The Natural Superiority of Women (54 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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has it, "Since God could not be everywhere he created mothers." Modern civilizations have yet to recognize the fact that women are the creators of humanity. The evidence of archaeology and anthropology has revealed that this was probably the common belief of humankind up to about six thousand years ago. After that, invaders from the north, by their violence and the subordination of women, put an end to egalitarianism, and replaced it with male domination, androcracy.
The considerable scientific evidence that is now available proves without doubt that the involvement between mother and child is indispensable for the healthy development of both. That involvement should actively last from conception to the end of their lives. The truth and wisdom of this should help women to bring about those changes, which will, beyond all else, restore the mother and the child to each other, and so a renewed humanity. In the new-found chaos in which we are living, women are our last best hope.
Full restoration of egalitarianism will, of course, take time; however, the signs all point in the right direction. At this time thousands of women with children have no alternative other than to work in order to help maintain the family. This is at a cost that is unfortunate for everyone concerned, as well as to the community as a whole. Such a state of affairs produces an inescapable maladjustment, an instability, a lack of interpersonal relationships, connectedness and an enfeebled integration into the bonds of society. This unhappy state, suffered by many others for similar reasons, is known to sociologists as
anomie,
an alienation of the individual, a widely diffused unease. People recognize that a problem exists, but few understand how serious it is.
As the pediatrician Dr. T. Berry Brazelton has observed, "We are paying a terrible price for our nation's inattention to the increasing stresses on children and families." He went on to identify teenage violence, suicide, drug abuse, alcoholism, and pregnancy, as "obvious signals that our children are growing up with hidden anger, and self-destructive impulses."
There have been many conferences, monographs, articles, newspaper reports, and interviews with mothers faced with the problem of having to work and be caring mothers. The toll it takes upon their lives, as well as upon their children, is writ clear upon their faces. As one mother said, "being a parent is the

 

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greatest responsibility society can bestow on me, yet it's a terribly squeezed part of my life.'' Such women wonder how they can be good mothers, and work in order to support the family, as well as meet all the other demands placed on them, and perhaps even enjoy a moment for rest, and some time for themselves.
The serious effects the working mother and child suffer have been revealed in many scientific studies, but no government agency has been engaged enough to address the problem with the action it calls for. It is curable. The cry from the heart has been heard but gone unheeded. The causes and disturbing effects of anomie on the family constitutes a challenge that should become a major concern of government. Because it is women who are the most deeply involved in the personal struggle of combining home with employment, it will be mostly up to women to use the power that they possess, namely the
franchise:
the right to vote in local, state, and national elections, to bring about the changes which will free them and their children from the ravaging handicaps they now suffer. The call to action was loud and clear then, it is even more so today.
It is estimated that women cast more than one-half the ballots in national elections and yet full constitutional rights are not yet theirs. One of the most notable ways in which women can exercise their influence is through the ballot, principally by helping to elect to the legislatures of the land men and women who are sympathetic to their cause. Of the 540 members of congress as of June, 1999, only 65 (12.03%) are women. This can scarcely be called proportional representation. It is up to women to change this state of affairs; and it cannot be too emphatically stated that unless they exert themselves to bring about a fairer representation of their sex in Congress, no one else will. The government of this land, of every land, needs the brains, the ability, and the understanding of women. It should be a self-imposed obligation upon women to take politics more seriously than they have in the past. Women have an important contribution to make to their society, and one of the best ways to do so is through politics. Let it be remembered that politics is the complete science of human nature, the science through which human nature is ordered. If the world is to be remade, human nature will have to be remade, a task in which women must always play the leading role.

 

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Who is to remake the world? It is a proper question to ask in a book of this sort, which has been written not simply to throw some light on the relations between the sexes with especial reference to man's injustice to women, but as part of the larger task of helping human beings to understand themselves better, to understand more fully how they came to be the way they are now, and what they can do about changing the conditions that make men and women function as unhappily as they frequently do at present. Who is to remake the world? Those who begin remaking the world by remaking themselves; those who will help future generations remake the world nearer the heart's desire by assisting to free the next generation, and the generations to follow, from the myths upon which their parents were bred; those who will make the truth available to the next generation in a humanizing way. They will do so not simply by stating the facts but by incorporating them into the lives of those who are to be the future citizens of the world in a vital and meaningful manner.
Women are already exercising a considerable influence in the realm of political and social action, an influence that is so conspicuously for the good, that one can only hope women will enter both the governments of their states and of their country in larger numbers than they have so far done. Not only their communities, their states, and their country need their help; the world also needs it. I have seen the ideas and action women have to offer in a multiplicity of different roles, and I have found them good. I recommend them to the attention of my fellow men, and particularly to those women who are wanting in sufficient faith in their own sex.
In the field of education women are being admitted in greater numbers as teachers in the colleges and universities, where, it is to be hoped and expected, their verbal abilities will reduce some of the dead weight of boredom that has afflicted so many campuses for too many generations! Pernicious academia is at present largely a disorder due to years of academic masculine inbreeding. But discrimination against women teachers at the higher academic levels is in many ways becoming a thing of the past.
Perhaps when the sexes have developed a better understanding of each other, men will not only cease to be appointed presidents of universities for the reasons that usually bring men

 

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that high privilege, but women will more frequently serve equally with men in such capacities.
On school boards and boards of higher education women already play a distinguished role. Parent-teacher associations throughout the country are almost entirely the doing of American women, and their influence for good in the schools and in the community, and thus throughout the land, has been incalculable.
Women are the cultural torchbearers in America; and even in the darkest parts of the land, wherever a gleam of light is seen it is usually cast from a source upheld by the hand of a woman.

