The Natural Superiority of Women (10 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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scientists, and so on, have been men, and that women have made, numerically, by comparison, a very poor showing? Clearly the superiority is with men. Where are the Leonardos, the Van Goghs, the Michelangelos, the Shakespeares, the Donnes, the Galileos, the Newtons, the Einsteins, the Freuds, the Mozarts, the Bachs, the Kants, and the Humes of the feminine world? In fields in which women have excelled, in poetry and the novel, how many female poets and novelists of truly first rank have there been? Haven't well-bred young women for centuries been educated in music? And how many among them have been great composers or instrumentalists? Possibly there is a clue here in answer to the question asked. May it not be that women are just about to emerge from the period of subjection during which they were the menials of the masculine world, a world, in which the opportunities and encouragements were simply not available to women? Or in a profounder sense may we not say with Oscar Wilde that "owing to their imperfect education, the only works we have had from women are works of genius."
Today almost everywhere, in spite of remaining discriminations, women are achieving what was once considered beyond their capacity: The Nobel Prize in literature has gone to Selma Lagerlof (1909), Grazia Deledda (1926), Sigrid Undset (1928), Pearl S. Buck (1938), Gabriela Mistral (1945), Nelly Sachs (1966), Nadine Gordimer (1991), Toni Morrison (1993), and Wislawa Symborska (1996). The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Bertha von Suttner (1905), Jane Addams (1931), Emily G. Balch (1946), Mairead Corrigan (1976), Betty Williams (1976), Mother Teresa (1979), Daw Aung San Suu Kyi (1991), Rigoberta Menchu Tum (1992) and Jody Williams (1997).
Not long ago it was inconceivable that any woman would ever have brains enough to attain great distinction in science. Marie Curie, the first scientist to receive a Nobel Peace prize twicein 1903, when she shared the prize in physics, and 1911, for her work in chemistrywas regarded as a sort of rare mutation. But Mme Curie no longer remains the only woman scientist to receive a Nobel Prize: In chemistry, her daughter Irene Joliot-Curie shared the prize in 1935; Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin received it in 1964. Maria Goeppert Mayer shared the physics prize in 1963. In physiology or medicine, Gerty R. Cori shared the prize in 1947, Rosalyn S. Yalow in 1977, Barbara McClintock

 

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won it in 1983, Rita Levi-Montalcini shared it in 1986, Gertrude B. Elion in 1988, and Christiane Nusslein-Volhard in 1995.
Women scientists such as Lise Meitner of u-238 fame are no longer extraordinary exceptions; nor are women members of distinguished scientific societies exceptions: The first woman was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1925 and since then many others have been elected as members. In 1962, Marguerite Perey, discoverer of Francium, the eighty-seventh element, became the first woman elected to the French Academy of Sciences.
Among instrumentalists there have been such accomplished artists as Myra Hess, Wanda Landowska, and Midori.
As an artist Mary Cassatt was every bit as good as her great French artist friends, Degas and Manet, considered her to be, but it took the rest of the world more than half a century to grudgingly acknowledge it. The truth is that in painting and sculpture, as in virtually everything else relating to creativity and achievement, women have for the most part been written out of history. Germaine Greer has written a brilliant and thoroughly sound answer to the question, Why has there been no female Leonardo, Rembrandt, or other painter of genius? Her book
The Obstacle Race
is beautifully illustrated with the works of outstanding women painters. From these illustrations readers may judge for themselves how admirable so many of these women painters really were. Why there have been so few women artists of the first rank, Greer forcibly shows, were the consequences of the obstacles they faced in the form of family demands and childbirth, the effects of female submissiveness and erotic entanglements with adored male masters, the disturbances of patronizing overpraise, the humiliations of sexual innuendo, the limitations of working on a small scale, and finally, the oblivion of neglect and misattribution.

1
A tragic case in point is that of the French sculptor of genius, Camille Claudel, of whom more later (chap. 10).

However, it is not going to be any part of this book to show that women are about to emerge as superior scientists, musicians, painters, sculptors, or the like. I believe that in these fields they will manifest abilities at least as good as those of men, and possibly even better. Not perhaps, in the immediate future, will they emerge in greater numbers, largely because the

 

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motivations and aspirations of many women will continue to be in conflict with family life and its absorbing long-term demands. In the long run, given the same incentives, opportunities, and encouragements as males, there is every reason to believe that the laurels of genius will adorn the brows of women as comfortably and frequently as they will those of men. At this point, in something more than a parenthesis, it should be said that there is a genius of the heart which is vastly more valuable than the accomplishment of any other form of geniusbut of that, more later. We do not know where the winds of genius may blow, but what we do know is that everyone possesses the genius and the spirit to transcend the daily circumstances of life, and to transform them to achieve new planes of meaning and creativity. What must be remarked here is that women are just beginning to emerge from their long-fettered period of subjection and the diehard discrimination against them. It is of interest to recall, as illustrative of the prevailing traditional attitudes toward women that the entire article on "Women" in the first edition of the
Encyclopedia Britannica,
published in 1771, consisted of six words: "the female of man. See Homo."
In the politics of sex most men have been Tories, and still continue to be so. If there is any man who without blushing can contemplate the history of his sex's conduct toward women, let it in charity be set down to the fact that he very likely does not consider himself responsible for the errors of his predecessors. Thus absolved from all responsibility for the past, it may be hoped that he will be willing to reexamine some of his inherited beliefs concerning the nature and place of women in the modern world and in the future. And although it may sometimes appear that civilization has a natural resistance against improving itself, there is some evidence that it is still possible for men living in an irrational world to behave rationally, with intelligence and a sense of responsibility.
On occasion men have claimed that they were attempting to escape from the domination of women, when in fact they were fleeing from their own self-doubts and an incapacity to master themselves. Women have always been a convenient screen upon which men have projected their weaknesses and ambivalence. For many men today, attitudes toward women remain very much what they were during the nineteenth century. The women of the

 

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nineteenth centurysecond-class citizens within male-dominated societieswere treated in a manner not unlike that which was the bitter experience of blacks in the United States and in many parts of the world. Nineteenth-century scientists and thinkers, with rare exceptions, were busily engaged in proving that women were inferior to men. Women, it was alleged, had smaller brains than men, were much less intelligent, became more emotional and unstable in stressful situations, were flighty, weakly creatures, and so drearily on.

