The Natural Superiority of Women (32 page)

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Authors: Ashley Montagu

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BOOK: The Natural Superiority of Women
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than men. Writing in
The Listener
(London, 19 August 1966, p. 286), in an article entitled "The Relief of Pain," a "professor of neurology" writes, "There can be little doubt, for example, that women bear physical pain on the whole more stoically than men.''
The Greeks, who were no more kind to their women than most men of other cultures have been to theirs, decided there was one disease that was peculiar to women, hysteria. They thought that the trouble began when the womb strayed from its place; hence they derived the name of the disease from the Greek word
hysteron,
meaning womb. For two thousand years women alone were, by fiat, declared capable of hysteria. It was not until 1887 that the great French alienist J. M. Charcotone of the teachers, by the way, of Freudshowed that men, too, could suffer from "hysteria." Hysteria, which has been replaced by more contemporary language in the current psychological literature, was defined as essentially a chronic functional disorder of the mind, characterized by disturbances of the will, perversion of the inhibitory powers of consciousness, and partial arrest or hypersensitivity of the individual functions of the brain. Symptoms were described as ranging from simple nervous instability and attacks of emotional excitement, with causeless weeping or laughter, to convulsions, muscular contractions, disturbances of the circulatory system, paralysis, blindness, deafness, indeed, ailments affecting almost every organ of the body.
It was claimed by Drs. Eli Robins, M. E. Cohen, and J. J. Purtell

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that hysteria in men differed from hysteria in women. They believed that men always stood to gain something by falling ill with hysteria, for hysteria was seen as an escape from something the victims were unwilling to face. Women suffering from hysteria did not appear to have anything nearly so tangible to gain from their condition, according to these investigators. The men could describe their symptoms crisply, but women were often vague, describing pains and aches all over, and commonly presented with twice as many symptoms as did the men. This differential expression of collection of disorders historically called "hysteria" in each sex is interesting, but the reason for our discussion of "hysteria" here is to record that for two thousand years it was considered an exclusively female disease,
and that for many years the evidence of its existence in

 

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males was denied .
Apart from its being a disorder limited to women, the condition gave quite a number of nineteenth-century medical men an opportunity to excise women's ovaries and to remove, by knife or cauterization, the clitoris in an attempt to cure the "disease."

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It seems difficult to believe that such drastic operations, in spite of all rationalizations by way of explanation, were altogether motivated by a desire to benefit the patient. Hysterical symptoms in women were described by Freud, and others, as conversions of repressed sexual wishes into psychophysical symptoms. Since the sexual involvement could hardly escape the attention of a perceptive nineteenth-century physician, it is not too difficult to surmise why it really was that the surgical attack upon the sexual organs was made, for nineteenth-century ladies were not supposed to be sexual at all. Men, it would seem, were avenging themselves upon women for having a womb and for having been ejected from it. But what is more to the point is that, while the statistics are unreliable, there is fair evidence that men were at least as often victims of "hysteria" as women, and possibly more often. Today psychiatrists and psychologists see the constellation of symptomsthose previously described as "hysteria"in patients of both sexes.
Women are generally believed to be more "nervous" than men; and indeed, they do bite their nails and suck their thumbs more frequently as children than do boys, but this is, surely, a far superior way of expressing aggressiveness, dissatisfaction, and tension than is the boy's more intemperate method. The female, it has been found, beginning at a very early age, is more fearful than the male, and this may be evidence of her more highly developed sensitivity and general superior adaptation to her environment. Fear is a basic drive that assists the organism to negotiate its way through life with the maximum chance of survival. As long as the fear responses are within normal bounds, fear is a highly desirable emotion; it keeps one from rushing in where fools too often do not fear to tread. Lack of fear is often a deficiency of development which renders one heedless of dangers that more sensitive and more imaginative persons tend to avoid. The physical courage or lack of fearfulness so often admired is generally the result of an underdeveloped imagination. I do not refer to such irrational fears as those that

 

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many women have displayed, until very recently, of such creatures as mice. Such fears were very early learned and are for the most part being unrenewed by contemporary women. And yet much was made by earlier generations of such fears as evidence of the essential emotional instability of women!
Further evidence of the greater "emotional weakness" of women have been statements characterizing women as gossipy, superstitious, and more religious than men; greater prevaricators; that they rely on their intuitions for their judgments, and that they are moody and temperamental.
The response to the accusation of being gossipy is: Have you ever been a member of a men's club? Men, of course, never gossip: They simply investigate rumors. Of course, women gossip. But if women were to gossip more than men, it would be perfectly understandable. Human beings are born for communication. With their children away at school and their husbands away at work, women often begin to talk to themselves; but because that isn't altogether satisfactory, they talk to neighbors across the hedge or pick up the telephone and talk. Women talk to their husbands, when they arrive home, but the husband's desire is nothing more than to relax. In a man's view, when his wife talks with her friends it's gossip, whereas when he talks with other men he's "talking business" or "talking shop."
Women have
friends
with whom they can talk intimately; men have
acquaintances
with whom they cannot. Women, on the whole, probably do talk more than men; and one of the reasons for this, I suspect, is that women find speech to be the most readily satisfactory of all tension releasers.
There have been a number of studies that indicate that women do tend to be more superstitious than men; and this is not to be wondered at, for a woman lives, in many ways, a much more precarious psychological existence than a man. As Scheinfeld pointed out, chance has until only relatively recently played a much more important role in a woman's life. When she will marry, whom she will marry, what her future is to bethese and many other questions were often, and in some places still are, settled only by chance, which for many is another name for "Fate." No great harm can be done by subscribing to the superstitions that, so many persons surmise under such conditions,
may
have something in them after all. Under conditions of a similar sort,

