The Natural Superiority of Women (6 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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comparative ethnography that abandons the search for the universal "key" to male dominance over women in favor of assessing the full range of human gender arrangements and their connection to human biology, specifically contingent histories of change and its political economic correlates, including colonization and decolonization, and warfare. Such a framework suggests that although San speakers of the Kalahari cannot be essentialized as egalitarian food foragers similar to our earlier stages as a species, their recent history of forced relocation by the former apartheid government of South Africa (which brought about a rise in interpersonal violence, including male violence against women) can teach us something important about the contexts of violence against women. We may learn much about gendered violence from these shifting, historically, politically and economically complex contingent processes as they unfold in human communities.
Gender, IQ, and Cognition
In its treatment of the question of whether there are cognitive differences between the sexes,
The Natural Superiority of Women
mines another rich area of modern social science debate. Montagu's discussion of intelligencespecifically the question of whether innate versus socialized differences in cognitive ability and intellectual performance exist between the sexes, embraces the progressive agenda of social constructionism, which asserts that much that has been previously viewed as ineradicable, biologically based difference is, in fact, culturally constructed. Here he works with the nuanced palate of late twentieth-century data and theory when he writes,
The principal error committed by the intelligence testers has been the assumption that their tests yield a quantitative measure of the biological determinant of intelligence. Evidence today reveals that these tests measure, if they measure anything, the combined effects of socioeconomic and schooling combined with genetic factors passed through the alembic of a unique personality. While there is no known method of teasing out of this amalgam what is due to biological factors and what is due to genes plus the individual history of the person, we do know that when the environmental factors are improved IQs go up, and that when they are depressed IQs go

 

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down. What, then, do they measure? No one really knows what intelligence is.

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The topic of comparative male and female intelligence was legitimized by Darwinian evolutionary writings because of their emphasis on the importance in natural selection of variation. As Stephen Jay Gould illuminates in his exhaustive deconstruction of racist anthropometry in
The Mismeasure of Man,
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intelligence was studied by important Victorian phrenologists and neuroanatomists, such as George Romanes, who believed that brain size and intelligence were secondary sexual characteristics. In 1910 Helen Thompson Woolley presented the first methodological critique of work in the psychology of gender differences, asserting that,
There is perhaps no field aspiring to be scientific where flagrant personal bias, logic martyred to the cause of supporting prejudice, unfounded assertions, and even sentimental rot and drivel have run riot to such an extent as here. Up until this period, the kinds of studies upon which assertions of gender differences in ability were based included such tests as rate and endurance in tapping on a telegraph key, tests of handwriting and association. In the case of handwriting, women were judged to be more conventional and men more individual. In tests of association, women and men were asked to write a number of associations when presented with a word. In one study of association women were judged to show more "concrete forms of response, a more subjective attitude, and more indecision."
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There was very little research using psychological methods.
These kinds of studies were largely replaced by standardized IQ tests during the next decades, during which the mental testing movement came to predominate in studies of all kinds of presumed cognitive differences, including those alleged between races and the sexes. As J. S. Hyde points out in an essay on the psychology of gender differences,
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the original IQ test had been developed by Binet in France with politically "benign" and practical goals. Binet had been commissioned by the French Minister of Public Instruction to identify children who might benefit from special education. Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman published the first American version in 1916. Neither Terman nor Binet believed that there were patterns of gender

 

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difference in performance on the Stanford-Binet. Terman published comments to the effect that girls did as well as boys on the test, and that women's comparative lack of professional advancement was due to social causes not innate differences in intellectual ability. The tests were, in fact, constructed to balance items that would advantage either sex, reflecting this ideological commitment to gender equality in ability.
The next phase in the testing movement occurred between the 1930s and 1940s, when there was a shift in focus to a method known as factor analysis in intelligence testing. L. L. Thurstone, for instance, developed the Primary Mental Abilities Test (PMA), which is based on factor analysis applied to seven areas of variation in ability, including mathematical ability, spatial ability, and verbal ability. Researchers began to use this style of analysis and to apply it to research on gender differences in these areas. By the 1930s there were numerous textbooks in differential psychology that reviewed a fairly large body of data on presumed group differences in abilities by gender, race, class, and age. Anastasi and Tyler drew similar conclusions: that women were superior in verbal abilities across the lifespan, and that men excelled in spatial relations tests, but that this difference emerged later than differences in verbal skills.

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Another set of differences believed to emerge later in men were mathematical skills requiring reason rather than computation. These perspectives have dominated the field of psychology of gender differences for many years. In their important and comprehensive review of studies of gender differences, the psychologists Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin reviewed thousands of studies on gender differences in cognition, personality and behavior.
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They concluded that much research was methodologically flawed and they on this basis dismissed conclusions about differences in the areas of achievement motivation, self-esteem, and higher-level cognitive tasks. They agreed that gender differences were well-supported by research in four areas: girl's greater verbal ability, boys greater mathematical and visual-spatial abilities and greater aggression. Gender differences in these areas have been reified and widely taught to many generations of undergraduates in introductory psychology classes.

In 1979 Jeanne Block published a critique of Maccoby and Jacklin's work, pointing out significant problems in their method

 

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of assessing data.

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By the 1980s a new statistical approach was applied to the analysis of gender differences in a wide range of studies. Called metaanalysis, it uses sophisticated quantitative methods to combine evidence from different research studies. This method has, among other things, allowed researchers to take into account intra-sex variability, to average the results of studies with greater reliability, and to indicate the magnitude of gender differences. Hyde applied metaanalysis to the studies reviewed by Maccoby and Jacklin in 1981 and found that the differences reified by these authors were not as significant as thought. She also found that the differences within the sexes are greater than those between the sexes. The general conclusions emerging from modern metaanalysis of cognitive abilities are, as Montagu noted in the early 1950s, not large. In analyses of social behaviors, such as aggression and helping, whether such differences are found depends upon context and methodology.
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But the vision of race, gender, and class typologies of aptitudes persists, and in fact has had a significant resurgence in the 1990s. In 1994 Hernnstein and Murray published
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life,
which attempts to justify race and class inequality by attributing it to innate differences in intelligence between groups. This claim has been repeatedly made over the course of the last century, to be refuted as "unfounded race, class, and gender prejudice," as Adolph Reed, Jr. points out in his review of the Murray and Hernnstein book in
The Nation .
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Hernnstein and Murray claim that rigid IQ stratification exists in every sphere of social life, winnowing out the "haves" from the "have nots." They propose a kind of brave new world in which people are slotted for the places that best fit their intelligence. In the book, they claim that Sir Cyril Burt, William Shockley, Arthur Jensen, and others who have asserted group differences in heritable aspects of intelligence, were maligned and persecuted by politically motivated ideologues.
That many of the early psychometricians had political and social agendas is clear. Daniel Kevles's
In the Name of Eugenics
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documents extensively the involvement of earlier psychometricians, including some of the founding fathers of modern psychometry, with the eugenics movement before World War II. Hernnstein and Murray neglected the work of many in this area

 

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