The Natural Superiority of Women (47 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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to clarify them. Men have made women feel that childbearing and childrearing are handicaps that prevent women from competing with men. The most important occupations in the world handicaps! Alas! And yet this piece of nonsense, wrongheaded and stupid and awful as it is, has caused some women, particularly in our own time, to react with an overweening desire to compete with men in their own fields, on their own ground, in order to prove their equality. How wrongheaded both attitudes are! Neither man nor woman should ever work in order to compete. Nor should women continue to measure themselves by male standards. To do so is to proceed in an utterly misleading direction. A thorough understanding of the differences between male and female, while leading to a promotion of the female, also leads to a promotion, not a demotion, of the male; for men, through better understanding, will be enabled to realize their potentialities quite as fully as women. This is an area in which both men and women can work together most cooperatively and creatively, in getting to understand each other better, in learning to think jointly, and in contributing to each other's happier development. As the distinguished American naturalist William Emerson Ritter (1856-1944) wrote in his last book,
Darwin and the Golden Rule,
"It appears to me certain that a major factor in hastening the socialization of the male will be his getting a deeper insight than he seems ever to have had into the real nature of the female in relation to the whole sexual, domestic, communal and political complex."

5

Both men and women must clearly understand the significance of women's performing the role of mothers, of women's bearing, giving birth to, and being largely responsible for caring for and helping the child to fulfill itself. This, we now know, is the most important of all the tasks that any human being can be called to perform for another. Indeed, the findings of contemporary scientific investigations in this area have shown that no less than the future of humankind depends upon the manner in which the task is carried out. By virtue of the female's being biologically equipped to bear and nurse children, she stands in the most fundamental relationship it is possible for one human being to stand in relation to another, namely, as the support and sustainer without whom the child could not survive during its first nine months in the womb, and thereafter

 

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in only a deformed sort of way, unless a person can be found who will perform the functions of a mother. The function of the mother is to love her child. That statement contains all that it would be necessary to say on the subject were it not that a large number of persons in our culture do not understand the meaning of love. It is here that a note of caution must be sounded.
The women's movement has done magnificent work, though there are some extremists in it who argue that those who plead the need of motherhood, and who emphasize the importance of mothering in the first few years of the child, are engaged in a conspiracy to perpetuate the servitude of the female. Some women in the movement are apparently desperately in need of enemies, for even in the face of the abundant evidence they continue to maintain that a good daycare center can do just as well as a mother.

6
Some
mothers, no doubt, and even better. But for the genuinely loving motherand that is the only kind of mother who mattersthere can be no substitute, whether she be biological or surrogate. When a baby is born, a mother is born too. It is a false view of "liberation" to believe that motherhood is a role from which women should be liberated. Liberated from what to what? From the oppression, discriminations, and injustices from which they have suffered, most certainly. But if women ever come to believe that they will be freed from the necessity of being mothers to their children, and that being a mother is somehow inferior to being a career woman, they will have betrayed themselves, and revealed how profoundly they have been brainwashed into accepting the mythology that males have imposed upon them. For the truth is that being a mother is the most important career anyone can be called upon to follow.

Women can and should enter any occupation or profession they choose. But when they become mothers they must realize that they have entered the most important of all occupations and professions combined, for what can be more important than the making of a loving human being? The demeaning references made by some in women's movement to women who choose to focus on family rather than career indicate how dangerous some of these female "chauvinists" may be. The needs of children are not incompatible with the rights of women, and any attempt to secure such rights at the cost of those children imperils all our rights. To see the child as an object rather than as a person is

 

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to reduplicate the offense that men have for so long committed against women. Women have a right to decline to have children, but if they do have them, they cannot abdicate that role in shaping their future. When Dr. Spock said, "I myself would say it is much more creative to rear and shape the personality of a fine, live child than it is to work in an office or even to carve a statue," women's liberationists may jeer him, as they did at their Political Caucus meeting in Washington in July 1971, but who else would disagree?
As Ian Suttie put it in his splendid book,
The Origins of Love and Hate,
"Any social factors therefore which stunt the characterdevelopment of women, contract her interests or lower her prestige with her children will interfere with her function of promoting the maturation of her children and their independence of herself."

7
And as Suttie goes on to show, disturbances in the maternal capacity to love constitute the major cause of mental illness, in the child and in the mother.

What is love? "Fool," exclaimed Sir Philip Sidney, "said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and write." But were any scientist to do so, his colleagues would almost certainly object. So let me, in plain English, and basing my answer on the interpretation of scientific findings, define love as the state of responsiveness to others during which we communicate to the other by demonstrative acts, to be tenderly regardful and wholeheartedly involved in satisfying the basic behavorial needs of the other. It means behavior calculated to confer survival benefits upon the other in a creatively enlarging manner. Not merely to enable them to live longer, but to live more fully realized than they would otherwise be. It means to communicate to them your profound involvement in their welfare, such that they can depend upon your being there to minister to their needs, to give them all the supports, sustenance, stimulations, and encouragements they require for their growth and development as warm, loving human beings. It means to communicate to them that you will be there whenever they have need of your answering to their need, that you will never commit the supreme treason of letting them down when they stand in need of you, but that they can depend upon you whenever they need you. That is love.
8
And that is what women, when they are not confused and rendered overanxious or turned into social workers in their own homes, have given or attempted to give their children. Where they have

