The Natural Superiority of Women (57 page)

Read The Natural Superiority of Women Online

Authors: Ashley Montagu

Tags: #Social Science, #Anthropology, #Cultural, #Women's Studies, #test

BOOK: The Natural Superiority of Women
12.81Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
page_293<br/>
Page 293
Article 4
All appropriate measures shall be taken to ensure to women on equal terms with men without any discrimination:
(a) The right to vote in all elections and be eligible for election to all publicly elected bodies;
(b) The right to vote in all public referenda;
(c) The right to hold public office and to exercise all public functions.
Such rights shall be guaranteed by legislation.
Article 5
Women shall have the same rights as men to acquire, change, or retain their nationality. Marriage to an alien shall not automatically affect the nationality of the wife either by rendering her stateless or by forcing on her the nationality of her husband.
Article 6
1. Without prejudice to the safeguarding of the unity and the harmony of the family which remains the basic unit of any society, all appropriate measures, particularly legislative measures, shall be taken to ensure women, married or unmarried, equal rights with men in the field of civil law, and in particular:
(a) The right to acquire, administer and enjoy, dispose of and inherit property, including property acquired during the marriage;
(b) The right to equality in legal capacity and the exercise thereof;
(c) The same rights as men with regard to the law on the movement of persons.
2. All appropriate measures shall be taken to ensure the principle of equality of status of the husband and wife, and in particular:
(a) Women shall have the same right as men to free choice of a spouse and to enter into marriage only with their free and full consent;
(b) Women shall have equal rights with men during marriage and at its dissolution. In all cases the interest of the child shall be paramount;
(c) Parents shall have equal rights and duties in matters relating to their children. In all cases the interest of the children shall be paramount;

 

page_294<br/>
Page 294
3. Child marriage and the betrothal of young girls before puberty shall be prohibited, and effective action, including legislation, shall be taken to specify a minimum age for marriage and to make the registration of marriages in an official registry compulsory.
Article 7
All provisions of penal codes which constitute discrimination against women shall be repealed.
Article 8
All appropriate measures, including legislation, shall be taken to combat all forms of traffic in women and exploitation of prostitution of women.
Article 9
All appropriate measures shall be taken to ensure to girls and women, married or unmarried, equal rights with men in education at all levels, and in particular:
(a) Equal conditions of access to, and study in, educational institutions of all types, including universities, vocational, technical, and professional schools;
(b) The same choice of curricula, the same examinations, teaching staff with qualifications of the same standard, and school premises and equipment of the same quality, whether the institutions are coeducational or not;
(c) Equal opportunities to benefit from scholarships and other study grants;
(d) Equal opportunities for access to programs of continuing education, including adult literacy programs;
(e) Access to educational information to help in ensuring the health and well-being of families.
Article 10
1. All appropriate measures shall be taken to ensure to women, married or unmarried, equal rights with men in the field of economic and social life, and in particular:
(a) The right without discrimination, on grounds of marital status or any other grounds, to receive vocational training, to work, to free choice of profession and employment, and to professional and vocational advancement;

 

page_295<br/>
Page 295
(b) The right to equal remuneration with men and to equality of treatment in respect of work of equal value;
(c) The right to leave with pay, retirement privileges, and provision for security in respect of unemployment, sickness, old age, or other incapacity to work;
(d) The right to receive family allowances on equal terms with men.
2. In order to prevent discrimination against women on account of marriage or maternity and to ensure their effective right to work, measures shall be taken to prevent their dismissal in the event of marriage or maternity and to provide paid maternity leave, and the guarantee of returning to former employment, and to provide the necessary social services, including child-care facilities.
3. Measures taken to protect women in certain types of work, for reasons inherent in their physical nature, shall not be regarded as discriminatory.
Article 11
The principle of equality of rights of men and women demands implementation in all states in accordance with the principles of the United Nations Charter and of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Governments, nongovermental organizations, and individuals are urged, therefore, to do all in their power to promote the implementation of the principles contained in this Declaration.

 

page_297<br/>
Page 297
Appendix B
On the Origins of My Views on the Natural Superiority of Women
The idea of the biological or natural superiority of women has so astonished many people that they have often asked me how I came upon such an "extraordinary" notion. I have attempted to satisfy their curiosity in what follows.
It all began, I suppose, in childhood, when I began to notice, about 1911, when I was six or thereabouts, that women were so much nicer than men. Men customarily greeted me, as they did other boys, would tweak my cheek, muss up my hair, and say, "What a nice boy you are," and then as abruptly go upon the even tenor of their way. I soon realized that this was a perfunctory conventional ritual granting men the liberty to express their hostility toward boys. Women, on the other hand, displayed a genuine and comforting interest in you. Far from tweaking your cheek they would gently caress it, and would warmly and pleasantly enter into conversation with you. Women, I found were kind; men were often cold-fishish, and thoughtless. There were some men who were nice, but when they were not they were horrid. Men seemed to be made of a coarser fiber than women. I heard of men who beat their own children. I never heard that said of a woman. Seated as I was in the land of English male supremacy and inaccessibility, I somehow divined the meaning of a cockney phrase I had occasionally heard, "If yer luvs us, chuck us abaht." I gathered that this was meant to be a cry for attention, even though it

