The Natural Superiority of Women (3 page)

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Authors: Ashley Montagu

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BOOK: The Natural Superiority of Women
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and gender, Montagu is an exemplar of this synthetic tradition, combining insights from biological and cultural studies, and recognizing that not only culture but also biology are contingent phenomena. Montagu writes,
It gradually became clear to me that the most important setting of human evolution is the human social environment and that the adaptive responses to the challenges of different environments can influence evolutionary changes through the media of mutation, natural selection, social selection, genetic drift, and hybridization.

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Like his teacher Boas, he was committed to the insight that "educability" and behavioral plasticity are hallmarks of the human species, and that cooperation rather than violence, and progress in the achievement of human dignity are possible. A central assertion of the UNESCO statements is the mental equality of races, and Montagu goes on to apply some of the same reasoning to his deconstruction of the assertion of male superiority over women in cognitive ability.
The 1950 UNESCO statement on race reads: "with respect to most, if not all, measurable characteristics, the differences among individuals belonging to the same race are greater than the differences that occur between the observed averages for two or more races within the same major group."
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In contrast to the racial typologies of the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century west, this approach strips the category "race" of essentialist biological meaning, and allows us to inquire how the categories of race and gender have been historically constructed. The historian of science Donna Haraway has pointed out how essential the modern synthesis was to anti-racism and feminism in the post-world war II period:
The "plain evidence" of the eyes, so relied upon in typological approaches to race and sex, has been forced to give way, at least in important part, to a biology constructed from dynamic fields of difference, where cuts into the field come to be understood as the historical responsibility of the holder of the analytical knife.
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The UNESCO statements were critical moments in the formulation of the scientific and political meanings of race that would irrevocably change the direction of studies of race by twentieth-century anthropologists. Some recent discussions of

 

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this formative period in modern physical anthropology have claimed erroneously that Montagu and others made race "off limits" as a field of inquiry for political reasons.

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While Montagu and Dobzhansky were clearly very aware of the political implications of the statements (and their importance as a response to racist scientism of the past, including that used in Germany to justify the Holocaust), the statements also reflected the growing body of scientific evidence on variation in population genetics. This is not to imply that typological racialism (or sexism) in science is now dead. On the contrary, the last decade has seen a resurgence of racial and gender typologies, often loosely based upon sociobiological assertions, more about which later. But the new approach crafted by Montagu, Dobzhansky, and others opened the arena for increasingly effective contestation of nineteenth-century racist science, as well as new ways to examine popular and academic received wisdom about gendered roles and abilities.

Gender and Evolutionary Theory
Montagu's vision in this book of the role of gender in the human past is in many ways a discourse with a century of anthropological theory. The issue of male dominance was a central concern in the Victorian evolutionary debate. Darwin and other evolutionists had asserted that it was both universal and "natural." This assertion is congruent with many aspects of popular thought on gender in nineteenth-century Europe, and with Victorian moral precepts on the relationships between the sexes.
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As noted by Frederick Engels, Bertrand Russell and others, Darwinism was both an expression of Victorian individualism and liberalism, and broadly used to justify these theories as natural law. In
The Origin of Species,
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Darwin discussed sexual selection as involving active males and passive females. In
The Descent of Man
he wrote that "woman seems to differ from man in mental disposition, chiefly in her greater tenderness and less selfishness" and "Man is the rival of other men, he delights in competition, and this leads to ambition which passes too easily into selfishness," and in a famous (or infamous!) passage,
The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man's attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever

 

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he takes up, than can womanwhether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands. If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music (inclusive both of composition and performance), history, science, and philosophy, with half a dozen names under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison. We may also infer . . . that if men are capable of a decided pre-eminence over women in many subjects, the average of mental power in man must be above that of women . . . (men have had) to defend their females, as well as their young, from enemies of all kinds, and to hunt for their joint subsistence. But to avoid enemies or to attack them with success, to capture wild animals and to fashion weapons requires the aid of the higher mental faculties, namely, observation, reason, invention, or imagination. These various faculties will thus have been continually put to the test and selected during manhood.

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The Natural Superiority of Women
may be read as a multilayered argument against this passage in Darwin, taking us on a century-long time travel in which Montagu engages many of the chief arguments against this view of women's "natural" inferiority. During Darwin's lifetime, feminists Eliza Burt Gamble and Antoinette Brown Blackwell indicted the sexist bias in Darwin's work, their ideas receiving little attention among scientists.
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Important twentieth-century works in human and animal ethology followed this model of active male and passive female (a model also embedded in Geddes' and Thomson's influential
The Evolution of Sex,
written in 1890).
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To the "Man the Hunter" model of the 1960s and 1970s, may be added such studies as Wickler's (1973) work on algae, showing active males and passive females, Geist's on mountain sheep (1971) and Williams' text on the evolution of human behavior,
Sex and Evolution
(1975), standard references of the period.
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As a number of feminist anthropologists have pointed out, both Darwinism and the androcentric evolutionary literature of the 1970s occurred coincident with the first and second waves of Western feminism, and both were popularized as in some cases explicit rebuttals to claims for gender equality.
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Montagu's response to Darwinian sexism, past and present, is complex. On the one hand, he staunchly denies and effectively deconstructs the idea of women's passive role in evolution and

 

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