The Natural Superiority of Women (16 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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biological advantages are demoted to the status of cultural disadvantages, and as cultural disadvantages, they are then converted into biological disadvantages. Once this is achieved, there need be no end to the belief in the cultural and biological disadvantages of these traits, and hence of their bearers. It is not here being suggested that this sort of thinking occurs, except occasionally, on the conscious level, for which there is a great deal of evidence, is drawn mainly from anthropological and psychoanalytic sources, as well as the above mentioned.

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From an early age females have been conditioned to believe that menstruation is a curse and a handicap.
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Pregnancy, females were taught, put them in a precarious condition, while childbirth was enveloped in so many myths, mysteries, and dangers that most women in the Western world have until recently rarely approached or experienced the event without foreboding and anxiety. This also held true for the sympathetic husband. The fact is that infant and maternal mortality rates were quite high in earlier days, so there was some reason for fear and anxiety.
Through our social heredity and our traditions, we have fallen heir to a battery of beliefs concerning the ''biological disadvantages" associated with being female. Even today we have not yet fully emancipated ourselves from these errors. We have already seen what some of the origins of these beliefs may have been, and why, in part, they continue to be perpetuated. These beliefs are almost wholly unsound. We know today that menstruation is neither mysterious nor malignant but a perfectly healthy, normal function of women. Pregnancy need be neither precarious nor handicapping, nor need childbirth or childbearing. Women have been led to believe that these functions are handicapping, and that they must, therefore, at best, play a secondary role to men. Today, both women and men perhaps better understand how this belief came into being, and perhaps endeavor to make the necessary concession to the facts. This is a theme we shall take up in a later and more appropriate place. For the present, let us return to a consideration of the manner in which certain of the other alleged disabilities of women came into being.
Owing to the enlarging experiences that fall to the dominant male in the androcentric society and the restriction of women's opportunities, the male has everywhere acquired a broad experience and varied knowledge, which has been denied the female. The

 

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male develops certain highly valued traits and skills far more various and extensive than those which the female is privileged to command. It will readily be understood that such traits immediately give their owner an advantage. It will also be readily understood why it is that men, under such conditions, consider women their inferiors and themselves incomparably more important, for while it is woman's work to concern herself with the preservation of the individualso goes the rationalization men are concerned with no less than the perpetuation of the their manmade rules. Were it not for the basic support that men provide for the family (so they consider), the species would die out. Even though this has always been a highly questionable view, such, nevertheless, has consistently been the opinion of the "head of the family." It is an open question whether the real mainstay and support of the family in the psychological, if not entirely in the material, sense has not always been the wife and mother.
However that may be, whoever pays the piper calls the tune, and the head of the family has always insisted upon the respect due the superior person, naturally at the cost of making all other family members feel subordinate. And indeed, by comparison everyone else in the family was inferior, for the wife possessed no such skills as her husband, nor was she anywhere nearly as knowledgeable about so many things her husband had experienced; furthermore, he was bigger and stronger than she, that in itself testifying to the biologically determined differences. The children, of course, were even more inferior to their father than was their mother, and boys, of course, were superior to girls. To this day, most parents in the Western world hope that their firstborn will be a boy. In societies that practiced infanticide, girls were invariably the principal victims. Growing up in such male dominator societies it would be difficult to avoid the belief that males were superior to females. Everyone, including the mother, drew the erroneous conclusion from the cultural facts that these differences of superiority and inferiority were biologically determined; women, it was assumed, were naturally inferior to men, and that was that. There were always women who entertained grave doubts on the subject. One of the earliest, "Miss S. Hadfield," in her little-known brilliant book,
Letters on the Importance of the Female Sex: With Observations on Their Manners and Education,
published in 1803, called upon women

 

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everywhere to look beyond the traditional role expected of them by men. In her preface she wrote, "Men have, indeed, too long thought it an advantage to consign the Fair Sex to ignorance, that, by a monopoly of knowledge, their superiority might be supported. Women were not permitted to possess just sentiments of their own importance, and of their native dignitybut were encouraged, or controlledwere gained or lostby the most childish, narrow, and degrading methods." Two centuries later, that truth still holds true.
In our own time, although much progress has been made, owing largely to the feminist movement, male dominator attitudes linger on almost everywhere in the civilized world. There clearly remains a great deal of work and reeducation to be done. The damage that has been done appears to have been the doing largely of male dominator conquerors and their continuing, though attenuated, influences. In short, the change from a matricentric to an androcentric culture is only about seven thousand years old. In male supremacist cultures women were never afforded equal opportunities with menopportunities for the development of their intelligenceand were severely restricted by what was traditionally considered permissible to women. Women were prejudged rather than fairly judged; and they were condemned to a caste system of lower status from which they could never emerge unless, on a rare occasion, granted the opportunity to do so. In the 1840s a writer in
Godey's Lady's Book
put it very plainly, "As a general hint there was much wisdom in the advice given by an old mother to a young one: Stimulate the sensibilities of your boys and blunt those of your girls." Depressing advice, but well adapted to the realities of the time.
Charlotte Brontë's friend Mary Taylor wrote in 1854, "There are no means for a woman to live in England, but by teaching, sewing, or washing. The last is the best. The best paid, the least unhealthy, and the most free." In 1864 Walter Bagehot, the famous English economist, wrote to Emily Davies, the woman's rights leader,
I assure you I am not an enemy of women, I am very favorable to their employment as laborers or in any other menial capacity. I have, however, doubts as to the likelihood of their succeeding in business as capitalists. I am sure the nerves of most women

 

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would break down under the anxiety and that most of them are utterly destitute of the disciplined reticence and selfconstraint necessary to every sort of cooperation. Two thousand years hence you may have changed it all, but the present woman will only flirt with men and quarrel with one another.
Indeed it is estimated that in the 1850's, among the 876,920 "surplus" gentlewomen of England, there were some twentyfive thousand governesses suffering pittance wages and a multitude of petty humiliations for the sin of not finding a husband. The truth is that until 1914 women lived in a world in which they were forced to be totally dependent on men, and were deprived of all legal autonomy as human beings. Bagehot was a highly intelligent and civilized man who was typically reflecting the cultural prejudices of his day, and this in spite of the fact that John Stuart Mill had published
The Subjection of Woman
five years earlier, in 1859.
Feelings of weakness and inferiority have their roots in other than purely cultural factors. It is a matter of fact that men are usually bigger and physically more powerful than women. Being bigger and more obviously physically powerful generally makes a person feel and act in a big and powerful manner. In the presence of such persons, the smaller and less powerful are likely to feel dwarfed. At any rate, where the sexes are concerned, the factors of size and power, added to other prerogatives and statuses, put the male decidedly in the position of dominance.
Most women have been so long conditioned in an environment of masculine dominance that they have come to expect the male to be dominant and the female subservient. The psychological subservience of the female has assumed innumerable ramifications in almost all human societies and constitutes yet another illustration of the effects of the cultural differentiation of the sexes. Among the many ways in which the downgrading of women traditionally proceeds, and one of the most blatant, is patronymy, in which names descend in the male line and women assume the surname of their husband. This is the rule in male dominator societies, and as Sharon Lebell says in her important book,
Naming Ourselves, Naming Our Children,
Whenever a woman automatically changes her name at marriage, or whenever a couple names a child by the patronymical code,

 

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