 

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successfully been able to give such love to their children, the personality of the adult shows its effects, even though many other elements have entered into the making of that personality. Such a person will be capable of entering into meaningful relationships, of loving others, and of cooperating with them, living a life perfectible through loveby demonstrative acts of involvement with one another; and loving others more than one loves oneself.
Unfortunately, in many cultures, including our own, the natural capacity of women to love their children is made to express itself in a social matrix that often distorts and nullifies it, with resulting serious consequences to the development of the personality of the child and the person into which he or she will grow.
The most important thing in the world for a developing human being to enjoy is love, unconditional love. Fathers are parents, too, and their love for their children is important; but when everything has been said and done the love of the father does not compare in fundamental importance with the love of the mother for her child. Indeed, so long as the occupational roles of the parents in our society remain what they are, no one can ever take the place of the mother, or someone who acts as a loving mother.
If men continue to impose their views upon women as to how a family, a society, and a world should be run, and if women continue to act as the executors of men's will, the world will remain in the unhappy plight in which it finds itself at the present time; however, together, men and women can remold that world nearer the heart's desire by recognizing that the best way to make loving, cooperative, harmonic, and nonhostile human beings is by being so toward children. Men can help women make better men, as well as better women, by permitting women to realize their potentialities for being human to the fullest. The most satisfactory way in which men can serve themselves in this connection is by supporting them in their needs to fulfill their potentialities for loving their children.
The best way of remaking the world is not by changing the world but by changing the people who make the world the kind of place it is, by making human beings out of people. Unfortunately we have changed the environment more rapidly and more substantially than we have changed ourselves. Each of us must

 

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ask ourselves what we are doing that is really creatively relevant to the world in which we are living. Almost everyone will agree that there have been more geniuses for being human among women than there have been among men.
The true genius of women is the genius for being human, for being loving. In our materialistic age, because we have placed far less value upon the qualities for being human than we have upon those for accomplishment in the arts, sciences, and technologies, our values have become confused, undeveloped, and we have almost forgotten what the true qualities of love are. Surely the most valuable quality in any human being is the capacity for being loving and cooperative. We have been placing our emphases on the wrong values, and it is time we recognized what every man and every woman, at the very least subconsciously, knows: the value of being loving and the value of those who can teach that better than anyone else.
I hope I shall not be taken for an anti-intellectual when I say that intellect without humanity, without love, is not good enough, and that what the world is suffering from at the present time is not so much an overabundance of intellect as an insufficiency of humanity. Consider men like, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, as well as a sizable number of others, at the moment still respectable (allegedly elected by the people), whom I must forbear to mention. They are the extreme cases. What these men lacked was quite obviously the capacity to love. What they possessed in so eminent a degree was the capacity to hate and to be unforgiving. It is not for nothing that the Soviet Communists attempted to abolish the family and masculinize women, while the Nazis made informers of children against their parents and put the state so much before the family that it became a behemoth that well nigh destroyed everyone who was victimized by it.
What the world stands so much in need of at the present time, and what it will continue to need if it is to endure and grow in happiness, is more of the maternal spirit and less of the masculine. We need more fosterers of life and fewer wreckers of it. We need more persons who will love and less who will hate, and we need to understand how to teach them to do so; for if we do not try to understand we shall continue to flounder in the morass of misunderstanding that frustrated love creates. The tendencies to love with which the infant is born are frustrated,

 

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and frustrated love results in estrangement and aggression. Hatred is love frustrated. That is what too many men suffer from, and what an insufficient number of women recognizeat least too many women behave as if they fail to recognize it.
Let us remember that in the United States every fifteen seconds a woman is assaulted by her husband or boyfriend, and that one-third of the emergency calls to the police are made by battered women, and that the battered-woman syndrome is now a clinical entity. Many children are battered by their caregivers, be they parents, single parents, or boyfriends.
What many women have learned to recognize is that the much-bruited superiority of the male isn't all that men, so loudly advertising their own wares, have claimed it to be. The male seems to be neither as steady nor as wise as women have been led to believe. But on this subject there appears to be a conspiracy of silence. Perhaps women feel that men ought to be maintained in the illusion of their superiority because it might not be good for them or for the world to learn the truth. In that sense this book might have been entitled
What Every Woman Knows .
But one can't be sure that every woman knows it. What one can be sure of is that many women don't appear to know it, and even that there are many women who are horrified at the thought that anyone can possibly entertain the idea that women are anything but inferior to men. And there is the hostility of women toward their own sex, reflected in 18th century Lady Wortley Montagu's remark, "It goes far to reconcile me to being a woman, that I reflect that I am thus in no danger of marrying one." This sort of thinking did no one any good.
The world is in a mess. Men, without any assistance from women, have created that mess, not because they have been failed by women but because men have never really given women a chance to serve them as they are best equipped to do, namely by teaching them how to love their fellow humans. Women must cease supporting men for the wrong reasons in the wrong sort of way and thus cease enabling men to marry them for the wrong reasons, too. "That's what a man wants in a wife, mostly," says Mrs. Poyser in
Adam Bede,
"he wants to make sure o' one fool as 'ull tell him he's wise." But women, as James Stephens wrote, are wiser than men because they know less and understand more. Serving as natural mirrors, they have helped men reflect

 

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