The Natural Superiority of Women (8 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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Page 37
Modern trends in gender studies are sharply divergent, with sophisticated, nonreductionist research strategies often failing to gain a public hearing, while a regressive biological reductionism dominate the airwaves and bookstores. Montagu's commitment to the role of the anthropologist as public communicator about this issue has been crucial. Biologically oriented feminists in and out of the academy continue to show the complex interactions between culture and biology, an idea that Montagu introduces repeatedly in the book, with its insistence on "multiple and interlocking causation." In these accounts there is an explicit recognition of the social and political context of science. Recent work in cross-cultural studies of reproduction over women's life cycles reveals the way that biological events such as menarche and menopause are affected by cultural practices. Rather than a universal ovary and female body, we learn of a flexible, responsive body that develops epigentically in relationship to a variety of cultural practices. These practices are part of the larger ecology, including subsistence methods, the division of labor, reproductive rules and practices, social stratifications, diet, politics and history.

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Ashley Montagu speaks to this when he distinguishes between what he calls "first nature" and "second nature," the latter being the effects of culture upon biology.

Over the last decade, as in so many fields, much feminist research has shifted attention to discourse analysis, from the issue of power to that of the representation of power. Feminists in the cultural constructionist realms of the social sciences and humanities have shown the ways in which the idea of polarized gender is itself a historically-based Western construct.
85
Cultural anthropologists, particularly those engaged in a decade of work in Gay/Lesbian studies, have revealed the more nuanced understandings of what constitutes the continuum of gendered roles and behaviors available in some other cultures, an area that Montagu does not specifically engage in this book.
86
But essentialist visions of male and female have made a huge comeback with some of the popularizations of sociobiology since the mid-1970s. Sociobiology universalizes gender strategies, reducing them to essential characteristics of all males and all females. Males, from insects to humans, are presumably always seeking ways to inseminate multiple fertile partners while

 

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females, according the sociobiologists, seek to maximize their larger investment in fewer progeny through attracting and keeping high status male provisioners. This approach blurs the substantial differences in patterns of sexuality, reproduction, and marriage cross-culturally, not to mention the immense variation in interspecific reproductive patterns. Unfortunately the debate about sociobiology has often been construed as one between reductionists in the biological and evolutionary sciences who contend that genetic mechanisms selected over phylogenetic history control important human behaviors, and feminists and other cultural constructionists who deny that biology has any important role in human experience.

87
This is far from true: Within modern biology there is an increasing appreciation for the importance of developmental environments in shaping behavior and structure. Many social scientists are interested in the ways in which biology interacts with culture in different settings. The question is one of what constitutes good science, not whether biology or experience are important in the development of human beings.

Sociobiology, having declared genes
uber alles,
is a regression to earlier reductionist modes of understanding behavior, with individual and cultural variation treated a merely a thin veneer over the basic biogram of genetic competition or ''kin-selection." Most often, these ideas have been used to forward conservative social agendas. A more reformist perspective among sociobiologists has recently suggested that social institutions may attempt to mitigate extremes of behavior, but must always work within the basic fixed genetic "program." It is no coincidence that sociobiology and the second wave of Western feminism were simultaneous occurrences. Early sociobiologists clearly envisioned their new model as "disproving" feminism. The sociobiologist van den Berghe wrote: "Neither the National Organization for Women nor the Equal Rights Amendment will change the biological bedrock of asymmetrical parental investment."
88
Philip Kitcher, a preeminent critic of sociobiology, points out,
Sometimes the expression is tinged with regretful sympathy for ideals of social justice (Wilson) at other times with a zeal to
epater les feministes (van den Berghe) . . .
[it] is far from clear that sociobiologists appreciate the political implications

 

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of the views they promulgate. These implications become clear when a
New York Times
series on equal rights for women concludes with a serious discussion of the limits that biology might set to women's aspirations and when the new right in Britain and France announces its enthusiasm for the project of human sociobiology.

89

In recent years, modern evolutionary science has diverged along these two distinctly different paths. Reputable studies in primatology, genetics, and developmental biology have revealed the exquisitely contingent nature of much biological and social development in our own and other species. At the same time, narrow biological determinisma kind of genetic fundamentalism related to nineteenth-century sexismhas persisted in popular and academic settings. Recent theorists in a new branch of evolutionary study dubbed "evolutionary psychology" use sociobiology to analyze human marriage and sexual practices. According to the new crop of evolutionary psychologists, because males ejaculate so many millions of sperm over the life cycle, whereas females ovulate far fewer eggs over a lifetime (and in addition must invest heavily in the nurturance of dependent offspring) it pays men to inseminate as many women as possible. Women presumably do better by choosing their inseminators with great care and cunning, since they have fewer shots at the genetic jackpot. Evolutionary psychologists assert that observations in our own and other human societies empirically support the conclusion that gendered sexual behaviors are fixed by biology.
90
Historian Thomas Laqueur has limned the fluctuating concepts of male and female sexuality in his book
Making Sex; Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud .
91
Studies such as these show the immense amount of variation in what is associated with womanhood and manhood cross-culturally.
In contrast to some of these recent reductionist trends, Ashley Montagu has always stood for a nonreductionist progressive and humanistic natural science. He knows that other things shape behavior beside genes, and shape it in important ways. He also tells us that little in human life is fixed and unchangeable. As biologist Susan Oyama has pointed out, the human world has never existed before and its conditions are constantly changing.
92
The Natural Superiority of Women
is an important

 

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signpost on the road to this more robust vision of what it is to be human. In his brilliance, resilience and persistence, Ashley Montagu continues to show us how the toolkits of biological and cultural anthropology can be used to build understanding of the human condition. Contemplated in this light, his work is an inspiration.

 

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Preface to the Fifth Edition
Since the fourth edition of this book was published in 1992, much new information bearing on the natural superiority of women has become available. The new findings unexceptionally support and confirm the conclusions reached in this book. These conclusions are based on incontrovertible evidence, evidence that can be confirmed by anyone who will take the trouble to examine it. The facts cannot be argued away. At most it is their interpretation that may be questioned. Here in the light of the findings of science I have attempted to offer the most highly probable explanation of the meaning of the facts. I do not think that these explanations can be seriously challenged. Nor since May 1952, when the book was first published has there been a serious challenge to any of its conclusions. It is necessary to make this unequivocally clear. This is not a work based on the author's opinions. What I am trying to say in this book is that the evidence for the natural superiority of women set out in it represents the actuality of nature. Anyone who desires to argue with the facts of nature should not be intimidated by such a statement. On the contrary, they should be encouraged to doubt and to question, for most people have a way of mistaking their prejudices for the laws of nature. I do not claim to be exempt from this particular frailty. None of us is. The facts set out in this book, however, are either true or false. If it can be shown that any of them are questionable, I would welcome the evidence.
I have endeavored to leave the book essentially as it was written, except that I have brought it up to date, with the latest findings and figures available up to the time of publication. I have also added a certain amount of new material. The results of recent research have in many places enabled me to present the earlier data in reinforced form.

 

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