The Natural Superiority of Women (29 page)

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Authors: Ashley Montagu

Tags: #Social Science, #Anthropology, #Cultural, #Women's Studies, #test

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than among women, but after that date these rates began to rise for women, until the present time, when they are appreciably higher among women. In spite of the fact that there were well over a million more women in the United States in 1951, there were ninety-five thousand first admissions to mental hospitals for males, as compared with seventy-six thousand for females. An exhaustive study of the subject by Drs. Thomas F. Pugh and Brian MacMahon, covering the years from 1922 to 1945 for first admissions in the United States, showed males far exceeded females. This is clearly seen in the table below. Forty-five years later these figures were almost exactly reversed. What can be the explanation for this change? The answer to that question is revealing, and has been dealt with by many investigators, including Phyllis Chesler
(Women & Madness,
1972) and Maggie Scarf
(Unfinished Business: Pressure Points in Women,
1980), as well as by others who have contributed much valuable additional research information and evaluation on the causes of mental illness in the sexes. The result is that today we better understand the many causative conditions of the hydraheaded forms such disorders may take.
First Admissions for Mental Illness per 100,000 per Year . Totals for All Ages .
1922
1939
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
Male
113.8
130.6
129.3
127.9
129.3
137.1
146.5
Female
86.5
93.6
98.7
97.2
96.1
100.2
105.6
Source: Thomas F. Pugh and Brian MacMahon, Epidemiologic Findings in United States Mental
Hospital Data (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1962), Table 5, p. 17.
The more I have studied the research findings the more convinced I have become that the sex difference for the functional mental disorders, that is to say, those that do not have an organic basis, are due to the pressures of social experiences of various kinds, often beginning in childhood and lasting throughout life. Let us take as an example one of the most common disorders among us, namely depression. Depression is a state of conscious mental suffering and guilt, accompanied by a marked reduction in the sense of personal value, and a diminution of mental psychomotor and, not infrequently, organic functions. The causes

 

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of Vallombrosa, however as a broad survey suggests, it is a reactive condition often related to a loss of some sort, imagined or real. The outstanding cause is the failure of expected satisfaction, the loss of love, or its decline. For women such causes seem to be more effective in resulting the depression than is the case in men. Other pathways to depression include sexual and physical abuse, poverty, and reproductive issues such as miscarriage and surgical menopause.
Statistics indicate that from two to six times as many women suffer from depression as men. What the varying statistics indicate is that bias in diagnosis and reporting, absurdities in counting, neglect of significant grouping, and many other inadequacies account for the disparities. The more dependable statistical indications are that some 12 percent of the population of the United States will suffer from some form of depression during their lifetime; 10 to 20 percent of the female population will be diagnosed as depressive, while only 5 to 10 percent of males will be so diagnosed.

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The ratio, then, of females to males being diagnosed as depressive appears to be two to one.

The conditions of life for women in our male-dominated society being what they are, it is hardly surprising that women should suffer more often from depression than males, even though women, by virtue of their greater resiliency, are better adapted to meet the challenges of the social and physical stresses to which they are exposed. The major factor for these differences is undoubtedly the fact that females from birth onwards are conditioned in dependency, while males are conditioned in independency. To summarize in a sentence a long story, being female means hardly ever being encouraged to become a self-sufficient person. The truth is that one can never become a self-sufficient person with an independent sense of self unless one has been in the habit of taking responsibility for dealing with life's experiences without completely depending upon one's original sources of love and support.
I know of no better description of the course of events that lead to depression than that given by Maggie Scarf, based on years of research and reflection on the subject. Women, she points out, are trained in a direction that leads away from thinking, "What do I want?" toward, "What do they want from me?" They then think of being successful in meeting the expectations of

 

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others. Since pleasure is related to the act of pleasing, this readily leads to a situation in which good feelings about the selfthat is, self-esteembecome dependent upon the esteem of those around one. Feelings of emotional well-being, a sense of one's worthfulness as a person, are hostage to the moods, attitudes, and approval of others (or maybe to one critically important other person). One is likable/lovable/significant only to the extent that one is liked/loved/significant to someone else. It follows, then, that in times of interpersonal droughtwhen sources of emotional supply are unusually low, or not there the "normally feminine, normally dependent" woman may experience her inner world as emptied of what is good and meaningful to her. The props of her self-regard, if they've been held in place primarily by feedback from the environment, may simply begin to crumble and fall down. Under the circumstances, a woman may become far too harsh in her assessment of herself and of her worth and usefulness as a human being. She may feel helpless about her life circumstances, and hopelessly ineffectual in terms of her capacity for mastering or changing them. She may, in a word, become depressed. "The depressed woman is someone who has lost. She has lost 'something' upon which she vitally depended. The tone is of something profoundly significant having been taken away, of some crucial life's territory having been surrendered." And what, "with amazing regularity," most frequently triggered a depressive episode in the women interviewed by Scarf, was the loss of a love bond.

