The Natural Superiority of Women (4 page)

Read The Natural Superiority of Women Online

Authors: Ashley Montagu

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

BOOK: The Natural Superiority of Women
6.67Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
page_19<br/>
Page 19
hence inferior cognitive and other abilities. On the other hand, his belief that women are less competitive and more naturally nurturant essentializes gender in ways that resonate strongly with nineteenth-century concepts. This bridging of the Victorian and modern is one of the fascinating things about Montagu: At the same time that we find him in a discourse with modern feminists such as Ervin-Tripp, Greer, Gimbutas, and Heilbrun, he is also responding to late Victorians such as Geddes and Thomson, some of whose ideas about essential qualities of male and female biology he echoes.
The Natural Superiority of Women
is in some ways a late Victorian treatise, in the very best sense. Like such works, it takes on large questions, drawing from biological and cultural studies, and thus making use of anthropology's holistic forte. This integrative approach, characteristic of earlier phases of the discipline, has been largely abandoned as the field experienced radical fragmentation in the last decades of the twentieth century.
Montagu is wonderfully prescient, pointing us in the direction of modernity and postmodernity in some key areas of race and gender studies.
The Natural Superiority of Women
also reflects essentializing visions of women inherited from the Victorian period, while the author at the same time deconstructs key aspects of Western patriarchal ideology. Montagu endorses an essentialist theory of women's role as mothers as preeminent. Nowhere is this more forcefully illustrated than in his ambivalence towards the modern women's movement, which he embraces as doing "magnificent work," while indicting "extremists" in the movement who attack as sexist those claiming the primacy of needs for female nurturance in the early years of childhood. At the same time, Montagu contests key aspects of Western patriarchal ideology using data from physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, cognitive and developmental psychology, and physiology. To follow the various threads that make up the dense weave of these nineteenth-and twentieth-century gender studies requires an examination of "contradictions, tensions, and paradoxes"

25
from which patterns emerge.

In the area of evolutionary studies, some of the themes played in the UNESCO statements are reflected in the work of Sherwood Washburn, the key formulator of the "new physical anthropology" at mid-century. Washburn wove together the humanism of the

 

page_20<br/>
Page 20
U.N. statements with important elements of the new synthesis, translating "population" into social group and emphasizing the universal origin of human behavior and culture. This post-World War II "biological humanism" laid the groundwork for the development of a theory of human origins that explains the universal nature of human adaptations at the time of origin, including gender differences.

26
By taking the study of populations to the level of social group, and through his encouragement of generations of students in primate field studies, Washburn set much of the research agenda for decades of physical anthropology, joining functional comparative anatomy to primate field studies.

Primate Studies of Gender
It is from Washburn and his students' work that the model of Man the Hunter arose, around an explicit analogy to the behavior of Savannah baboons. According to this model, key elements of human culture are derived from our species' hunting past, in which males were presumably responsible for tool-making and cooperation.
27
Because Montagu explicitly rejects the model Man the Hunter in his analysis of the origins of human culture, it is useful to travel down the primatological paths that led to the wide dissemination of the image. Modern Western primate studies arose largely in decolonized Africa and other Third World sites. Soon thereafter, anthropological primatologists and their advocates in other disciplines began to fit data about monkeys and apes into models of human evolution. The template had been set earlier in the century by Robert M. Yerkes and Clarence Ray Carpenter, both of whom worked with nonhuman primates to examine human evolutionary issues. Earlier in the century, before the advent of commercial plane travel and antibiotics, both essential to the ability of Western scientists to undertake large-scale field studies (Washburn, personal communication), Robert Yerkes and his colleagues had undertaken experiments with captive apes on issues of gendered behavior. Yerkes, working with caged chimpanzees, set up a series of food-chute experiments in which females and males were offered food items through a chute leading to their cage. He believed that females traded sexual access to males in exchange for food, and that this indicated evolutionary behavioral adaptations. Yerkes

 

page_21<br/>
Page 21
believed that females and males were equally intelligent, but had distinct psychobiological and temperamental differences.

