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Authors: Ashley Montagu

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BOOK: The Natural Superiority of Women
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reductionism and stereotyping also pervade some of the mainstream discourse on gender within the academy. A recent literature in the new discipline of "evolutionary psychology" posits innate differences in basic behaviors of men and women. According to some evolutionary psychologists, men are largely motivated by the drive to inseminate as many fertile women as possible. Women, on the other hand, are believed to attempt to hold on to high status male provisioners for themselves and their offspring.

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The twin constructs of race and gender were key formulations during anthropology's early years and continue to be in its central zone of contestation. The abhorrent tract .I read in my friend's guestroom makes one correct point: Ashley Montagu has been in the thick of things for a long time, a central figure in the struggle for what constitutes the modern scientific study of human differences, versus retrograde repackaging of nineteenth-century racism, sexism, and eugenics. This struggle has often been misapprehended as one between the "politically correct" and the "politically incorrect." But it has much to do with correct science, which incorporates sophisticated research strategies from biology and social science into anthropology, as opposed to incorrect science. What is generated within the academy about race and gender has important implications for public understanding of human differences, a perspective that Ashley Montagu has represented for decades. In a period in which the increasing emiseration of the poor, many of them women, is justified by neosocial Darwinism, scholarly and popular ideas about these issues are more than purely academic.
Seeded by the Enlightenment search for the "laws of nature," germinated within the social and political-economic environments of nineteenth-century colonialism, anthropology has been formed by and formed Western taxonomies of male, female, self, and other. But the birth of anthropology as a modern discipline, some might say its delayed birth, took place in the middle of this century. Ashley Montagu was present at this birth and was one of its midwives. Although himself born early in this century, Montagu spans two centuries in his intellectual influences and formation as a scientist and popular intellectual. Two of his teachers, the British evolutionary anatomist Sir Arthur Keith and the American anthropologist Franz Boas, respectively

 

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represent nineteenth-and twentieth-century directions. To understand why Montagu's writings on gender and race are so importantand his work on race and gender
should
be examined as a dyadit is important to view them in the broad sweep of twentieth-century academic and popular discourses on these issues.
Montagu wrote this book during a period crucial to the formulation of twentieth-century discourses on gender and race in anthropology and related disciplines, and reading his work offers insights into this history. A historically contextualized reading of
The Natural Superiority of Women
allows us to unravel some of the important threads of theory and practice in the study of difference at mid-century. Montagu's recognition of the complex relationships between culture and biology, his "insistence on the principle of multiple and interlocking causation," as Aldous Huxley wrote in his forward to Montagu's first edition of
Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race
(1942),

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his apprehension of the social and political contexts of scientific studies of gender, and, finally, his deconstruction of the Western ideology of male dominance are important contributions to the history of gender studies. In subsequent editions of the book, Montagu engages a number of important feminist writers inside and out of the academy, and this most recent edition provides a fascinating discourse between the author of the original text and these later works on gender relations.

Race
It is useful to look at the arguments that Montagu makes regarding that other locus of "difference," race, because he developed many of his criticisms of scientistic sexism along the same lines as his deconstruction of racialist typologies. Montagu is explicit about the linkage between sexism and racism as parallel modes of oppression:
The women of the nineteenth centurysecond class citizens within male-dominated societieswere treated in a manner not unlike that which is still the bitter experience of blacks in the United States and in many parts of the world. Traits mythically attributed to blacks today were for many generations saddled upon women. . . .

 

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says Montagu in the forward to the fourth edition of this book,

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and he reiterates this in
The Natural Superiority of Women .

Montagu studied anthropology at University College and the London School of Economics in the early 1920s, where the received wisdom on the issue of race was still very much that of a hierarchy of primitive to more advanced human types exemplified by modern peoples. According to this central construct of nineteenth-century cultural evolutionism, living groups such as the Australian aborigines were thought to exemplify earlier stages of European evolution. This mode of analysis was also frequently applied to social and economic classes and to the sexes within Europe. The lower classes and women in general were thought by many, including Darwin, to represent more primitive levels of adaptation. An early teacher of Montagu's, Sir Arthur Keith, believed that racial animosities are part of ''the primitive organization of the brain."
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As a student of Franz Boas, Montagu came under the influence of a powerful critic of this kind of thinking, one who turned decisively away from the racialism of nineteenth-century physical anthropology. Boas's 1940 book
Race, Language and Culture
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drew attention to the many errors of nineteenth-century anthropometry, so elegantly unpacked by Stephen Jay Gould at a later date in
The Mismeasure of Man .
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These included the misuse of statistics, the arbitrariness of assigning varied individuals in human populations to groups based on "ideal types," and a fundamental misunderstanding of the complex relationship between biology and culture.
Sir Arthur Keith had said "Nature keeps her human orchard healthy by pruning and war is her pruning hook."
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In distinct contrast to this Malthusian perspective, Boas wrote in 1941,
It is also necessary to remember that in varying environment human forms are not absolutely stable, and many of the anatomical traits of the body are subject to a limited amount of change according to climate and conditions of life. . . . The stature in European populations has increased materially since the middle of the nineteenth century. War and starvation have left their effects upon the children growing up in the second decade of our century. . . . The importance of selection upon the character of a population is easily overestimated. . . . The economic depression of our days shows

 

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clearly how easily perfectly competent individuals may be brought into conditions of abject poverty and under stresses that only the most vigorous minds can withstand successfully. Equally unjustified is the opinion that war, the struggle between national groups, is a selective process which is necessary to keep mankind on the onward march."

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Boas, a German Jewish academic refugee to America in 1899, well understood the Malthusian and eugenic implications of such thinking, as well as its scientific invalidity. His ideas and research agendas influenced most of those who were important to the early twentieth-century reformulation of anthropology as distinct from nineteenth-century scientistic racism and ethnocentrism.
In the drafting of both the first and second UNESCO statements on race, Montagu applies some of the same analytical frameworks to race as he would to gender in
The Natural Superiority of Women .
The UNESCO statements on race
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move the concept of race out of its nineteenth-century biologizing framework and firmly into the context of social construction: "For all practical social purposes, "race" is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. According to present knowledge, there is not proof that the groups of mankind differ in their innate mental characteristics, whether in respect to intelligence or temperament."
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Three individuals assumed primary authorship of the first statement on race, Ashley Montagu, Julian Huxley and Theodosius Dobzhansky. As authors of these "sacred texts of mid-century biological humanism,"
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each contributed essential elements of the formulation of the statements. Dobzhansky and Huxley, along with the evolutionary geneticist Haldane (important in the drafting of the second statement) were architects of the modern evolutionary synthesis.
Montagu's contribution reflected a Boasian theme not much noted in discussions of Boas's unparalleled influence in American and twentieth-century anthropology. Boas is often characterized as responsible for a disjunction between biology and culture. But Boas was a physical anthropologist as well as a social scientist, as illustrated by his application of classic anthropometric techniques to prove that head measurements of immigrants to America in the early twentieth century were not inherited ethnic or racial "traits," but rather a result of impoverished environments.
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Thus, Boas showed that socioeconomic class can influence biology. In his approach to race

 

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