The Natural Superiority of Women (15 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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fact that a woman is pregnant or that an hour ago she gave birth does not interfere with daily routines, except for the additional task of nursing. It sometimes happens that on the march, in moving from one food area to another, a woman falls out, gives birth to her child, catches up with her companions, and behaves as if nothing requiring heroic measures had occurred. If, as rarely happens, another child is born to her a little too soon after the last one, it may be disposed of, for it may constitute a real disability, since under the conditions of the gatherer-hunter way of life it is difficult to take care of more than one infant at a time. There must be adequate spacing between children, not for this reason alone but also because the responsibility of fostering a child is considered virtually a fulltime commitment. Owing to intensive breastfeeding lasting four or more years conception rarely occurs at less than four-year intervals.
Childbirth and nursing do introduce additional activities into the life of the female, but such activities do not necessarily constitute disadvantages. In comparison with certain forms of masculine mobility, and under certain social conditions, such activities
may
be disadvantages, and it would be wrong to underestimate them. It would, however, be equally wrong to overestimate such disadvantages; yet this has been done, and I believe the evidence strongly suggests that it has been deliberately done by male "authorities," if to some extent unconsciously. Besides, do we not have Divine sanction for such practice? Does it not say in Genesis 3:16 that God said "unto the woman, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children." So it is ordained that labor and childbirth shall be hazards and painful. Clearly, then, if one can turn childbirth into a handicapping function, then that makes women so much more inferior to the sex that suffers from no such handicap. Those who resort to such devices are usually concerned not so much with the inferiorities of others as with their own superiority. If one happens to be lacking in certain capacities with which the opposite sex is naturally endowed, and those capacities happen to be highly, if unacknowledgedly, valued, then one can compensate for one's own deficiency by devaluing the capacities of others. By turning such capacities into handicaps, one can cause those thus afflicted to feel inferior, while anyone not so "handicapped" can then feel superior.

 

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Farfetched as the idea may appear to some, the fact is that men have long been jealous of women's ability to give birth to children and have in some societies even envied their ability to menstruate; but men have not been content with turning these capacities into disabilities, for they have surrounded the one with handicapping rituals and the other with taboos that in most cases amount to punishments. They have even gone so far as to assert that pregnancy occurs in the male first, and that it is entirely dependent upon him whether the female becomes pregnant or not. For example, among numerous Australian aboriginal peoples it was the common belief that intercourse had no causative relation to pregnancy, and that pregnancy is the result of the entry of a spirit child into the female.

19
In many of these tribes it is the spirit child that has entered the male first, or he dreamed it. Should he desire a child, he tells his wife what has happened and the spirit child is then transferred to her. Even then she is merely regarded as the incubator of the child planted in her by the male. The idea is clearly expressed by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.) in his play,
Eumenides,
in which Athene, the daughter of Zeus who sprang from his head, is made to say, "The parent that which is called her child is not really the
mother
of it, she is but the nurse of the newly conceived fetus. It is the male who is the author of its being, while she, as a stranger (that is to say, no blood relation), preserves the young plant."
20

The very terms we use when we speak of male and female roles in reproduction, like the terms
male
and
female
themselves, and also
man
and
wo-man,
make women subservient addenda to men and reflect the ignorance and prejudice that have characterized dominant male attitudes. The male
fertilizes, fecundates,
or
impregnates
the female. The truth, however, is quite otherwise. The process of reproduction is not one-sided: Its antecedent condition is the fusion of two cells, the female ovum and the male sperm. It is not that an ovum is rendered fertile by sperm, but that ovum and sperm contribute to the initiation of those further processes that result in an embryo's development.
21
Furthermore, all embryos up to the end of the sixth week are female. The ovum has a volume approximately eighty-five thousand times greater than that of the sperm, because it carries the nutriment necessary for the development of the early conceptus.

 

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Menstruation has been regarded among many peoples as woman's natural method of getting rid of evil humors that are believed to accumulate in the body. Since men lack such a natural means of achieving this desired end, the Australian aborigines perform an operation called
subincision
on the adolescent youth, at his second initiation. This operation consists of slitting open the urinary tube, the urethra, on the underside of the penis, often from the scrotum to the external orifice of the glans penis. A stone is then inserted into the subincised penis to keep the urethra permanently open. The aborigines call a subincised penis by the same name as the female vulva.

22
There can be not the least doubt that, among other things, the purpose of this operation represents an attempt to imitate feminine genitals. Every so often, especially at ceremonies and initiations, the subincised penis will be incised to make it bleed in imitation of menstruation. Similar operations are performed by the natives of Wogeo, one of the Schouten Islands off the north coast of Irian Jaya, Indonesia. Periodic incision of the penis and the flow of blood thus induced is often referred to as men's menstruation; such men are subject to much the same prohibitions as menstruating women, but the flow of blood is considered to be a necessary cleansing process.