28

After the Second World War, naturalistic field studies of primates proliferated in the a number of Western societies, including the United States.
29
In the period since World War II, field and laboratory studies of primates have produced a large body of data on the behavior of diverse species. Explaining gender differences in our species' evolution has been a major focus of models of primate evolution in the post war period, which have often proposed that changes in reproductive behavior is a central factor in the hominid transition. In the 1960s data from a variety of field studies, particularly those of savannah baboons and the chimpanzees of the Gombe Reserve in Tanzania, were incorporated into structural-functionalist models for human evolution, centering on the sexual division of labor, the origin of the family, and the origins of human gendered behavior. In much of the academic and popular evolutionary literature of the 1960s and 1970s, an analogy was made between the savannah baboon troop and early hominids. The message in these accounts of early hominid life is about aggression and territoriality as biologically determined hominid traits, male hunting as the engine of the hominid transition, and the dominance hierarchies of males as functioning to maintain social order and cooperation.
Linda Marie Fedigan has reviewed many of the evolutionary reconstructions by primatologists of this period.
30
She points out that the "baboonization" of early human life in such models rested on a savannah ecological analogy: Since protohominids evolved on the African savanna, presumably they would have shared certain selective pressure with modern baboon troops, particularly for predator protection by large males. There is now evidence that the earliest phases of human evolution may not have occurred in savanna paleoenvironments, and that, in any case, our species is genetically magnitudes more closely related to forest-living apes than to baboons.
31
Washburn, his student Irven DeVore, and other early post-war period baboon researchers had viewed male dominance as functioning to organize troop members hierarchically and to control overt aggression. Fedigan argues that the other primary model for protohominid evolution, that of the chimpanzees studied by Jane Goodall at the Gombe Reserve in Tanzania, was far more sensible.
32

 

page_22<br/>
Page 22
Here the analogy rested on the immensely closer phylogenetic relationship between chimps and human with humans and chimps sharing about 98% of their genes, reflecting their recent common ancestor. This model emphasized the mother-offspring bond, sharing within the matrilocal family, the immigration of young females to new groups, birth spacing, and temporary sex bonding. It is to this chimpanzee behavioral model that the first wave of feminist authors, in particular the constructors of the "woman the gatherer" model, would turn for primatological evidence of the social centrality of females in early hominid evolution.

33

The savanna baboon model was compatible with, and tended to bolster, a Hobbesian view of human society, while the chimpanzee model originally tended to reflect a more benign view, stressing the mother-infant pair and a more flexible, less hierarchical social structure. But many of the assumptions underlying the early use of ape and baboon behavioral data in models for hominid evolution were equivalent: Ape and monkey behavior were the microcosms of human social behavior and political life, including the politics of gender. Fedigan points out the "baboonization" of protohominids became so common that by the early to mid-1970s not a single introductory text in human evolution omitted reference to it. As Rowell
34
and other critics of this model stressed, many of the generalizations and assumptions about the functions of male dominance made by early baboon researchers and their popularizers were unsubstantiated by data from other field sites. Rowell's study of the troop movements of forest baboons, for instance, indicated that the direction of daily foraging routes was determined by a core of mature females rather than by the dominant males. As feminist scholars such as Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway note,
35
women primatologists often have had a different vision of group structure and behavior because they attended to female actors in ways that male primatologists did not.
36
This focus on female behavior in baboons and a variety of other species became fuel for the critical deconstruction of the baboon model during the 1970s. In addition, a number of studies questioned the assumption that male dominance conferred a reproductive advantage on particular males, thus contributing to selection for male aggression.

 

page_23<br/>
Page 23
The period between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s saw a tremendous emphasis on the baboon model and Man the Hunter hypothesis for human evolution. Haraway has pointed out the deep postwar anxieties that fueled this image, anxieties about the fate of civilization, social stability, the stress of urban environments and the potential instability of the modern family.

