The Natural Superiority of Women (53 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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seriously affect our society. It is, otherwise, a very simple idea too simple, I will be told, I'm sure.
I suggest that for married persons the working day be limited, on a voluntary basis, to half the normal working hours, that is, to four hours a day. Such an arrangement would immediately make it possible for each of the parents to spend not only a great deal more time with their children but with each other, and would result in other untold benefits to our society. It is not being suggested that such an arrangement would auto-matically produce these effects. In the majority of cases, one may speculate, it would greatly help. Working hours could be arranged so that husband and wife could work the same hours, either in the morning or in the afternoon, or one could work in the morning and the other in the afternoon, or stagger the hours whichever way was found most suitable. Thus at least one of the parents would be at home a good part of the day, or both of them would. Alternatively the presence of one parent throughout the day could be ensured simply by arranging alternative working days for each parent.
Making more time available to young parents would not in itself solve any problems; it is not time but the uses to which one puts it that are important. I am assuming that educational changes paralleling the changes here suggested will have occurred which will prepare young parents to put their new inheritance of time to healthy constructive uses. Wisely used, the bounty of increased time would make the solution of innumerable family problems so much easier; it would contribute substantially to the solution of the problem of leisure and assist our whole society to take on a less tired, less feverish look.
It has been calculated that no one in our society need work more than three hours a day in a five-day working week. All the work, and more, that is done today on a full week's employment could be done on a three-hour-a-day week of five workdays. I think we will eventually arrive at such a workday, but I am not suggesting it now. I am not suggesting that the five-day working week or the eight-hour day be abolished; such arrangements may be retained for unmarried persons and for all married persons on a voluntary basis. I am suggesting that as soon as women and men marry they be given the privilege of working

 

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only half a day, say a total of four hours each of the five days of the week, or alternatively if they wish only three or two-and-a-half days a week. When children arrive, the mother should not work for at least two years, and preferably six years, but should devote herself to her child and home; the husband should have the freedom to work no more than half a day or the reduced day week during this period and thereafter. Women and children could, indeed, have life in their time. And I see such working and family arrangements as these, as well as other benefits, as the product of the approach of the sexes toward a better understanding of each other.
I am quite aware that the four-hour working day or the reduced day week will be dismissed by many as impractical and that it will be greeted by others with derision. I should like to remind any such readers that many of the impracticalities of yesterday are the realities of today. Not so long ago many workers were laboring sixteen and eighteen hours a day, while the twelve-hour working day has been reduced to an eight-hour day, and in some cases to a six-hour working day. There were those who thought that the introduction of such short working hours would ruin our economy. The best answer to them is the economic history of the United States.
Let us be fair and try to see whether the suggested four-hour working day or reduced-day week has any merit at all. No one could expect it to be put into practice on an extended scale and all of a sudden, as it were; but do let us try it on a small, experimental scale, in various parts of the country and under varying conditions, and let us fairly judge the results. If the results are satisfactory, let us extend the four-hour working day for married couples. If the results are unsatisfactory, let us drop the whole idea. I am willing to predict that when it is tried and examined, workers who have had a four-hour working day or reduced workweek to look forward to will, on the whole, be found to be more efficient than those who have to contemplate the traditional working week. Anyone who has had any experience in such matters will, I think, agree. In considering the balance of incentives to work, students of industrial life have uniformly found that the most important factor in a worker's efficiency is contentment or happiness at work. In this,

 

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as in so many other matters, the secret of contentment or happiness lies not so much in doing what one likes as in liking what one ought to do.
The advantages of the four-hour working day and the three-or two-and-a-half day week are innumerable and far-reaching, the effects of such an arrangement could alter the face of our whole civilization and contribute to the improvement of human relations in the most effective and wholesome of ways. It would give men and women, for the first time in their lives, the time they have never enjoyed for doing something constructive about human relations. It would give them the time for fulfilling the primary function of life:
living .
As it is, most people haven't sufficient time to live, having become as they have, hostages to their work.
I conceive that the most important function of the four-hour day or reduced day week for family couples is to make more time available for the parents, and particularly the father, to be with their children and with each other. Even if one parent works in the morning and one in the afternoon, each will be in a much more fresh and happy state of mind than either would be at the conclusion of an eight-hour day. One could easily fill a large book by setting out the advantages of the four-hour day or reduced workweek, and I hope someone will do so. I do not, however, think that the advantages need be enumerated here; the reader, in reflecting upon the proposal, will readily see many of them. Once having granted the desirability of trying the experiment, a way must be found to make it a reality. In certain groups where conditions are favorable, as among teachers and in academic groups, such an experiment would be quite feasible. In the business world special arrangements would have to be made in order to conduct such an experiment. Indeed, the first steps in this direction will probably be taken by an enlightened private industry. And there is no reason why a movement for a four-hour working day for the married couldn't get under way. I am convinced that genuinely civilized living will not come about until, among other things, the four-hour working day or something akin to it is available to everyone.
The development of these ideasnamely the choice employees may make, with the support of their employers, toward a more

 