 

page_298<br/>
Page 298
were to be at the cost of a physical beating. It was all very puzzling, and led to a great deal of wondering.
As an only child, and rather lonely, I felt uncomfortable, even unwelcome, an intruder in the family, as if I were living in a strange country in which people behaved in inexplicably bizarre ways and had no understanding of children whatever. It was clear to me, from their behavior toward children, that adults could never themselves have been children. And yet they often said things like, ''When I was a boy . ." And then there were photographs of them as children. So something must have occurred between the time when they were childrenif they ever wereand the time they became adults, to cause them to forget what it was like to be a child.
And so I became deeply interested in discovering how adults came to be the way they were. It seemed to me a topsy-turvy world, in which children, given the chance, could certainly make better parents than adults, and where women, being so much kinder than men, ought to have been treated more humanely, and given more power in defense of children.
Books offered an answer. A prize book set me off in the right direction. By the time I was fourteen I had read books on anatomy, physiology, neurology, and psychology, but it was not until I had gone to university in 1922, at age seventeen, that I came upon Havelock Ellis's
Man and Woman: A Study of Human Secondary Sexual Characters
that I began to discover the clues for which I had been searching. The book was first published in 1894. It was probably the fifth revised edition issued in 1914 that I read. My major reading at this time was biology, cultural and physical anthropology, logic, philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis. The work of Ellis and Freud gave me a compass to steer by; as a result I was able to find my way into all sorts of fascinating subjects in which I read widely.
In 1924-25 I wrote a little book, in which I set out my ideas on the nature of the sexes, showing that the traditionally accepted views concerning that subject were quite unsound, and that, in fact, the differences, significant as they were, were much less than was generally believed. I entitled the book
Androgyne: Or the Future of the Sexes,
and sent it to C. K. Ogden, the editor of
The Today and Tomorrow
series, of which T. S. Eliot wrote, "We are able to peer into the future by means of that brilliant series [which] will constitute a precious document upon the present time." Alas, Ogden returned my

 

page_299<br/>
Page 299
manuscript without a single comment. I still have the manuscript, which I never again offered for publication. The few people who have read it say that it was too much before its time. Robert Briffault, author of
The Mothers,
read the manuscript in 1931 and commented on it in his article, "The Evolution of Woman," in that path-breaking symposium, Woman's Coming of Age.

1
But that was all.

As a student of physical anthropology I had learned in sexing skeletons (without going into detail here) that those that were delicately made
gracile
was the termwere more likely to be female, while those that were more coarsely or robustly made were most likely to be male. This was also true in monkeys and apes and was regarded as evidence of greater evolutionary advancement of the female than the male. Ellis and the authorrities he so abundantly quoted confirmed these facts, and it was Ellis who pointed out that the fetuses and young of apes and of human beings are strikingly more alike than are their adult forms. Furthermore, the fetuses and young were much more like adult human beings than they were like adult apes. In short, humans, by retaining many more of their youthful features into adulthood, were so much more advanced than other primates. Finally, since women showed the childlike physical traits to a greater extent than men, women were so much more advanced than men. In setting out the conclusions to which his massive examination of the relevant evidence led, Ellis put it this way,
[woman] bears the special characteristics of humanity in a higher degree than man . . . simply because she is nearer to the child . . . . She represents more nearly than man the human type to which man is approximating . . . Nature has made women more like children in order that they may better understand and care for children, and in the gift of children Nature has given to women a massive and sustained physiological joy to which there is nothing in men's lives to correspond. Men have had their revenge on Nature and on her protégé. While women have been largely absorbed in that sphere of sexuality which is Nature's, men have roamed the earth, sharpening their aptitudes and energies in perpetual conflict with Nature. It has thus come about that the subjugation of Nature by Man has often practically involved the subjugation, physical and mental, of women by men. The periods of society most favorable for women appear, judging from the experiences of the past, to be somewhat primitive periods in which the militant tendency is not strongly marked.
2

 

Other books

Fuzzy Navel by J. A. Konrath
I Need a Hero by Gary, Codi
Surrounded by Sharks by Northrop, Michael
Starburst by Jettie Woodruff
Bloodmoney by David Ignatius
By Heresies Distressed by David Weber