37
Popular books of this period, including Robert Ardry's
African Genesis
(1961),
The Territorial Imperative
(1966),
The Social Contract
(1970), and
The Hunting Hypothesis
(1976); Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox's
The Imperial Animal
(1971); Desmond Morris's
The Naked Ape
(1967); and Konrad Lorenz's
On Aggression
(1966), brought these images of male aggression, dominance and social control to a wide readership.
38
During this period, a number of popular books contested these images of territorial and aggressive males and passive females as the ordering force of hominid society. Jane Goodall's
In The Shadow of Man
(1971), Elaine Morgan's
The Descent of Woman
(1972), and Evelyn Reed's
Woman's Evolution
(1975) challenged the zeitgeist of male dominance and hunting ability as the starting point of a heavily gendered account of the hominid transition.
39
It is to these contestations of the primacy of male agency as central to the hominid transition that Ashley Montagu turns in his discussion of the human past. He indicts the "putdown" of women as implicit in the Man the Hunter model and cites some of the important texts contesting the model, such as Dahlberg's edited volume
Woman the Gatherer
(1981), Nancy Tanner's
On Becoming Human
(1981), and Richard Lee's work on the San of the Kalahari (1979, 1974).
40
Montagu argues for the importance of women's gathering of up to 80% of the food consumed by modern food foragers, and against the obfuscation of the significance of their economic and social roles in the androcentric evolutionary models of the 1960s and 1970s.

Cultural Anthropology of Gender
The Natural Superiority of Women
also attempts to make sense of the widespread subordination of women in many of the world's complex societies. To place this aspect of the book in context, it is useful to look back at the nonlinear pathways taken by feminist scholars in cultural anthropology who have attempted to understand the causes of the existence of women's subordination in

 

page_24<br/>
Page 24
many cultures studied by twentieth-century anthropologists. Early in
The Natural Superiority of Women,
Montagu takes up the question of whether male dominance is a universal, biologically determined feature of human life or culturally determined in particular political, economic, and historical settings, contexts that he asserts have only existed for a relatively narrow time frame in our species' history. How he solves this conundrum reveals much about his intellectual roots and how they have branched in the soil of twentieth-century gender discourses.
A key concern of the mid-Victorian debate about gender was whether female subordination was universal or ''natural." Bachofen asserted that human cultures had undergone a matriarchal phase in which women ruled over men and were later deposed.

41
Civilized women, it was proposed by many Victorians, were less subordinated than "indigenous" women. Anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo has pointed out the ways in which "assertions of male lust, female purity or licentiousness, male anxiety of paternity, and female capacities for moral uplift were deeply woven into these accounts and found their way into the evolutionary schemata of those late Victorians Marx and Freud."
42

In the early 1970s feminist anthropology (or "the anthropology of women," as it was then called) was part of the larger political and academic ferment in the United States growing out of the 1960s, including the civil rights and antiwar movements, feminism, and environmentalism. Marxist theory underwent a revival in the post-McCarthy academy, Kuhn's influential book
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
provided persuasive evidence for a historically and socially contextualized science (vs. "timeless" scientific authority), and a generation of predominantly white, middle-class and college-educated women began to limn the links between politics and knowledge and to question the received wisdom of classic social science work on gender formation and relations.
43
Despite the high profile of a small number of women in the field, most notably Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, women anthropologists have had significantly lower academic status for most of the twentieth century.
44
Most of the ethnographic work considered foundational to the discipline before the 1970s was done by men. Male ethnographies most often focus on male activities, perspectives and structures of power and authority;

 

Other books

Coyote V. Acme by Ian Frazier
Demon Marked by Anna J. Evans
Tatiana March by Surrender to the Knight
LOSING CONTROL by Stephen D. King
Cloudburst by Ryne Pearson
The Dreamer Stones by Elaina J Davidson
The Lost Island by Douglas Preston
Fractured by Barker, Dawn