The Natural Superiority of Women (41 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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Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives
be to their own husbands in everything.
In I Peter 3:1 it is written,
Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands;
that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word
be won by the conversation of the wives.
And in I Peter 3:7 the husband is enjoined to give honor to his wife, "as unto the weaker vessel."
There shall be enmity between the serpent and woman and between man and woman, and woman shall be a sorrowful creature, over whom her husband shall rule; and he shall not listen to her because she is easily deceived; but she shall learn in silence and subjection, and neither teach nor attempt to usurp authority over her husband, but remain in silence. "Every woman," said the Fathers of the early Church, "should be ashamed of the thought that she is a woman." The early Church Fathers popularized, and their followers perpetuated, the idea of loving God by hating women.
These ideas from the Old and New Testaments, as well as the early commentaries on them, have had a baleful influence in determining the attitudes of the sexes toward each other. The ideas expressed in the passages above are much older than the Old and New Testaments; these books merely enshrined doctrines that were already old when they came to be written.

 

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The passages in Genesis were probably written some nine hundred years before those in Timothy, and in the interval no love seems to have been lost. The profound contempt for woman that these passages sanction is accentuated by the account of the disdainful and irregular manner of her creation from a rib of her lord and master, compared to which even the lower animals were created in a regular and proper manner. And then, to cap it all, all the misfortunes and sorrows of humankind are ascribed to the credulous folly and emotional nature, the unbridled appetite, of this lowly appanage of manEve, the first woman, wife, and mother.
It is with some justice that Madame de Tencin, Montesquieu's mistress, was prompted to remark, "From the way he treats us, it is easy to see that God is a man."
It is interesting to note that the biblical account of the creation of woman is paralleled by similar stories among some indigenous and other peoples in many parts of the world.
In his
Vindication of Married Life,
Martin Luther, echoing the thoughts of St. Paul, writes of that "stupid vessel," woman, over whom man must always hold power, for:
Man is higher and better than she; for the regiment and dominion belong to man as the head and master of the house; as St. Paul says elsewhere: "Man is God's honor and God's image." Item: Man does not exist for the sake of woman, but woman exists for the sake of man and hence there shall be this difference, that a man shall love his wife but never be subject to her, but the wife shall honor and fear the husband.
Where such misogynist views of women prevailed, and where women were forced to make the necessary accommodations, there was absolutely no encouragement toward achievement in the private preserve of the master. In fact, not only was such encouragement forbidden, but any attempt on the part of the menial to usurp the authority of the master was considered an infringement of the law, for which exemplary punishments were prescribed. Women who made themselves conspicuous in some "unwomanly" manner were often in danger of being treated as objects of derision, or of disparaging remarks, and in numerous other denigrating ways. In the year 415 A.D., Hypatia, the Alexandrian neoplatonist philosopher and mathematician, renowned for her learning and eloquence as well as for her beauty,

 

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was brutally murdered by a band of monks, said to be at the instigation and encouragement of the Archbishop St. Cyril of Alexandria (see Charles Kingsley's
Hypatia,
London 1843). Women were encouraged in the practice and preservation of womanly virtues, to know their place, which was in the home, and not to aspire to be anything other than what by nature they were designed to be. "And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home." The weight of this tradition and practice is still so pervasively with us that even today the vast majority of women do not approach anything like the same encouragements and opportunities for achievement as men. And just as it is true of intelligence, so it is true of achievement that unless each sex is afforded equal opportunities there can be no means of knowing whether there are any essential inborn differences in their potentialities for achievement. On the other hand, when immemorial tradition "proves" and the present "knows" that women are inferior to men, and that women are all the things that they have customarily been said to be, and when so many women as well as men consider these beliefs to be true, the incentive to achieve on the part of all but a very few women is not likely to be great.
Among the principal reasons why women do not have as many achievements of the kind that men have attained are the following: (1) For the greater part of their history most fields in which men have excelled have been closed to them; (2) in fields in which women were admitted they were not permitted to enter on an equal footing with men; (3) or, having been admitted, they were not encouraged to excel, were actively discouraged, or were not noticed at all. Women weren't even permitted on the stage until the seventeenth century; by far the greater proportion of them couldn't read or write when their husbands could; and when, in the nineteenth century, women first really began to express themselves through practically the only means available to them, namely, the novel, they sent their manuscripts to the publisher under men's namesCurrer Bell (Charlotte Brontë), Ellis Bell (Emily Brontë), Acton Bell (Ann Brontë), George Sand (Aurore Dupin), George Eliot (Marion Evans)for what woman could write? What man ever chose to send
his
manuscript to a publisher under a feminine pseudonym?
Women have been the oppressed race of the "superior" masculine world for many millennia; as an "inferior race" they

 

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have been deprived of their privileges, the right of every human being to enjoy those opportunities, equally with all other human beings, which would enable them to realize their potentialities to the optimum degree. This statement does not, of course, imply anything so idiotic as that men should be given the opportunities to give birth to babies, or that they should enjoy the freedom to suckle babies, and that women should be free to grow beards with mustaches, but what it
does
imply is that men and women should be given equal opportunities to realize their natural potentialities within the social milieu. These opportunities have never been fully afforded women or men; but if they haven't been fully afforded men, they have been afforded women to an even lesser extent. Even today, when there are now more women in the professional specialty occupations than there are men, discrimination still exists.
Women have always been treated as the inferior ''race" by the masculine world. Everything that has been said by racists about blacks has been said by men about women: that they have smaller brains, less intelligence, are of limited abilities, unclean, incapable of achievement, lacking in creativity, and so on. The parallel between sexism and racism is deadly. The same impediments to self-fulfillment that have traditionally been placed in the way of blacks have been operative for a much longer time in the case of women. In the eighteenth century men claimed that no woman had produced anything worthwhile in literature, with the possible exception of the Greek lyric poet of the sixth century B.C., Sappho. Since women had failed to do so up to that time, it was argued, it was a fair assumption that they would never do so. But within the first half of the nineteenth century the supremacists were to be proven wrong, for women writers of genius commenced the break into the literary world: Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ann Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, George Sand, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And they were followed by such distinguished writers as Emily Dickinson, Mary Webb, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Pearl Buck, Doris Lessing, Sigrid Undset, Selma Lagerlauof, Grazia Deledda, Nadine Gordimer, Mary McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and many others. No one any longer doubts that women can write, and that what they have to say is worth reading. Nevertheless arguments are still heard to

 

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