2
In a crisis, it was asserted, one could always depend upon women to swoon or become otherwise helpless; they were hysterical and sickly creatures who suffered from the "vapors," with little judgment and less sense; they could not be entrusted with the handling of money; and as for the world outside, there they could be employed only at the most menial and routine tasks, as servants, nannies, or if they were adequately trained, as governesses.

It is not that Victorian men were misogynists by biological heredity, but they certainly were by social heredity. Before all else they were the inheritors of an intellectual and cultural climate into which they, as well as women, were thoroughly locked; a tradition in which the inferiority of women was a hoary-headed ancient belief that everyone took for granted, a fact of nature beyond question. But this "fact" of nature was, in fact, a prejudice, a myth.
What is a prejudice? What is a myth? A prejudice is a prejudgment having no factual validity, a judgment or opinion held before the facts are known. What, then, is a fact? A fact is a datum of experience that has been repeatedly tested and confirmed by independent investigators, the current best fit between reality and our method of confirming it. The greatest enemy of truth is not error, but prejudice. A rigorous thinker or scientist is one who believes in proof without certainty, unlike most other people who tend to believe in certainty without proof. It is the nature of myth to elaborate, but never to prove.
Since most people who have been to school or college have been taught
what
to think rather than
how
to think, they are consequently at the mercy of any juggler who chooses to reinforce their prejudices or create new ones for them to believe. Hitler, for example, was such a one so that he easily persuaded his following, a whole nation, to believe that familiar myths were

 

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actual facts. In his case, he was quite aware of what he was doing. Concerning women, most nineteenth-century scientists seem to have been quite unaware that when engaged in the appraisal of women they were doing so with prejudiced minds, for what they were really doing was reinforcing the myths of their predecessors.
Let us say a little more about myths. It is important for us to understand what a myth is, for not even the best of us is any more free of myths than we are of prejudicesand each can be dangerous and destructive. What, then, is a myth?
A myth is usually a traditional belief, of unproven reality, which serves to explain some phenomenon of nature, creation, humankind, the supernatural, religion, persons, social conditions, and the like. Myths are often expedient fictions. What, then, are the functions of myth? Myths perform the double function of serving as
models of
and
models
for cultural attitudes and behavior. In this way they reflect the beliefs of and provide sanction for the actions of society, while at the same time furnishing the forms upon which belief and conduct are modeled. Built as they are into the structure of social relationships, they predetermine the categories of perception, fusing as they do what is unsoundly perceived with the imaginary. The danger of myths is that they tend to be reified as something that has a substantial existence, that is, turned into a truth, a reality. Such myths act as a force of daily life and of history, whereas in fact they are nothing but ideas, abstractions, which are erroneously treated as realities, in short social constructions. Racism is such a myth. It is interesting to note that everything derogatory that has ever been said by whites about blacks has been said by men about women. Indeed, women have been the scapegoats of the masculine world for a very long time.
It has been said that myths are not accountable to reality. But what is reality? Do our separate individual fictions add up to a joint reality? In many cases, and in many religions, for example, they do, and as such they are inarguable, but when it is possible to put them to the test of probability or the measure of the facts, it is another story. Facts seen through the distorting glass of prejudice take on a thoroughly warped significance, and far from being recognized for what they are, myths or prejudices, become "truths." The danger of such myths is that

 

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they too often fuse the false and imaginary into a blend that becomes a reality itself.
It was entirely by the skillful use of the hideously effective myth of racism that Adolf Hitler won over the German people, which directly led to World War II and the crimes against and death of many millions of human beingsthe Holocaust. The losses to humanity have been incalculable, and will go on reverberating until the last syllable of recorded time. Seen from such a viewpoint the judgment of history is that any act of bigotry against any individual or group is a crime for which the guilty should be brought to justice. This is essentially what the Nuremberg trials were about. Myths tend to bring about what they describe, and thus tend to become "realities." Such realities are often more real to their believers than the truths which would show them to be unreal.

3

It took World War I to make a dent in the myth of women's inferiority and begin the disintegration of some entrenched beliefs concerning female employability. During that horrible slaughter of over two hundred million human beings, a nightmare which seemed never ending, revolutionary changes were taking place on the home front. Women, for the first time, were enlisted to replace men in occupations that were formerly the exclusive male preserves.
4
Women became bus drivers, train engineers, truck drivers, ticket collectors, factory workers, farm workers, laborers, supervisors, executive officers, armed services personnel, and a great many other things which almost everyone had believed were beyond female capacity. At first it was claimed the women didn't do as well as men; then it was grudgingly admitted that they weren't so bad; and by the time the war was over many employers were reluctant to exchange their women employees for men! But the truth was out: Women do as at least as well as men in most of the fields that had been considered forever closed to them because of their supposed natural incapacities. In many fields, particularly where delicate precision work was involved, women had proved themselves superior to men.
As if releasing themselves from their fetters, women asserted their newfound freedoms in their clothing: the feminine silhouette was made to appear flat and as sexless as possible; unashamedly skirts were raised to show the whole leg (above the ankle); and that "glory to woman," long hair, was cut short in a manlike bob.

 

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