The Natural Superiority of Women (7 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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of research, including Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner,

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whose arguments for multiple fields of intelligence Montagu cites enthusiastically. Hernnstein and Murray write,

The broad envelope of possibilities suggests that senior business executives soak up a large portion of the top IQ decile who are not engaged in the dozen or so high IQ professions . . . A high proportion of people in those positions graduated from college, one screen. They have risen in the corporate hierarchy over the course of their careers, which is probably another screen for IQ. What is their mean IQ? There is no precise answer. Studies suggest that the mean for . . . all white collar professionals is around 107, but that category is far broader than the one we have in mind. Moreover, the mean IQ of four year college graduates in general was estimated at about 115 in 1972, and senior executives probably have a mean above that average.
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Putting aside the question of whether such reasoning constitutes "science," the implications for non-whites and women here are obvious, as the ranks of senior business executives are still largely filled by white men. Hernnstein and Murray's scientistic racism and sexism has as serious implications for white women as it does for women and men of color. That these authors could propose such a simplistic and unsupported social Darwinist argument in 1994, and be taken seriously, speaks to the persistence and power of this retrograde ideology well into the end of the twentieth century.
As geneticist Richard Lewontin has pointed out, the relationship between genes and complex behaviors such as intellectual performance is not a simple one. Control does not flow from the gene outwards only, but development involves an interaction between the growing organism, its genotype and the environments in which it develops from conception on.
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This epigenetic view of development reflects the consensus among modern geneticists, so often neglected in the popular literature of group "difference," whether speaking about race or gender. Ashley Montagu spoke to the complexity of biological and environmental interactions, including cultural experience, in the formation of adult human beings, long before these perspectives were widely understood or appreciated, as in his mid-century opus on race "The most important setting of human evolution is the human social environment."
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Since the publication of
Man's Most

 

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Dangerous Myth,
he has continued to reflect this perspective of complexity in behavioral and biological interactions in human evolution and individual development in his large corpus of works on these issues.
Many other contemporary examples of Victorian scientistic sexism and racism thrive in the contemporary political arena. Women's reproductive and economic rights, the rights of recent immigrants in U.S. society, as well as the rights of African Americans to economic and political justice are debated in the context of a retrograde shift to the political right in American life. Hernnstein and Murray's warning in
The Bell Curve
of the "dysgenic" effects for the nation of the relatively greater number of children of "low-IQ women" and the "shifting ethnic makeup" resulting from immigration of presumably low IQ, high fertility populations will "lower the average American IQ by 0.8 points per generation."

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It is ironic, and disturbingly so, that four decades after the egalitarian UNESCO statements and books such as Montagu's on race and gender, such a return to discredited social Darwinism and eugenics dominates the popular discourse on these issues.

Recent Trends
Montagu's writings on race and gender have stood for at least half a century in opposition to the kind of corrupt scientism found in
The Bell Curve
and similar works.
The Natural Superiority of Women
is, in many respects, a palimpsest of many twentieth-century scientific, humanistic, and progressive approaches to the issue of gender. At the same time, Montagu's roots in late Victorian and early twentieth-century science are reflected in his engagement with the ideas of the evolutionary theorists Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson, the sexologist Havelock Ellis, whose classic work in late Victorian sexology
Man and Woman
(1898) Montagu liberally cites.
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The important bridge that Montagu provides between late nineteenth century and current evolutionary discourses can be traversed in his discussion of neoteny, the concept that humans retain characteristics of the young into adulthood. Montagu's compelling book on this subject,
Growing Young
(1981) presents his own thoughts on this important subject, and those of others

 

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from Havelock Ellis to Stephen Jay Gould, who, like Montagu, convincingly argue that neoteny has been strongly selected over the course of human evolution. The Victorian influence can also be felt in Montagu's often essentializing visions of womanhood, some of which are worthy of the Victorian "angel of the hearth" portrait tradition. He writes,
Because women are unselfish, forbearing, self-sacrificing, and maternal, they possess a deeper understanding than men of what it means to be human . . . It is the function of women to teach men how to be human . . . it is in this that women can realize their power for good in the world and make their greatest gains.
While not entirely different from some modern essentialism within women's studies (i.e., Carol Gilligan's assertion that girls and boys develop fundamentally different perspectives on issues of moral responsibility),

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it is at odds with much of late twentiethcentury feminism, which has separated itself from these fixed images of gender. Women, when given the opportunity, seem to do a pretty good job of being "men"; that is, competitive and assertive in the postindustrial workplace. Montagu's attachment to this philosophy of maternalism leads him to his one scathing criticism of the modern women's movement.

The Women's Liberation Movement has done magnificent work, but as in all movements there are some extremists in it who argue that those who plead the need of motherhood, who emphasize the importance of mothering in the first few years of the child, are nothing but male chauvinist pigs who are engaged in a conspiracy to perpetuate the servitude of the female.
Here, I think, he sets up a straw woman: few feminists of my acquaintance have ever suggested that the "need of motherhood" should be trashed. On the contrary, it is modern feminist activists who have most consistently fought for the rights of mothers in a society in which too much lip service and too little actual economic support honors this reification of abstract versus real mothers or their children. It is fascinating that, in his dialogue with feminists Greer, Heilbrun, Gimbutas, and others, Montagu stretches to bridge these earlier visions and late twentiethcentury feminism.

 

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