The Natural Superiority of Women (44 page)

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Authors: Ashley Montagu

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

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egos that have been damaged, with wills that are defective, with libidos that have been driven out of reach and energy diverted into neurotic channels. Western art is in large measure neurotic, for the concept of personality which it demonstrates is in many ways anti-social, even psychotic, but the neurosis of the artist is of a very different kind from the carefully cultured self-destructiveness of women. In our time we have seen both art and women changing in ways that, if we do not lose them, will bring both closer together.

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There have been more than a dozen distinguished women sculptors. Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908) was the best known American sculptor of her time. She was most famous for her
Puck,
now in the Smithsonian Institution, and for her
Zenobia,
the warrior queen of Palmyra, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Another American sculptor of great originality is Louise Nevelson (1900-1988). Among the many well-known works of Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975) is the Dag Hammarskjold Memorial at the United Nations in New York.
Perhaps the most gifted of all women sculptors was the young Frenchwoman Camille Claudel (1864-1943). Claudel began modeling in clay when she was a child. By the age of twenty, when she went to work in Rodin's studio, she was already a marvelous sculptor. For some fifteen tumultuous years she shared life with Rodin as pupil, model, partner, and lover. During this whole period, while collaborating with Rodin on many pieces, she resolutely maintained her own originality and independence as a creative artist. That period was one of the greatest creativity for Rodin. It was generally believed among their friends that the change in Rodin's character and in his work was due to Claudel's influence. It is also believed that many of the works created in the studio during these years, and subsequently attributed to Rodin were in fact by Claudel. However that may be, judging from the works that remain, there can be little doubt of her genius. In recent years there have been several exhibitions of her sculpture, articles, books; and at least one motion picture,
Camille Claudel,
released in 1990, has been made of her life and work.
10
Why, it may well be asked, was full recognition of Camille Claudel's genius so late in emerging from the obscurity to which she was consigned by the fame of Rodin? The answer would seem to be that, first, she was a woman, and, second, before she could

 

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become widely known, her creative life came to a terrible end. She had looked forward to Rodin making her his wife; this he would not do, although he genuinely loved her. Because of a longstanding commitment he felt bound to marry his housekeeper, Rose Beuret. Years of violent bickering eventually led Claudel, at thirty-five, to leave Rodin. A severe nervous breakdown followed, which rapidly grew into a raging paranoia and cruel disintegration. During this period she destroyed every one of her sculptures she could lay hands on. In March 1915 Camille's brother, Paul Claudel, the distinguished poet and dramatist, was reluctantly forced to have his beloved and much admired sister confined to an asylum. Here she spent the next twenty-nine years of her life, hoping for the liberation which came only with death. She died from a stroke in 1943 at the age of seventy-nine. A 1905 moving and wonderful appreciation of Claudel's sculpture by her brother Paul is reprinted in Reine-Marie Paris's book,
Camille,
moving and generously illustrated with photographs of Camille's sculpture.
In literature, women during the last century and a half have achieved a quality that puts a number of them in the very first rank with the best of men. Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot are, by general consent, considered supreme among English novelists. Mary Webb is thought by some to belong in their company and most people would rank Virginia Woolf. Not many are likely to question the judgment that there have been few journalistic writers in any day who have been as able as Rebecca West.
In the United States such women novelists as Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Pearl Buck, and Toni Morrison, the latter two Nobel Prize winners, have achieved great distinction. In Scandinavia, Sigrid Undset, Nelly Sachs, and Selma Lagerlof have been awarded Nobel Prizes for their outstanding work as novelists. In Italy, Grazia Deledda received the Nobel Prize as a novelist, and in Chile, Gabriela Mistral received the Nobel Prize for poetry, and Nadine Gordimer, South Africa, the Nobel Prize for literature. And, of course, there is Sappho of antiquity, and there are Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, among poets.
Ever since women were first allowed upon the stage in the seventeenth century, there has been an unbroken succession of

 

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actresses of genius. From Mary Betterton, Anne Bracegirdle, and Nance Oldfield in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to Rachel (Elisa Felix, 1821-1858), Sarah Bernhardt, Duse, and Ellen Terry in more recent times, women have excelled as actors. Here, indeed, is a field of accomplishment in which women have received every encouragement, and in which they have done surpassingly well. Possibly there is here an obvious moral to be drawn.
In science, a field demanding all the qualities that have traditionally been regarded as supremely those of the male, women, in spite of many continuing obstacles, have at least gained a foothold. We have already noted that in physics and chemistry we have the double Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie; in physics Marie Curie's daughter Irene Joliot-Curie, also a Nobel Prize winner. Another Nobel Prize winner in physics is Marie Goeppert-Mayer; in chemistry, Dorothy Hodgkin, and in physiology and medicine the Nobel Prize winner Gerty Cori. And another, Rosalyn Yalow, in medicine, and in genetics Barbara McClintock. We have also previously noted that the highest scientific academies are now beginning to open their doors to women, and the English Royal Society, admission to which constitutes the highest scientific honor it is in the power of the English scientific world to bestow, already has a sprinkling of women among its Fellows. In the United States a trickle of women have been admitted into the National Academy of Sciences. When, in May 1991, only six out of the sixty new members elected to the academy were women, one of those elected, Dr. Susan E. Leeman, a neuroscientist, remarked, "I think it's a disgusting percentage . . . It's amazing." In an admirable article by the Pulitzer prizewinning
New York Times
journalist Natalie Angier, it is clearly shown how discrimination still limits the progress of women in science. While women are entering the ranks of science, social barriers, invisibility at the top, unequal pay, intellectual bullying and the understandable reluctance of women to join the fray, are barriers still very much in place in this man's world.

