, male critics of women's literary and dramatic works did not hesitate to draw upon their stockpile of misogynistic prejudices. Their views were well summarized by "the Great Cham," the incomparable Doctor Samuel Johnson, when he said, "A woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." As Mary Ellmann has said in her luminous book on male critics anatomizing female writers, femaleness is regarded as a congenital fault, rather like Original Sin.

19
This view of femaleness owes a great deal to Judeo-Christian teaching.
Woman
still remains a term of opprobrium, a state from which the female of the species may achieve ladyhood through "good" behavior. Ah, the
ladies,
bless them-noblesse oblige. Nevertheless, ''lady writers" still carries a full charge of stereotypes and clichés.

Some critics walk down the field after the battle and shoot the wounded. In condescending mood, what greater praise can such a critic bestow upon a "female writer" than to say that she has "a masculine mind." George Eliot passes, but only as a male impersonator. Virginia Woolf, however, fails abysmally. Mary McCarthy gets by on her "formidability," which, presumably, disqualifies her for being a
lady .
Ivy Compton-Burnett, "that big sexless nemesic force," as Anthony Burgess labeled her, also passes, but only just. Jane Austen, however, is far too genteel for the critic who requires brawn with his brain. For him "conversation pieces" will hardly do. The obsessive antifeminism of such critics constitutes a sorry commentary on both their critical integrity and their sensibility. Dostoevski dubbed them "these lovers of humanity-by the book." Like an impacted tooth that is unable to break through the gum, these critics painfully persist in pushing in the wrong direction.
Being a woman to the masculine critic has meant being shrill, hysterical, erratic, temperamental, and all those other female

 

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"infirmities" upon which men in particular are so expert. Compare with these the masculine qualities of verve, panache, dash, impulse, the exaltation of error. Men nobly investigate, while women gossip. "The little woman" of the past, according to the macho critics, is still a little woman even in literature. Women, according to them, are incapable of grasping subtle principles of conduct, large aspiration, bold errors, grand designs. The healthy vulgarity of man was contrasted with the anemic gentility of women; the daring of the heroic sex, with the timidity of the weaker sex.
Why is it that men, even intellectual men, sometimes still find it necessary to diminish women? Why must critics so often weave their misogynist prejudices into the fabric of their best judgment, which is what criticism is supposed to be? Are the usual critical judgments of women writers by masculine minds really worthy of serious critics?
One of the obligations of the genuine critic is to rise above parochial and tradition-bound ideas, to avoid looking at the creativity of others through the distorting glass of prejudice. When it comes to women writers, few critics ever managed to achieve such responsibility. What seems to have irritated some masculine critics was that women dare to write at all, recalling La Bruyere's words, "It is the glory and merit of some men to write well, and of others not to write at all." Must women write like men or ape some neuter model of what is arbitrarily considered acceptable? If style is the man, is it not also, surely, that of the woman, and at the very least, of the human being of whatever sex or inclination? And is there not at least as much to be said for the woman's angle of vision as for the man's? How rare it is to find a male critic praising a writer for his or her feminine qualities. And yet, it is these so-called feminine qualities that are the essentially humane ones. So-called because the qualities we call feminine are not biologically linked to one sex but are learned traits, the acquisition of which would greatly benefit most men, and especially critics.
Among the many tests that have been made of sexual differences, it has been found that girls, in general, do better than boys on tests involving aesthetic response to color, shape, and discrimination in pictures. In tests involving the classification

 

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of pictures according to prettiness, quite small girls do better than boys. In drawing it is found that girls include more detail than boysyet another indication of the greater sensitivity of girls to their environment. Indeed, the best description I have ever heard of what an artist does when drawing was offered by a little girl. When asked what she did when she drew a picture, she hesitated for a moment and then replied, "Well, first I think, and then I draw a line around my think."

20

Does anyone today really talk of women as being born prevaricators or born liars? In
Women and Men
(1944) Scheinfeld said, "The most common charge of wrongdoing which men level against women is that they are given to
lying
and
deception ."
21
Scheinfeld thought the charge based baseless, and so do I. He considered it to be yet another example of the application of the double-standard principle: When men lie it is not the same thing as when women do. I think that there is yet another factor at work here, namely,
projection .
It is the easiest thing in the world to project upon others the failings we are unable to face in ourselves. The mechanism is unconscious, and hence, in its consequences, all the more real. In an investigation on lying in relation to age, conducted over a period of eight years on 151 mentally competent men and women, Dr. Nathan Masor found that the men lied about their age in 21 percent of cases compared with only 10 percent of the women. However, when the women lied they stretched the bow appreciably longer than the men.
22
Because women have had to use much tact and discretion and employ certain discreet devices in order to achieve their ends, men have concluded that women are not "straight dealers." This is to add insult to injury, for if there have been women who were not straight dealersand no one would deny that there have no doubt been someit has often been because men have forced them into that oblique approach. Most of their faults women owe to men, while men are indebted to women for most of their better qualities. Nowadays, one hears less of women's "trickiness" than one used to, for men seem to have developed a greater respect for women than their fathers had. Men sometimes claim that women make fools of them. This is quite untrue. No woman ever makes a fool of a man, she merely presents him with an opportunity to realize his natural propensities.

 

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Women's intuition has been a favorite topic for a long time. Woman's intuition stood to her as reason stood to man, and was a proof of her greater emotionality. Shakespeare, in
Two Gentlemen of Verona,
makes Lucetta say:
I have no other but a woman's reason;
I think him so because I think him so .
And Shakespeare, who was himself among the most sensitively feminine of spirits, was a great understander and admirer of women. Indeed, as Ruskin noted in
Sesame and Lilies
many years ago, Shakespeare has no heroes; he has heroines only. The catastrophe of every play is caused always by the folly or fault of a man; the redemption, if there be any, is by the wisdom or virtue of a woman, and, failing that, there is none.
Woman's intuition, as everyone knows, is a true faculty that most women possess in a form far more highly developed than anything the random male ever acquires. It is a kind of sixth sense, an ability to listen in the dark, a capacity for picking up, as it were, vibration of every short wavelength almost as soon as they have been generated. James Stephens put it very nicely in
The Crock of Gold
when he wrote, "Women and birds are able to see without turning their heads, and that is indeed a necessary provision, for they are both surrounded by enemies." Being a woman, as Joseph Conrad remarked, is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men. As Helene Deutsch put it,
Woman's understanding of other people's minds, her intuition, is the result of an unconscious process through which the subjective experience of another person is made one's own by association and thus is immediately understood. The other person's subjective experience manifests itself in an external happening that is sometimes barely perceptible, but that in an intuitive person evokes by quick association a definite inner state; the conscious perception rapidly tames the inner reaction, incorporates the impression received into a harmonious series of ideas, masters the "inspirational" element, and translates it into the sober form of conscious knowledge. Since the whole process is very rapid, its second phase, that is, the intellectual elaboration, is barely perceivedeverything seems to take place in the unconscious and affective element, because the conscious ingredient does not come to the fore.

 

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