The Natural Superiority of Women (45 page)

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Authors: Ashley Montagu

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

BOOK: The Natural Superiority of Women
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profession. Male applicants place a higher value on "prestige and salary," while women choose more often "helping people" as their motivation for selecting a career in medicine.

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It is not so much the treatment of symptoms as of their underlying causes that characterizes the good caregiver. The doctor tends to focus on disease, the caregiver focuses instead on health, on prevention.
It took a woman to do what no man had done before, for it was Florence Nightingale who introduced humanity into the handling and nursing of wounded soldiers. Following her arrival in the Crimea, an army major wrote, in scorn of women's knowledge of hospital work, that the first thing she had done was to order two hundred scrubbing brushes! But in spite of the hostility and the scant encouragement, she initiated the organization of the first war hospital at the battlefront; and, indeed, it was she who succeeded in contributing most to making the nursing profession what it is today. It surely could have been predicted that this was one profession that women would make their own, for it is essentially the profession of caring. In the United States, Clara Barton (1821-1912), the "Angel of the Battlefield," who cared for the wounded during the Civil War, who helped gather identification records for the missing and the dead, and in 1881 founded the Red Cross in the United States, was also responsible for securing the important amendment providing Red Cross relief in catastrophes other than war.
Inventions by women have never been more than 2 percent of the total accepted in any one year at the United States Patent Office. I do not know what the proportion may be for other countries, but I doubt whether there are any in which it exceeds that of the United States. As for the typical masculine comment that women have contributed not a single invention to ease their lives in the kitchen, the answer may be that women have been so busy using, among other things, the gadgets invented by men that they have had no time left for inventing anything themselves. Lilian Gilbreth has pointed out that "men often have good ideas about housework chiefly because they don't like it much. The engineers sometimes say that they are careful to observe the laziest person in the plant. He is the one who thinks up the short cuts." In any event, a more than one housewife has remarked, the most useful domestic gadget ever invented is a husband.

 

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The law and the ministry until recently made little appeal to women, and most churches actively discouraged them by refusing them ordination. Professions such as engineering and architecture have attracted a fair modicum of women. Of the more than 609 federal judges in the United States in 1979, 28 were women. Altogether, in the various courts of the country, about 200 women held important judicial posts. As in most professions traditionally dominated by men, the numbers are changing, albeit slowly, as more and more women join their ranks.
Many names of women could be cited who have done distinguished work in almost every branch of human endeavor. It is not, however, my purpose to make out a case for women as creative workers, even if it could be done; on a numerical basis alone one would not expect women to excel in as great numbers as men. The important fact is that in spite of the great discrepancies in the numbers engaged, many women
do
excel. Therefore the probabilities are high that it is not a biological incapacity that is responsible for women achieving ''excellence" less frequently than men. Quite obviously there is nothing on the X chromosomes of women that debars them from attaining great distinction in any branch of human endeavor.
But how can we say this, someone is bound to ask, since there are innumerable fields in which women have not attained great distinction? Undoubtedly this is true, but one can be reasonably safe in saying that such fields are the ones in which women have not been engaged in as large numbers as men, and most certainly not for as long a period. Writing on this subject some hundred years ago, the great English humanist J. M. Robertson settled the argument with the following
responsum ad hominem:
No Englishman has yet written a great symphony or a great opera, and no American has yet written a great symphony, great opera, or great tragedy: Is it then reasonable to suppose that no Englishman or American is genetically capable of doing so? I leave the question to be answered by those who may feel they are competent to say whether or not any Englishman or American has done so. If adequate opportunity and stimulus are provided, great works will be created. Have women ever been provided with such opportunities and encouragements over an adequate stretch of time?

 

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At the time when the male is preparing for that period in his life when his creativeness is likely to be at its highest, the female is turning in a totally different direction: toward marriage and a family. During the years spent in childbearing and child rearing, not to mention the enervating domestic chores that family life entails for so many women, whatever other creative abilities she may have had tend to fall into desuetude. There is no opportunity or stimulus to develop and exercise one's creativity. Were the male required to do all that the average woman has always been expected to do, how much would he achieve? Most males consider it a calamity when they are called upon to perform for a few days the domestic chores with which their wives deal virtually every moment of the day, year in and year out.
A commentary on some men's understanding of women's work is provided by a communication received by Dr. Alice Chenoweth which she quotes in an article in the
Journal of the American Medical Association,
30 January 1960,
Some years ago I was asked to answer a letter addressed to the 'Health Department' from a mountain man. It read, in part, as follows: 'Dear Sir: I am writing to ask your advice. I want some personal advice and not just some little papers or pamphlets.' He went on to say that when his wife had given birth to their first and second children she had got up in a day or two and begun helping him in the fields. Then he related what happened to her in each successive pregnancyher third, fourth, and fifth; her sixth ended in a miscarriage. By the end of the first page she had had nine pregnancies. In her tenth she had a convulsion, then followed her eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth. And now she was pregnant for the fourteenth time. She didn't want to do anything except lie around all the time. He didn't know whether she was getting lazy or not. He had heard when women had grown children they liked to sit down and let their children wait on them. The letter ended with the question, 'Can it be that my faithful wife don't want to help me anymore?'
A woman usually enters upon an occupation with a somewhat different attitude from that which characterizes a man. Most working women regard their work outside the home as important but secondary, or at best, unless they are career women, are committed to both a job and to the family. Such divided allegiance is not what men feel. Men regard their work as primary. Men make their occupations whole-time jobs, a way of life; their jobs take