What the female is endowed with, the male must, at great pain and suffering to himself, periodically reproduce by art; this constitutes further ground for jealousy of, and resentment against, the female. A similar operation is therefore performed upon girls at puberty. During this operation the clitoris and labia are cut away, at which time, in some Australian groups, all the initiated men proceed to have intercourse with the girl. Such an operation is still performed today in the thousands in some territories of Egypt and far up along both sides of the Nile. Furthermore, in North African regions where this operation is performed, the vulva is sewn up in such a matter as to leave only a small orifice for the exudation of the menstrual and urinary fluids; this operation is known as
infibulation .
Here the jealousy of the male has gone so far as to limit completely the female's capacity for pregnancy and childbirth. When the girl reaches marriageable age, the orifice may be enlarged to admit her husband's penis, and it will be opened up, by incision, shortly before childbirth, and after childbirth sewn up again!
23

 

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Should anyone be inclined to think that it is only indigenous peoples and benighted heathen who indulge in such practices at the expense of the female, it has only to be pointed out that not so many years ago some American surgeons were performing clitoridectomies by the dozen, while today surgeons sedulously castrate thousands of women yearly, for even though the ovaries are not removed, that is what the operation of hysterectomy actually achieves. How many of these operations are really necessary? In 1969 at the behest of the New York State Teamsters Union an investigation of the cost and quality of medical and hospital care was conducted by the Columbia University School of Public Health and Administrative Medicine on the Teamster families. The relevant part of the report reads as follows:
There were 60 cases in the sample where a hysterectomy (removal of the uterus) had been performed. From a review of the records, including the operative report and the pathology findings, the surveyor felt that one-third were operated on unnecessarily and that questions could be raised about the advisability of the operation in another 10 percent. At the very least these women should have had a dilation and curettage (scraping of the uterus) followed by a period of observation prior to the hysterectomy. In many instances, the dilation and curettage alone would have alleviated symptoms.

24

Dr. Sidney Wolfe, testifying early in August 1975 before a House of Representatives subcommittee investigating the incidence of unnecessary surgery in the United States, stated that by the age of seventy the average woman stands a 45.3 percent chance of undergoing a hysterectomy. By contrast, women who were members of health maintenance organizations, which are prepaid group plans rather than fee-for-service plans, have only a 16.8 percent probability of undergoing a hysterectomy. A study by Cornell University Medical College found that some 787,000 hysterectomies were performed in 1975, resulting in 1,700 deaths. It was estimated that surgery was unnecessary in 22 percent of cases, resulting in 374 avoidable deaths. Even today, more than thirty years later, more than 600,000 hysterectomies are performed in the United States each year. Various sources put the percentage of unnecessary hysterectomies anywhere between 24 and 88 percent. More than one-fourth of the female population will undergo this procedure by the time they are 60

 

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years of age. Can it be that in some cases the unconscious motivations for such operations differ from those consciously alleged? For further information on unnecessary surgical interventions the reader should refer to Dr. Diana Scully's important book,
Men Who Control Women's Health: The Miseducation of ObstetricianGynecologists
(1980).
Man's jealousy of woman's capacity to bear children is nowhere better exhibited than in the Old Testament creation story in which man is caused to give birth (from one of his ribs) to woman: "And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man" (Genesis 2:22). A frequent subject of medieval art is the birth of Eve from Adam's side. Milton considered the creation of woman a mistake. In
Paradise Lost
he wrote,
Why did god Creator wise, that peopl'd highest heav'n with Spirits Masculine, create at last This noveltie on Earth, this fair defect of Nature, and not fill the World at once with Men as Angels without Feminine, or find some other way to generate Mankind?
Possibly the answer lies in Dr. Samuel Johnson's reply to a lady who asked him to define the difference between man and woman: "I can't conceive, Madam," he replied. "Can you?"
We begin to see, then, how it may have come about that childbirth as well as menstruation were transformed from perfectly healthy natural phenomena into a handicap and a curse. Men project their unconscious wishes upon the screen of their society and create their institutions and gods in the image of their desires. It would seem as if their envy of woman's physiological prepotencies causes them to feel weak and inferior, fear being often added to jealousy. An effective way for men to protect themselves against women, as well as to punish them, is to depreciate their capacities by devaluing their status. One can deny the virtues of women's advantages by treating them as disadvantages and by investing them with mysterious or dangerous qualities, hence, the tracking down of witches. The attitudes and the practices to which they lead constitute the palpable evidence of man's morbid fear of existential irrelevance. By making women objects of fear and something to be avoided as unclean, one can reduce the cultural status of women by simple inversion. Their

 

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