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The independent male tends to react very differently, frequently with disappointment, frustration, or hostility, or if he is depressed, it is not as long enduring.

Some of the factors that may have contributed to the biases in producing statistical distortions in rates of mental illness, were reported in the 1975
Report of the Task Force on Sex Biases and Sex-Role Stereotyping in Psychotherapeutic Practices .
This study identified four major themes affecting female clients in therapy: (1) Therapists were often assuming that self-actualization and resolution of problems for women comes from marriage and family, and they did not encourage gratifications from work and careers; (2) therapists commonly demonstrated a lack of respect for women through demeaning comments and labels; (3) therapists often made use of use sexist psychological concepts such

 

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as penis envy and vaginal orgasm; (4) therapists held a double standard for male and female sexual activities and sometimes treated women as sex objects. In the twenty-odd years since this report, many changes have been made in the way therapists and physicians approach depression, though there is still much work to be done in this area.
Clearly, differences in the social experiences of the sexes are responsible for the differences in their rates of depression. There are, of course, many other factors that contribute to the greater vulnerability of women to depression. Some years ago Dr. J. L. Evans of the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut, studied the records of fifty wives of physicians admitted to a private psychiatric hospital. Despite a high level of adaptation in the early years of marriage, these women later developed severe psychiatric symptoms requiring repeated hospitalizations. A precipitating factor in many of these cases appeared to be a feeling of increasing exclusion from the husband's life as he became more and more involved in his profession. Symptoms of depression, organic disorders, and addiction were prevalent and were clearly related dynamically and empirically to the profession of the husband.

3

The feeling of exclusion after some years of marriage that many women experience, whether their husbands are professionals or not, is a major factor in contributing to the depressive illnesses from which so many suffer. It is yet another form of the widespread failure of communication, which is probably the married woman's most frequent complaint.
There is another factor in the causation of mental illness in women that must be mentioned here. It is the terrible wounds which many men inflict upon their wives, even when they do not physically abuse them. Sticks and stones may not break bones, but mutilating or denigrating words frequently do. As Kathryn Lasky Knight put it,
The biggies like Hitler, Mussolini, Nero have been enshrined in the darker pages of history. But the petty tyrant too must be reckoned with. Although he . . . does not plan the extermination of a race, it is the petty tyrant that day in and day out causes the small deaths of the people closest to him . . . . And it is these small deaths that wear one down until a person is a mere shell, a husk of a former self through which the wind can moan.''
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The frequency of this kind of abuse has, as far as I know, never been recorded, but it must be considerable.
Though women are more emotional than men, men are emotionally weaker than women; that is, men break more easily under emotional stress than women. Women are emotionally stronger than men because they bend more easily and are more resilient. If that is true, how then does it come about that women fall more frequently victim to depression than men? The answer to that question seems to be plain: In matters of interpersonal relations, especially where there is a loss of love, research has shown that women, more often than men, are the losers. In spite of very real progress women have made in recent years, their lives have in many ways become more stressful than they were in earlier days.
May Ann Mason has devoted a groundbreaking book to this subject, appropriately titled
The Equality Trap .

5
The author, a professor of law and social welfare at the University of California, Berkeley, makes it abundantly and sorrowfully clear that we live in a time when even in marriage men and women have lost the touch for long-term commitment. Women are working more hours per week in the home and outside and are bedeviled by more problems than ever, often in low-paying jobs. In this brave new world men and women alike find it increasingly difficult to support themselves. The problems that married women face, especially those with children, in the double bind of home cares and the workaday world, add up to serious stresses that produce real damage to all concerned. The social changes necessary to accommodate the revolutionary changes that have occurred as greater numbers of women have entered the work force are complex and bewildering. This has put a severe burden upon women that far exceeds anything any human being should be expected to suffer. Women have come to stay in the workaday world, and it will be to the benefit of all were the appropriate arrangements made by our society to make that world a more comfortable place to live in and the family treasured. This is something I considered and made recommendations to follow in the first edition of this book in 1953, and in the third edition in 1974. I am not aware that anyone has paid much attention to them. Perhaps we shall have better luck this time. Meanwhile, Mason makes some

 

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