 

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14
Woman's Task
It was a Victorian saying that the last thing man would civilize would be woman. This was, of course, intended as a criticism of woman's alleged refractoriness. The Victorian male, ensconced in his fortified citadel of infallibility, aware of his own superiority and of the female's inferiority, employed the myth of female inferiority as the explanation of the female's unyieldingness to the blandishments of his conception of civilization. Perhaps it is a fortunate thing for the world that women, prevented from yielding to men's interest in things technological and material, have been able to pay so much more attention to people and their needs, and therefore are better equipped to solve the problems of humanity than most men.
Civilization is the art of being kind, an art at which women excel. Shall I be told that women can be quite as unkind and as bigoted as men? Indeed some can, and a great many other things too; but it is not natural for them to be so, any more than it is natural for men to be so. In general, women tend to retain a sympathy for the other, which so many men seem to lose. Men have done themselves the greatest disservice by comfortably basking in the spurious glow of their traditional attitudes toward women, and by so doing have left themselves out in the cold. In being unfair to women, men have been unfair to themselves, suffered untold losses in innumerable ways, and have crippled

 

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the development of their potentialities, for tenderness especially, and for kindness in general. In the Western world tenderness and gentleness have been identified as feminine, denied and unbecoming to men. The truth is, of course, that sensitive feeling and kindly conduct are neither feminine nor masculine traits,
they are human traits,
and like other human behavioral traits, they have to be learned.
One of the primary tasks of women will be to teach their children the meaning of tenderness and gentleness. In an emotionally illiterate society it is largely by the warmth of women's tenderness that the long ice age of man's emotions will be thawed. Machismo, the exaggerated sense of masculinity that stresses such attributes as physical power, virility, domination of women, and aggres-siveness, is a problem, a disaster, the consequences of which hang over us all like an invisible darkness in the sunlight. But we need not despair, for in the days of our darkness there remains a ray of bright hope. It is in the rebirth of our children. In this women will always have the key role to play. Civilization is not just a matter of living together in cities; it is also an attitude of mind. For the larger and more complex the community of which we recognize ourselves as members, the more certainly we are called upon, consciously and willingly, to abrogate our personal sovereignty, and to unite, as a genuine community to assist women, as the principal caregivers, through the family, to do what women are best qualified to do: create healthy, humane beings.
The natural superiority of women is a biological fact and a socially acknowledged reality. The facts have been available for more than half a century, but in a male-dominated world in which the inflation of the male ego has been dependent upon the preservation of the myth of male superiority, and the subordination of women, the significance of those facts has simply been denied attention. When the history of the subject comes to be written, this peculiar omission will no doubt serve as yet another forcible illustration that men see only what and how they want to see.

1

Male supremacy has been dependent upon the maintenance of the myth of female inferiority, and as long as everyone believed that men were naturally superior to women, neither men nor women were disposed to perceive the facts for what they were. Beliefs and prejudices, especially when they are sanctioned by

 

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age and fortified by "experience," are often so much more convincing than facts. But facts, as Mr. Pecksniff said, "is facts"; and the truth does have a way of asserting itself, and eventually, of prevailing. I hope the facts have been made sufficiently clear in this book to cause the reader to reflect upon the possibility that women are naturally, that is, biologically, far better endowed in the viable fundamental respects of their being than has hitherto been generally understood or acknowledged.
Science is not a matter of private whim or personal prejudice; it is a public method of drawing rigorously systematic conclusions from facts that have been confirmed by observation and experiment. The facts cited in this book supporting the thesis of the natural superiority of women will be considered and evaluated by scientists and laymen alike. All that the author can claim to have done is to have set out those facts and offer his interpretation of them; as a scientist I have done my best to ensure their accuracy and to offer a sound interpretation of their meaning. It now remains for readers to evaluate critically what I have done. In the presence of startling ideas, the truly scientific attitude is neither the will to believe nor the will to disbelieve, but the will to investigate. Finally, let us always remember that a scientist is one who believes in proof without certainty, while other people tend to believe in certainty without proof. Furthermore, it should be remembered that facts do not speak for themselves, but are at the mercy of anyone who seeks to juggle them, and that selection of the facts often determines their interpretation.
I consider the theme of this book to be a most important one, for I am convinced, and I hope the reader will agree, that good relations between the sexes are basic to the development of good human relations in all societies. This should be obvious, yet men do not behave as if it were. Is it too much to hope that the claims herein made for the natural superiority of women will shake men out of their complacent acceptance of the myths of sexism? If I had thought that that was too much to expect, I should not have written this book. It is to be hoped that there will be some discussion of my contentions, and that is highly desirable; for the more we talk about the relations between the sexes, and the more informed we are while doing so, the more likely will be our progress toward establishing happier relations between them.

 

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