The Natural Superiority of Women (48 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 twice their natural size. It is time that men learned the truth, and perhaps they are likely to take it more gracefully from another male than from their unacknowledged betters. It is equally important that women learn the truth, too, for it is to them that the most important part, the more fundamental part, of the task of remaking the world will fall, for the world will be remade only by helping human beings to realize themselves more fully in terms of what their mothers have to give them. Without adequate mothers life becomes intolerable, and Mother Earth becomes a battlefield upon which fathers participate in the slaying of their young and are themselves diminished. Old soldiers never die. Young ones do.
Though men have had a long tenure in mismanaging the affairs of the world, it is time that women realize that men will continue to run the world for some time to come, and that women can best assist them to run it more intelligently and more humanely by teaching them, when young, what humanity means. Thus men will not feel that they are being demoted but rather that their potentialities for good are greatly increased. What is more important, instead of feeling hostile toward women, they will for the first time learn to appreciate them at their proper worth. An old Spanish proverb has it that a good wife is the workmanship of a good husband. I am sure that even in Spanish societies it is no longer true. For of one thing we can be certain: A good husband is the workmanship of a good mother. The best of all ways in which men can help themselves is to help women realize themselves. In this way both sexes will come for the first time fully into their own, and humankind may then look forward to a happier history than it has thus far enjoyed. It was Matthew Arnold, that man of great sensibility, poet and critic, who, more than a hundred years ago, said, "If ever the world sees a time when women shall come together purely and simply for the benefit and good of mankind, it will be a power such as the world has never known."
The genius of woman is the genius of
humanity,
the ability to love others more than one loves oneself, and love, humanity, is the supreme form of intelligence. Humankind must learn to understand that all other forms of intelligence must be secondary to the developed humane, compassionate intelligence, for any form of intelligence that is not primarily implanted into a matrix of humane feeling and understanding is the most dangerous

 

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thing in the world. The clever can never be too clever when they are governed by the desire and the ability to think of the welfare of others even before they think of their own, for so to think and conduct oneself is to serve oneself better than one may in any other manner. It is that kind of intelligence that the world stands most in need of at the present time. It is that kind of intelligence that the world will always stand in most need of. It is that kind of intelligence with which women are so abundantly endowed. It is that kind of intelligence that it is their destiny to teach the world.

 

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12
Mutual Aid
In this book I have had to deal with certain myths about women, myths that have grown hoary with the ages, and I have had to set out the facts. The facts, for the most part, completely controvert the myths, and the facts prove that, on the whole, the advantages are unequivocally with the female. This conclusion alone will be sufficient to elicit the sympathetic interest of most women and bring them rallying, even more devotedly than ever, to the side of their men, which is precisely as it should be. Men need women more than men need men. This is not to say that women don't need men; they do very much but not as basically, pressingly, as men need women; for just as a child needs the love of a mother if it is to develop healthily, so a man needs the love of a woman to maintain him in good mental and physical health. For his complete and adequate functioning he is more
dependent
upon such love than a woman is. In such a fundamental human situation women will not dream of considering themselves as anything but helpmeets to men. One can only wish that men would more profoundly understand what the medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer so well expressed almost six hundred years ago.

 

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For this ye know well, tho' I would in lie,
In women is all truth and steadfastness;
For in good faith, I never of them sie
But much worship, bounty, and gentleness,
Right coming, fair, and full of meekéness,
Good, and glad, and lowly, I you ensure,
Is this goodly and angelic creature .
And if it hap a man be in disease,
She doth her business and her full pain,
With all her might him to comfort and to please,
Iffrom his disease him she might restrain:
In word ne deed, I wis, she woll not faine;
With all her might she doth her business
To bring him out of his heaviness .
Lo, here what gentleness these women have
If we could know it for our rudéness!
How busy they be us to keep and save
Both in hele and also in sicknéss,
And always right sorry for our distress!
In evéry manner thus show they ruth,
That in them is all goodness and all truth .
Of course we do. But why in the name of goodness we men have done so little about this knowledge, and left it until so late, perhaps constitutes a commentary on our lack of understanding of ourselves.
We have been scared and we have been confused, and we have had to live within the framework of the male-dominated society into which we have been born. Something of the truth of Chaucer's words every man knowswhich is a good point of departure on the rewarding journey of learning to know morewhy Chaucer wrote a
Legend of Good Women
but no
Legend of Good Men .
And in ''Tales of Melibeus," in
The Canterbury Tales
(1380?), he asks the rhetorical question, "What is better than wisdom. Woman. And what is better than a good woman," And answers, "No-thing." We are with Chaucer. Men can help women, and women can help men. Men should help women; women will help men, anyway.