 

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possession of them. Women do not have the same capacity for dissociation characteristic of men. Women think of marriage, home, and family as integral parts of their entire lives. Men are able to dissociate the family from their work and lead two separate existences, employing much greater concentration upon their work than upon their families. A woman's life is first and foremost bound up with that of her family, with her husband, her children; or if she hasn't a family of her own yet, with the hope and expectation of one.
Consider a typical situation in the professional field. The profession of medicine, for example, will bring the point out, as it were, in high relief. In medicine today, it is more likely than not that a woman will marry, and she is more likely than not to continue her career. It is, however, less than likely that she will have children, or that, having them, she will continue a fulltime profession. In fact, two-thirds of women doctors with active practices have children, and therefore limit their work hours. To some extent this is a factor in the disparity of earnings between genders in the medical profession.

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The responsibility for young children is the dilemma with which women in most professions are to a greater or lesser extent faced. The male, however, with his uncanny faculty for detaching his mind from his heart, his reason from his emotions, his work from his home, is seldom confronted with such a quandary. For him work and home are two utterly different worlds, so that when he arrives home it is, in large measure, to a totally dissimilar way of life, with new terms and symbols and relationships. The working male doesn't have the same kind of problems that the working female has. He is able to devote all of himself to his work when he is at it, for traditionally the male stakes his whole career upon his performance; a woman rarely does. For the most part women are busy creatively living the life that men can only paint or write about. Because women live creatively, when they write, as they so ably are increasingly doing, they bring an added dimension of humanity to their writing that makes, for example, the novels of Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, and Toni Morrison among the most distinguished in the English language. Women create naturally, men create less sensitively.
Great gifts in a woman's mind and character, great achievements made by women, do not usually take the form that brings recognition and fame. Her medium is humanity, and her materials

 

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are human beings. Her greatest works remain unsigned, and fame and recognition are bestowed upon the work and not upon the artist. In a stirring address delivered at the tenth National Woman's Rights Convention, at the Cooper Institute in New York on 10 May 1860, Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), a leading founder of the Women's Rights Movement in the United States, stated the case beautifully:
In marriage either party claims the right to stand supreme, to woman, the mother of the race, belongs the scepter and the crown. Her life is one long sacrifice for man. You tell us that among womankind there is no Moses, Christ or Paul-no Michael Angelo, Beethoven, Shakespeare, no Columbus or Galileo, no Locke or Bacon. Behold those mighty minds so grand, so comprehensivethey themselves are
our
great works! Into you, O sons of earth, goes all of us that is immortal. In you center our very life, our hopes, our intensest love. For you we gladly pour out our heart's blood and die, knowing that from our suffering comes forth a new and more glorious resurrection of thought and life.
But in the masculine-dominated world, creativity in women can hardly be allowed a place. This is well illustrated by the story of the scholar who insisted that Shakespeare's plays had been written by Queen Elizabeth. The Scots minister Dr. Hugh Black challenged him. "Surely," he scoffed, "you don't believe a woman could have composed such masterpieces?" "You miss my point entirely," replied the scholar. ''It is my contention that Queen Elizabeth was a man." Creative women, in the sense in which men usually understand the term, have frequently been childless. Let the reader make a survey of the creative woman of history and ask how many of them have been mothers. It is of interest to note that many women "become" creative after their children have grown up, and they are relatively free to pursue their interests. Such women are beginning to create in fields which were once considered the sole prerogative of men. The world of men is highly competitive, and women traditionally simply haven't been competitors. For millennia they were not allowed to compete with men; a woman's place was in the home, and women have from the earliest times been encouraged to look to the home and children as the fullest possible realization of their lives. If they were employed in any way, they usually

 

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