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Authors: Ashley Montagu

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BOOK: The Natural Superiority of Women
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Traditional myths concerning women have grown hoary with age and have been accepted as eternal truths. Custom and rationalization have served to keep them alive. The seventeenthcentury French philosopher François Poulain de la Barre, writing on this subject, said, "Men persuade themselves of very many things, for which they can give no Reason; because their Assurance is founded upon slight Appearances, by which they suffer themselves to be hurried: and would have as strongly believed the contrary, if the Impressions of Sense or Custom had thereto determined them after the same manner." Quite so, but the fact is that men have always found it easy to provide reasons for their belief in feminine inferiority. For surely, went the "definitive" argument, was it now clear to anyone with common sense that women were inferior to men? This is the kind of "clarity" and ''common sense" which informed the medieval inquisitor's handbook, the
Malleus Maleficarum,
produced in 1487 and sanctioned by Pope Innocent VIII, and for two centuries thereafter a widespread influence as the supreme authority on the methods of detecting, bringing to trial, and punishing the "witches" of the world.

6

Unfortunately, common sense is not very common, and it is not quite enough to disprove an argument, based on false premises and reasons, that has assumed the form of a secular religion. The myths have recreated reality: We tend to fall back on the readiest of explanations. Belief in the myth of the inferiority of women is indeed part of the religious system of many faiths, not only those of the Western world. What seems clear or obvious to us is not necessarily true. Locked into perceiving reality in certain traditional ways we become the prisoners of our perceptions, and our beliefs in the unreal become more real than reality itself. Fortified by all sorts of rationalizations, not clearly known to ourselves, and devices for believing what we want to believe, we proceed to act upon our prejudices with ritual fidelity. The first of the great feminists understood this quite clearly: Mary Wollstonecraft, in her
A Vindication of the Rights of Women
(1792), wrote, "Men, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices, which they have imbibed, they cannot trace how, rather than root them out."
Most women will not like talk of "superiority" and "inferiority" any more than I do. We have had altogether too much of these

 

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terms in the recent past in connection with the so-called superior and inferior races. The unspeakable horrors that have been committed in the name of such pathogenic ideas constitute the most awful record in the history of humankind. I should not have written this book had I thought there was any danger that women would adopt superior airs and deal with men as men have dealt with women. Most women have better sense than that. The one thing of which we may be certain women will never do is to be overbearing toward men as men have for so long been toward women. The truly healthy minded person experiences not the slightest need to establish supremacy over anyone. It is only the individual of weak and insecure character who, like the bully, is impelled to such contemptible devices.
Men are both numerically and biologically a minority group, while women are both numerically and biologically the majority. One need not emphasize, therefore, the peculiar necessity of generosity toward the minority group. The greatest victory one can yield to one's traditional enemy is to become like him.
In this book I bring some of our rationalizations and the reasons for them into the light of day for everyone to see plainly and clearly, to make available the relevant factsall too little known and all too seldom discussedconcerning both sexes. With the facts thus placed, and the conclusions soon to be drawn, it is to be hoped that men will rethink the foundations of their beliefs concerning feminine inferiority and not permit themselves to be deflected from the truth by prejudice and entrenched traditional beliefs. The truth will make men free as well as women, for until women are freed from the myths that still impede their progress, no man can be free or mentally adequately healthy. The liberation of women means the liberation of man. As Richard Garnett put it many years ago, "Man and Woman may only enter Paradise hand in hand. Together the myth tells us, they left it and together they must return."

 

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2
The Subjection of Women
Why is it that in many Western cultures as well as those of the Middle East, North Africa, the world of Islam, and elsewhere, women have been, and still are, considered to be lower beings, creatures not quite as human as the male: not as wise, nor as intelligent; deficient in the development of virtually all the capacities and abilities with which the male is believed to be so plentifully endowed? How has it come about that women have occupied a position of subordination to men in so many cultures?
Humankind is about three and a half million years old. Since practically nothing is directly known about the social life of our earliest ancestors, speculation and conjecture by scientists and others has for the most part substituted for direct investigation. From the late eighteenth century until relatively recently, those who devoted themselves to the study of anthropology were all European males, who saw and interpreted their "primitive" societies through the ethnocentric eyes of their own cultures. The very term
primitive
reflected their ethnocentric bias, just as the term
mankind
indicated their gender bias in favor of themselves and underlined their cultivated slighting of the
other
half of the human species.
"Humankind"
hardly occurred to
mankind .