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flexible work scheduleis very promising, and goes by the name of
flextime .
The reports, as of 1999 on flextime experiments thus far are highly favorable, and it is to be hoped that flextime will become a widely established practice.
In general, evidence has long indicated that no mother should abandon her child for a job before the child is six years old. Experts at the 1950 Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth agreed in its fact-finding report that such abandonment was undesirable. They said: "It may well be questioned whether most mothers can, without undue strain, carry a full-time job and still give responsive and attentive care to the physical and emotional needs of small children. The first six years have been shown to be crucial years for the child, who would seem to need a substantial share of the mother's time and attention during this period." Hence, short of the four-hour working day or the reduced hours or days a week, or flextime, I can see no satisfactory way of solving the problems of the mother of the preschool child, of the mother who wants to be a mother to her child and who also wishes to work outside the home. But until the four-hour day or some such working day arrangement comes into being, such mothers will have to resort to mother substitutes, nursery schools, and day care. These can never be adequate substitutes for a mother who wants to be a mother. Men as well as women must learn to understand these facts.
As men begin to understand women's true value, and abandon the myths they have traditionally inherited, they will come to view their relationship to women as a partnership conferring mutual benefits, as well as benefits upon all who come within the orbit of their influence. The freeing of women and increasing respect for them will mean the freeing of, and increasing respect for, men. Men need not fear that women will be transformed into men or that men will turn into women-there are certain biological arrangements in each of the sexes that will effectually prevent such development. On the contrary, each of the sexes will for the first time function as completely as it has hitherto functioned incompletely, for each of its members will have, for the first time, a full opportunity to realize themselves according to their own nature and not according to the "nature" that has been forced upon them.

 

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What do the schools teach concerning the sexes? Largely what is taken for granted. But the schools could be a most powerful influence in readjusting the sexes to each other in the light of our newer knowledge and of the great benefits that will accrue from the application of our knowledge. Such facts and ideas as I have set forth in this book should be a matter of staple discussion in our schools and colleges and evaluated for what they are worth. From the very beginning children of opposite sex should be educated to understand each other; they should not be left to pick up the traditional myths they find so freely floating about in their culture. The essential human state is harmony, cooperativeness; our culture has managed to produce a complex separateness and lack of understanding between the sexes. Much effort will be required to break down this separateness, but I know of no better way to accomplish this than by educationthe education of the sexes
for
each other, not in opposition to each other.
An ounce of example is worth a pound of precept any day. But in view of the probability that the examples will be rather slow in developing, education concerning the sexes will always remain necessary. The sooner we begin teaching the facts and not only the facts, but the practice of their implications in human relationsthe better.
The climate of opinion concerning the status and the relations of the sexes in recent years has undergone so favorable a change that the idea, for example, of a woman running for the presidency of the United States is no longer inconceivable. This marks a distinct advance. It is commonly acknowledged that the women who have been appointed or elected to federal and state positions have, even by male standards, done well. Indeed, American women in general have done extremely well, and this in itself constitutes one of the greatest tributes that one can pay to American men. Men have the women they deserve.
During the more than half a century of expanded research on the mother-child relationship since the Midcentury Conference of 1950, the findings of its contributors have been fully confirmed and widely extended. What is pressingly needed is that our government should make it possible for women to breastfeed their children for what has been shown to be a minimum amount of time, namely a year or as much thereafter as

 

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seems necessary or agreeable to both mother and child. The results that would accrue from the institution and encouragement of such a reciprocal relationship, would greatly benefit not only mother and child, but also the family and society. Since 1935 the Social Security Act has provided financial aid to families with dependent children, the old, the disabled, are made through Medicare payments, to all whose monthly incomes fall below state-specified levels. We must be grateful for such programs, but they all could stand much improvement by more attention to the needs of the child.
It is the warm embrace of the home, that haven from which we begin and are shaped by our parents, the family beyond all else, that provides the benison of lovethat wonderful facilitator of all that the child will be as a warm, loving human being.
We hear much today of the breakdown of the family, of "dysfunctional families," of the lost extended family, that nourishing institution that flourished not so long ago, in which the benefits of parents, maternal and paternal grandparents, often great-grandparents, aunts and uncles, as well as teachers and playmates, provided a "togetherness," love, and awareness, discipline, and a primary education in human relations. Kinship meant an affinity, the proximity of multiple caregivers in the shared involvement in the welfare of the children, an enduring bequest that lasted a lifetime.
The mobility of Americans is such that physical and social disconnection between the members of the family and friends has become the order of things. In his novel
Howard's End
(1910), E. M. Forster makes a telling point by occasionally introducing into his narrative the phrase "only connect." It is very effective in underscoring the unconnectedness, the disabling effects, the social codes of the period, produced in thwarting communication between relations and friends, frustrating human feeling. The upper and middle class Victorians, alas, understood very little concerning the importance of love in caring for children, with consequences that led to the "cold fish syndrome," the inaccessibility of the Englishman, a dehumanization syndrome, a psychopathy ranging from mild to serious disorder.
When everything has been said and done on the subject, what will always remain are the biologically and socially formative influences of the mother on the child. As a Middle Eastern saying

 

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