The Natural Superiority of Women (50 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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We have to understand that what any society considers to be the gender roles of masculinity and femininity are mainly arbitrary. Male and female are terms that refer to biological sex,
not
to gender sex. A biological male may by gender role be feminine, and a biological female may by gender role be masculine, and each may be all the gradations in between. A survey of the societies of the world shows that the vast majority of them are organized by and around males rather than females, and that statuses and roles are subject to this male dominance. Based on the biological differences between the sexes men have erected a superstructure of expectations, obligations, rights, and duties that they call statuses and roles. These gender roles are quite arbitrary, and their determinance by men has led to every conceivable discrimination by them against women. The long-entrenched dominance of the asymmetric gender roles in most societies has so solidified them that they have come to be accepted by almost everyone as expressions of the laws of nature. It is, for example, in the Western world generally believed that gender is a biologically, a genetically determined status. The fundamental error committed here is that gender is confused with sex. Sex is biologically determined; gender is to a great extent learned, and often plays a significant role in influencing adaptability.

4

The species trait of
Homo sapiens
is educability, flexibility, and malleability, and adaptability, and it is particularly important at this critical period in our social development to understand that fact, to understand what it means to be human. What is to be comprehended is that within the limits of what is possible human beings are capable of learning anything. That whatever the biological or physiological components that enter into sexual behavior, sexual status, and sexual gender, their character, form, and expression are functions of the interaction between genetic potentials and the environments in which those potentials undergo development. What the evidence indicates is that every-where in human societies sexual behavior, gender, and yes, even society itself, are influenced not by genetic potentials,
but by the action of the individual's learning experience upon those potentials .
It is what society does with the genetic potentialities, and not what genetic potentialities do with society that creates human institutions. The genetic potentialities are possibilities and within the range of those possibilities culture can do virtually anything

 

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with them. In short, with the exception of the reproductive roles, sex roles and the roles of sex are what we choose to make them. And what we need to do in the socialization of the young is to humanize those roles to function in loving relationships with others, rather than in tyranny and exploitation of one sex by another, and of children by parents (however well meaning). And this, I believe, each of us can at least approximate, if we would but make the effort.
I thoroughly agree with Carolyn Heilbrun who, in her book
Toward a Recognition ofAndrogyny,

5
has pointed out the dangers of an ideal of masculinity that emphasizes the characteristics of competitiveness, aggressiveness, and defensiveness. By placing such men in positions of power, we have greatly endangered our survival and ensured such tragedies as Vietnam and will continue in the brutalizing environment of the manmade world.

The traits that men have called femininegentleness, tenderness, loving kindnessare human traits, and they are the very traits that males need to be conditioned in and develop if they are ever to be returned to a semblance of humanity.
The important thing for men to understand is why it is desirable to be kind and cooperative. The brief answer to that ''why," which has been set out at greater length in the preceding pages and elsewhere, is that it is to the advantage of everyone to be so. To be cooperative means not only to confer survival benefits upon the cooperators but also to enlarge their capacity for living; it means the production of harmony, health, wealth, and happiness; it means to restore to human beings their ability to love, to work, to play, and to thinktheir mental health; and it means an end to conflict on the interpersonal plane and on the international plane, by being conciliatory, nonconfrontational. Someone has defined civilization as the process of learning to be kind. That is precisely what we need to doto become more civilized, to learn to be kind; and that kind of civilization is a race between a loving education and catastrophe.
It is not sufficient for men to be kind to their children, which as yet they are from being: They must be kind to their wives also, to all women. Men need to understand that the principle of cooperation, like charity, begins at home, and that the best place to begin anew with the development of their own characters and their children's is in their relationships with their wives.