 

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The sexes are interdependent in a manner so biologically fundamental, their functions are so basically reciprocal, and they are so delicately related to each other, that any failure in adjustment between them is likely to have serious personal and social group consequences. Perhaps it need not be emphasized that such lack of adjustment has been characteristic of the greater part of humankind for a very long time, and that the consequences have been more than unfortunate. Just as the lack of adjustment between mother and infant may do irreparable harm to the mental health of the infant, so the lack of adjustment between the sexes has done damage to men and women and their children, and to the societies they constitute. Men cannot keep one-half of the human race in subjection and expect to escape the havoc they thus cause in themselves.
The tragedy is that modern men are caught in the web of a tradition they never madea tradition that came to them as part of their social heredity but that they most often believe to be part of the biological order of things. But if men were conditioned in the truth, if they were afforded opportunities for studying and learning the facts, and if they were brought up in a society that hung question marks on antiquated traditions and on ideas that have been taken for granted, they might successfully disentangle themselves from the web of false traditional beliefs concerning women as well as themselves.
People have deep investments in their own illusions.
It is, however, not only a matter of disentangling oneself from the entanglements of the old and fallacious ideas and practices, but a question also of adjusting oneself to a new conception of the relations between the sexes. In these tasks women and men will have to work together; they will
need
to cooperate; and by doing so they can free each other from the shackles that have bound them for so long. By working together in harmony, men and women will confer the greatest benefits upon each other and upon the whole of humanity.
These are nice sentiments; but now let us proceed to a discussion of the rationale, the scientific basis for such ideas, so that readers may judge for themselves how well founded such recommendations are.
First I should like the reader to understand something of the basic meaning of social relationships; this done, we may

 

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then proceed to the discussion of the practical significance of the facts for the improvement of the relations between the sexes. It is a convenient academic device to start with the simplest types of organisms in order to show students as clearly as possible the main facts about an organism's functioning. I shall follow this procedure here. Remember, we are interested in the nature of social relationships.
If, under natural conditions, we observe a simple one-celled organism like the amoeba, we shall generally find it in association with other amoebas. Now, if we look at a number of amoebas long enough under a microscope we shall find that when the single amoeba has reached a certain size it begins to duplicate itself, that is, to reproduce. By studying the process of reproduction carefully, we will find that the nucleus of the amoeba, the central structure that contains the chromosomes, divides into two, and that the new nucleus flows into the protoplasm to the side of the maternal nucleus. There it remains with the protoplasm while certain other changes are going on, still quite within the same maternal cell membrane. Any changes induced in the protoplasm will mutually be responded to by both the maternal cell and the daughter cell that is coming into being. Whatever affects the one affects the other. There is a complete exchange of physiologically necessary substances between the maternal and daughter cells while they are still within the same cell membrane. There is a complete interdependent relationship; one is dependent upon the other.
Every living thing comes into being originally in this fundamentally similar interdependent manner. It is in the process of origin of one living thing from another, in the biologic relation of interdependency that the reproductive process constitutes, that the fundamental meaning of social relationships, of social life, is to be sought and understood. It is, indeed, in the pattern of interdependency that has been described for the single-celled organism that the significance of social relationships in the most complex of many-celled organisms is to be understood, for interdependency, no matter how complex the organism or how simple, is the basic pattern of the social state. Indeed, the earliest source of social drives may be perceived as an outgrowth of the original biologic interdependent relationship between genitor cell and offspring cell in the process

 

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