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While women constitute 51 percent of the U.S. population, only 22 percent of scientists and engineers in the labor force are women. Within science and engineering, half of the women in these fields choose to receive their degrees in social sciences, while only about 33 percent choose mathematics and physical sciences, and 15 percent select engineering as their career path.
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In spite of such discouragements women are bravely continuing to enter the various branches of science with a view to pursuing scientific research as a career, and are receiving bachelor's degrees in numbers similar to men in the same fields.
In my own field, anthropology, some of the most original and path-breaking work has been done by women, and among the outstanding names in the field of anthropology that of the late Ruth Benedict, author of the classic
Patterns of Culture,
and of the dynamic Margaret Mead will always occupy an honored place.
In the realm of behavioral field studies the real breakthroughs were all achieved by women, Jane Goodall in the study of chimpanzees, Dian Fossey on gorillas, and Birute Galdikas on the orangutan. Where men had gone into the wild armed with guns, the women went in armed with nothing more than goodwill, tact, and delicacy, and succeeded in making many new discoveries where generations of men had failed.

13
Another striking case in point is Shirley Strum, an anthropologist who studied wild baboons under natural conditions, and found that they were very much more congenial creatures than the male anthropologists who had observed them at a safe distance made them out to be. Her account of the reaction of other baboon watchers to her discovery that her baboons were neither aggressive nor male dominated, but cooperative and family oriented, is illuminating. Her views were met with hostility and disbelief, apparently because she set out before the "male-dominant" field workers facts which challenged their own "observations."
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Most interesting in this connection is the work of Margaret Power, a Canadian anthropologist, whose book,
The Egalitarians,
challenges the orthodox view that chimpanzees are naturally aggressive, dominance seeking, and fiercely territorial.
15
Power conclusively shows that all reports from natural non-artificially fed field studies are of nonaggressive chimpanzees living peacefully in nonhierarchical groups, on home ranges open to all. These reports have been ignored and downgraded by most of the scientific community, who failed to perceive that by artificially feeding the animals they studied they substantially altered the conditions of their lives.

Can it be that male anthropologists sometimes have difficulty in freeing themselves of their gender prejudices? What Power has achieved is the construction of a model of an egalitarian

 

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form of social organization, based on a fluid role relationship of
mutual dependence
between many
charismatic
chimpanzees of both sexes and other more
dependent
members. This highly and necessarily positive
mutual dependence
system is characteristic of both (undisturbed) chimpanzees and (undisturbed) humans who live by foraging, like gatherer-hunters, who do not have to wait for relief of their hunger. Margaret Power has opened up a view of foraging societies that will have a fundamental and refreshing effect upon anthropological science.
In the field of psychiatry, of interpersonal relations, and psychoanalysis, much highly original and important work has been done by women. I mention some names that come to mind: Theresa Benedek, Charlotte Buhler, Helene Deutsch, Anna Freud, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, Clara Thompson, Phyllis Greenacre, and Alice Miller.
In the field of social work the outstanding name is that of Jane Addams; indeed, the whole modern social-work movement from its inception to the present day has been almost wholly a development brought about by women; and so have the preschool and kindergarten movements. It is not, we may suspect, by chance that when women in medicine choose to specialize they tend to choose such lower paying specialties as internal medicine, pediatrics, psychiatry, obstetrics, and anesthesia.
There are, of course, many excellent women doctors in the other branches of medicine; but women do not enter these as frequently as the others mentioned, not because of the predominantly masculine grip on cardiology, surgery, radiology, and the like, but because it would seem women physicians are happier when they can provide the support of their personalities, their sympathy and understanding, as well as their wisdom and skill, to their patients. The technical accomplishment of a cure or a surgical procedure does not constitute their greatest reward, as seems to be the case with the male. The male is interested in the performance of a task, in the solving of a problem; the female is concerned also with its human meaning and with ministering to the patient's need in the context of that meaning. The female doctor knows what the male doctor so seldom remembers: The care of the patient begins with caring for the patient. A survey of medical school applicants offers an interesting glimpse into the differences in attitudes held by men and women entering the

 

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