The Natural Superiority of Women (46 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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regarded their employment as secondary to the most important business in life, that of having a family. Whereas men have concentrated most of their energies upon their work, most women have distributed their energies in the service of men. Men have never suffered from housemaid's knee. If men have been able to achieve as much as they have, not a little of their achievement has been due to the support that their women have given them, an achievement in great part due to the very home that the male is so effectively able to dissociate from his work! Support is another word for love, and love is woman's domain. Woman's concentration is on love first and only secondarily upon work, profession, achievement, and competition.
The explanation of the disparity in achievement of men and women is that, in addition to the barriers that have been erected against them, women have simply not been as interested for themselves in the kind of achievement upon which men place so high a premium. Hence, even if from the very beginning men and women had enjoyed full and complete equality, there would still have been a larger number of men than women in almost all fields of accomplishment. Because of this difference of interest I believe that there may always be some disparity in these types of creativity between men and women. I am not saying that women could not do as well as men if they could be interested in doing what men do, for there is every reason to believe that they could; all I am saying is that women, because they are women, are more interested in relationships, in which they can creatively love and be loved. As long as this remains the true genius of women, the world will be safe for humanity. On the day that women begin to outstrip men in the fields of worldly achievement, the human race will have to take its temperature. But I do not think that day will ever come,
not
because women aren't as intelligent or as well endowed with genius as men, but because women will increasingly tend to realize their intelligence and their genius in the most important of all areas for human beingshuman relationships.

 

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11
The Genius of Woman as the Genius of Humanity
Woman is the creator and fosterer of life; man has, for the last half-dozen millennia at least, been the mechanizer and destroyer of life. The fact that men cannot have babies and suckle them, nor remain in association with their children as closely as the mother, has a profound effect upon their subsequent psychological development. Altogether apart from the psychological influences due to sexual physiological differences, the mother-child relationship confers benefits upon the mother that are wanting between father and child.
The maternalizing influences of being a mother have, from the very beginning of the human species, made the female the more humane of the sexes. The love of a mother for her child is the basic patent and model for all human relationships. Indeed, to the degree to which we approach in our relationships with others the love of the mother for her child, to that extent do we move more closely toward the attainment of genuine humanity. The mother-child relationship is an interdependent one. The interstimulation between mother and child is something the father misses, and he suffers from the want of it. In short, the female in the mother-child relationship tends to be more considerate, more self-sacrificing, more cooperative, more altruistic, and more involved than the male.

 

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The female thus acquires, in addition to whatever natural biological advantages she starts with, a competence in social understanding that is usually more responsive to human need than the male's. The tender relationships that exist between mother and child belong to a unique order of humanity, an order in which the male may participate as a child, but from which he is increasingly caused to depart as he leaves childhood behind. Not so the female, whose practice in the art of human relations continues throughout life; and this is one of the additional reasons that enable women to perceive the nuances and pick up the subliminal signals in human behavior that men usually fail to perceive. The very words
sensitive
and
tender
are seldom parts of the male's vocabulary, or applied to his behavior.
Because women are unselfish, forbearing, self-sacrificing, and maternal, they possess a deeper understanding than men of what it means to be human. Women live the whole spectrum of life; they do not think in terms of achromatic black and white, "yes" and "no," or in terms of the all-or-none principle, as men are inclined to do. Women don't settle matters of life and death by saying, "Put him up against a wall and shoot him.'' They are inclined to say, rather, "Give him another chance." Women are more ready to make adjustments, to consider the alternative possibilities, and to see the colors and gradations in the range between black and white. By comparison with the deep involvement of women in living, men appear to be only superficially engaged. Compare the love of a male for a female with the love of the female for the male. It is the difference between a rivulet and a great deep ocean. In Byron's words:
Man's love is of man's life a thing apart
'Tis woman's whole existence .
Men, the world over, lack the depths of feeling which seem natural to women, most of all of what it is like to be pregnant, to give birth and love the child. Anyone who has ever observed the joyful expression on a mother's face when she sees her baby, no matter how painful or prolonged the labor and the birth may have been, can never forget or find Words adequate to describe it, the jubilance and the triumph together with the, powerful need to nourish the newborn's dependent needs are all there in her face. In a male dominated world obstetricians have not

 

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understood the nature of the relationship between mother and newborn and the vital importance, for example, of breastfeeding in directly conferring enduring physiological and psychological benefits upon mother and child, thus perpetrating a great hoax upon the public and an incalculable cost to the individual and society, not to mention innumerable other failures.
Few men understand women as they really are, living instead by the institutionalized ignorance of women in which they have been conditioned. Many years ago an Ethiopian woman eloquently threw some much-needed light on the subject when she explained to anthropologist Leo Frobenius,
"A woman's life is altogether different from a man's. God has ordained it so. A man is the same from the time of his circumcision to the time of his withering. He is the same before he has sought out a woman for the first time, and afterwards. But the day when a woman enjoys her first love cuts her in, two. She becomes another woman on that day. The man is the same after his first love as he was before. The woman is from the day of her first love another. That continues so all through life. The man spends a night by a woman and goes away. His life and body are always the same. The woman conceives. As a mother she is another person than the woman without child. She carries the print of the night nine months long in her body. Something grows into her life that never again departs from it. She is a mother. She is and remains a mother even though her child die, though all her children die. For at one time she carried the child under her heart. And it does not go out of her heart ever again. Not even when it is dead. And this the man does not know; he knows nothing. He does not know the difference before love and after love, before motherhood and, after motherhood. He can know nothing. Only a woman can know that and speak of that. That is why we won't be told what to do by our husbands.

1

Women love the human race; men behave as if they were, on the whole, uncomfortable with it. Men act as if they haven't been adequately loved, as if they had been rejected, frustrated, and rendered hostile. Becoming aggressive, they say that aggressiveness is natural, and that women are weak and inferior because they tend to be gentle and unaggressive! But it is precisely in the capacity to love, in their cooperativeness rather than aggressiveness, that the superiority of women is demonstrated;
2
for

 

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whether it be natural to be loving and cooperative or not, as far as the human species is concerned, its evolutionary history, its destiny, its very survival, are more closely tied to the capacity for love and cooperation than to anything else.

3

It is in this, of course, that women can realize their power for good in the world and make their greatest gains.
It is the function of women to teach men from the moment of birth how to be human .
Women must not permit themselves to be deflected from their function by those who tell them that their place is in the home, in subservient relation to man. It is indeed, in the home that the foundations of the kind of world in which we live are laid, and in this sense it will always remain true that the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.
4
And it is in this sense that women must assume the task of creating men who will know how to participate in the process of making a world fit for human beings to live in. The greatest single step forward in that direction will be made when women consciously assume the task of teaching their children to be, like themselves, loving and cooperative.
Having been made to feel inferior to men all their lives, it seems only natural to expect many women to react to the feeling of inferiority, that the male-dominated world has produced in them, with behavior calculated to demonstrate that they are as "good" as men. It has been sagely remarked, "any woman who wants to be the equal of a man lacks ambition." By such behavior women do themselves and the world a disservice. Women do not have to, and should not, compete with men. They should not compete with anyone, any more than men should. Women and men should cooperate. That is what they are naturally designed to be, and that is what they are born to do. The function of women in relation to men is not to outdo men but to do for them what women alone are capable of doing; namely, to prepare them while they are children for the responsibility of being good, mentally healthy human beings.
Men must fully and sympathetically understand that it is not their occupation that is the most important, but that it is the occupation of the woman, the mother, that is the most important and significant in the world. Men must understand that if anyone is competitively handicapped in this connection, it is not the female but the male. But why speak of handicaps? Only

 

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