 

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The husband-wife relationship is the proving ground of character. No less an authority than Balzac remarked that marriage is the best school for a man's character that was ever devised. For both sexes, marriage should be a continuing, and the best, part of one's education for living. It should be a mutual exchange of experience and stimulation contributing to the greater creative growth and development of each, of supports and assistance, of mutual working out of problems, of sharing and preparing for the requirements of parenthood and of being human in a world at war with itself. Above all, marriage should be based on friendship and mutual respect. And in the present state of the relations of the sexes I should add that on the man's part it should be accompanied by a sense of responsibility and obligation to his partner.
Men should feel it one of the obligations of marriage to make available, as far as it lies in their power, all the assistance they can to help their wives be more effectively what they desire to be. Men must realize, more profoundly than they seem to have done so far, what it is to be a domestic slave; they must learn that a woman should not be exclusively required to be her husband's maidservant, laundress, cook, concubine, nurse, and governess to the children, spending the first quarter of a century of her married life so employed, and the next twenty-five years recovering from the effects of bringing up the children, still unrelieved of her other duties. A woman is a person in her own right who wants to be, and should be, treated as something more than the good companion who happens also to be one's domestic slave.
Men are altering their attitudes toward women, and have been doing so for more than a hundred years, but their attitudes must undergo this final change; namely, that where they may have retained any doubts about the right of women to complete equality as a human beings and as citizens they must shed their doubts and freely acknowledge women have that right. And this means not only constitutionally and before the law but in all human relationships on the interpersonal plane. The first largescale step in the cooperation of men with women will be achieved when men stop denying women their natural right to be what they want to be. It is a debt that men owe women, and payment is long overdue. The accumulated interest on the debt is enormous. Women don't expect to be paid the interest, compound

 

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or simple; which is all the more reason men should assume the obligation to discharge their debt and pay at least some of the interest by cooperating to the fullest in helping women to achieve complete emancipation from their long period of subjection to the supremacist male.
As men aid women to emancipate themselves, so will women aid men to emancipate themselves from the confusion that has prevented them from realizing the best that is within them. Mutual aid is the principle by which all human beings must live if they are to live most efficiently and most happily. Women will not assist men in the dual task of emancipating women and emancipating themselves if they continue to play the role of clinging vines or half-men. Let women be themselves. In human relationships it is much more important to
be
the right person than to expect others to be so.
In a hostile, warring world women alone preserve the understanding of love. It is time for them to realize this; it is time for them to take the world back into their arms so that once again men may know what it means to live within the bosom of the family. Men can afford to be magnanimous; they can, in justice, not be less. Women must have the wisdom to recognize that justice is on their side, and to be generous they could not be more; for women owe it not only to themselves, but to men, to their children, to civilization, to realize themselves, to be what it is in their nature to be, and not be content to remain what they have in so many cases become. Women play a very large role in determining the behavior of men toward themselves. Women must, therefore, take thought, and grasp the opportunity that is offered to help their men to help them achieve equality.
A democracy is as strong as it weakest links, and among the weakest links is the position of woman. It was Abraham Lincoln who said: "As I would not be a
slave,
so I would not be a
master .
This expresses my idea of democracywhatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is not democracy." What is the extent of the difference between women and men in our democracy? The answer to the question will provide us with something of the measure of the changes that must be brought aboutchanges largely in the status of womenbefore we can speak of having a full democracy. Men and women must become

 

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partners in the greatest of democratic enterprisesthe making of a democratic world; and a democratic world can be made only by persons who are themselves truly democratic. To label oneself democratic is not enough: One must
be
democratic.
Neither peace nor equilibrium can be achieved in a society in which the relationships between the sexes are out of balance. Most women and men wish to see a balance achieved, but they don't know quite how to bring it about. How is one to deal with innumerable little and big problems that must be solved before progress can be made? Women are discontented with their lot not all of them, but enough to constitute for them and for society a very real problem. Men feel that all is not well, and that something ought to be done about itbut what? Perhaps as Elizabeth Wordsworth, the first principal at Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford wrote,
If all the good people were clever,
And all clever people were good,
The world would be nicer than ever
We thought that it possibly could .
But somehow 'tis seldom or never
The two hit it off as they should,
The good are so harsh to the clever,
The clever so rude to the good!
So friends let it be our endeavour
To make each by each understood;
For few can be good like the clever,
Or clever, so well as the good .

 

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