 

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where chance plays a considerable role, as in gambling, sports, and war, men are not one whit less superstitious than women.
Women do appear to be more religious, more idealistic, and aesthetically more interested in spiritual matters than men are. Church attendance records, and the enthusiasm with which women throw themselves into the work of the church, bear testimony to their religious ardor. Professor Frederick H. Lund, in a study of human beliefs, found that women "were more confident of the practicability of the Golden Rule, more assured that a democracy was the best form of government, more convinced that the world came into existence through the creative act of a divine being, more ready to question the human origin of morals." The factors that make one religious are extremely complex; possibly some of the factors that lead to the belief in superstitions are involved, but quite frankly I believe these play a very minor role in the lives of women. Women, it seems to me, tend to feel rather more in tune with the universe than do men, largely because they are more sensitive to the world in which they live than men. Furthermore, while most men are able to talk with their wives and tell them their troubles, many women have no one else to talk with but a sympathetic friend or their minister or their God. Many people find God a substitute for an inadequate earthly father or husband; they devotedly offer their piety to a Heavenly Father in place of one they might have had on earth. Or if life with father and his counterparts has been too much of a failure, one can call on the Heavenly Mother. Consuelo Vanderbilts' mother, later Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont, the woman's suffrage leader, is said to have counseled a despairing young suffrage worker, "Call on God, my dear.
She
will help you." Then there is the matter of communication with the Creator, as well as with one's neighbors in the community of the church. Spiritual comfort can be more satisfying than the material comforts provided by a husband too busy earning a living, and when he isn't earning a living, occupied telling his wife what his troubles are without giving her equal consideration. Everywhere, women remain the pillars of the church, while men at best may be described as flying buttresses.
It will be said: Yes, but this is an exaggeration. Women do tell their husbands their troubles, and husbands do listen. My answer is that of course there are numerous wives who have husbands

 

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who make sympathetic and helpful listeners; but for every wife who has such a husband I strongly suspect there are a number who make neither sympathetic nor helpful listeners, and I suspect also that this is a factor, though certainly not the largest one, in the greater religiousness of the female. It is not so much a matter of hearing on the part of the male, as a matter of listening. Women, who are so much closer to the fundamental problems of life than men, are more sensitive to the needs of human beings than men. It is women who know better than anyone else that man cannot live by bread alone and that human beings are something more than slaves to the idea that men exist to earn a living and beat the other fellow to the mark. Men flatter themselves on being realists, on living in the present, and, like practical men, they go on repeating the errors of their predecessors.
Women, who live more profoundly in the present than most men manage to do, are idealists in addition to being far better realists than men, for they see not alone the present but the future as well. They do so because they are the creators of the future through their children. The true realists of any day are the visionaries (often described by practical men as being long on hair and short on sense); the visionaries who believe in improving the world as they find it and are unwilling to accept things simply because they are; the visionaries who have the wisdom to know the difference between the things they cannot change and those they can.
Woman is a more religious creature than man because she understands so much more than man how much there is in the world to be worshipped, and this understanding seems clearly to be a function of her maternal role whether she has ever had children or not. The truth is that, in the modern world, were it not for women the churches would cease to exist. There is not the least doubt that women are by nature maternal and nurturing, and that men are not, and that it is the essence of the maternal attitude toward life to be sensitive to the needs of others and to retain the wonder of the miracle of creation and of the miracle of love, the willingness of the heart. Such experiences and such wonderment are generative of the religious spirit. In this also, women display their superiority to men, believing as they do that the only true prayer is a good deed, and the only true religion is living a loving life.

 

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Lund tells us that women show more interest in the aesthetic, the ideal, and in the mystic, and he thinks this may be due to woman's greater sensitivity, and to training. Children who are trained to play a musical instrument seldom, if ever, become juvenile delinquents. Common experience, in our culture at least, tells us that women are more interested in beauty than men are. Men sometimes say, when they wish to describe the peculiar delicacy of another man's sense of beauty, that he has a "feminine" sense. The "feminine touch" is something to which we all warmly respond. Indeed, the more closely a man's sense of beauty approaches the feminine, the less violent and the more harmonious in character he is likely to be. It is interesting to observe that during the last fifty years, with the development of the postimpressionist, nonobjective schools of painting, cubism, pointillism, vorticism, there have also gone many ''arty" experiments. Women painters have been conspicuous because, while they have progressed with the times, they have kept their aesthetic heads and not gone to the violent extremes that have characterized so many experimental schools of painting. Marie Laurencin painted exquisitely beautiful canvases, and so did Georgia O'Keeffe, in a totally different style; even that delightful primitive, Grandma Moses, managed to avoid the contaminating influence of the machine age, painting rustic scenes with feminine ardor. The poetry and the novels of women usually show the same sensitivity to beauty, a beauty of a more loving, graceful, and humane kind than that which generally characterizes the work of male writers.
In art men express something of their sense of beauty and conflict; women, on the other hand, practically never use art as a vehicle for the expression of anything but love. When women try to ape men, their aesthetic sense becomes deformed, and they vie in toughness with the male writers, let us say, of the Hemingway school. These are not the feminine writers who will endure. The women writers who will endure are those who remain true to themselves, who are admired for the virtue of their own qualities and not for being like men. One thinks of the Brontës, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Mary Webb, Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, Colette, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, and many others. The humanitarianism, warmth, wit, and moral earnestness that characterize the writings of these women grow out of a feeling for humanity based on love. It is

 

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