 

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So-called primitive peoples are
culturally
different from peoples of technological societies in precisely the same sense that all ethnic groups differ from one another culturally. In their languages, kinship systems, religions, and social organization, so-called primitive peoples are as well developed or more so than so-called civilized peoples, and on the whole,
more
civilized, if one understands by
civilized
a community characterized by people who live in courtesy, thoughtfulness, cooperation, and peace with each other. The only things they are less advanced in compared with "civilized" peoples are written language and technology.
The truth, however, is that indigenous peoples with oral rather than written cultures have no need for writing or for anything more than the ingenious technology which is perfectly adapted to their requirements. Writing and complex technology develop when the need arises for them in urban societies. Hence, modern anthropologists abjure the term
primitive,
and prefer the term
indigenous .

1

Thanks to the work mainly of female anthropologists and archaeologists during the second half of the twentieth century, the male-created mythology concerning women in prehistoric and indigenous societies is being completely recast by a vastly more interesting and undoubtedly more accurate picture than the long-held view of women of these societies as nothing more than beasts of burden, slaves, chattels, economic assets, commodities, and sexual conveniences dominated and enforced by the "superior" males, a view that is wholly unsound.
In the class-bound hierarchical societies of the civilized world the classification of persons by status is the rule. In indigenous societies it is not. In the past, the male anthropologists and archaeologists were so blinded by their own prejudiced, male-oriented ethnocentrism that they simply failed to see women as they really were. Women in prehistoric and indigenous societies were viewed in the same discriminative manner as were women in their own societies. The result was a complete distortion and misinterpretation of the conditions prevailing in indigenous cultures the misconstruction of those prevalent in prehistoric societies.
John Pfeiffer has put the situation very well. "Human evolution," he writes,

 

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has been long regarded as a male achievement, a product of male aggressiveness and initiative. The ringing phrase
man the hunter
evokes an image of to-the-death combat at the human dawn: A mammoth at bay, trapped in a pitfall, trumpets its pain and rage while men hurl rocks and spears at it. The accent on such encounters as the major moments in the emergence of the genus
Homo
makes fine pedagogy, providing an exciting story line of men in groups learning to cooperate and conquer. The putdown of women is generally implicit. They were bit players in the human drama, concerned primarily and unadventurously with having babies and gathering plant foods, making only minor contributions to the cultural advancement of the species.

2

Cartoonists completed the picture by displaying brutish looking men garbed in animal skins carrying knotted cudgels in one hand and with the other dragging women by their hair along the ground. The caricature still makes its appearance quite frequently, at best supposedly funny, but in fact significantly contributing to the prevailing misjudgments concerning prehistoric times, as well as those of indigenous women. This caricature greatly narrowed the definition of humanity.
From the eighteenth century, throughout the Victorian period, and well into the twentieth century, childbirth meant the "confinement" of the mother to her bed for at least two weeks, and she was often treated as a convalescent for a durable period thereafter. Add to this the prolonged period of breastfeeding, and the Victorian anthropologists could only think of women of nonliterate societies as of secondary consequence. Most of these armchair anthropologists had never in fact even seen a woman of an indigenous society. When some anthropologists eventually did encounter such women, the projection of their Victorian image of European childbirth practices upon these "savages" prevented them from paying more than the most perfunctory attention to the conditions of childbirth as they really were.
Certain biological facts are pertinent here, or rather it is not these facts so much as the
interpretations
that have been given them. It has long been held that because women bear children and nurse them, they are forced to be much more sedentary than men. Woman in the Victorian period was taken to be the cricket on the hearth; man, the eagle on the wing. Women stayed

 

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at home to nurse and care for their children, prepare meals, and perform virtually all other domestic duties. Men left the hearth for the hunt. That was how the traditional scenario was written, but is it sound?
It is necessary to understand that during a great part of the long history of humankind, its economy was at first characterized by foragingeating foods as they were gathered, or by scavengingeating foods that were killed by predators or died by accident. This was later followed by food gathering and hunting. Agriculture and herding of animals were unknown; habitations were of the most primitive kind, like windbreaks, probably similar, to those built by Australian aborigines. Tools were probably fashioned of wood or bone, the remains of which have long disappeared. Implements were simple and few. Most of these were probably developed after our ancestors had made the transition from foraging for food, which may have included scavenging, to food gathering. It is important to remember that food gathering came long before the invention of hunting. It is probable that women made the tools they needed in digging for tubers and other plant foods.
The belief has been that since women had babies to nurse and care for, they were sedentary. But the gathering of food is a shared activity in which children as well as several other women may participate, apart from men. Observation of the conditions among gatherer-hunter peoples tells us that women are seldom incapacitated by childbirth and are quite active shortly following it, carrying their infants in a sling. In some cultures women even hunt while carrying an infant with them in some sort of sling or carrier. There was almost certainly no significant division of labor between the sexes, though it is possible that men and childless women were free to range more widely over their habitat than were women with children to care for.

3

Contrary to the usual picture painted by earlier anthropologists, it is probable that both sexes foraged for food, that both were food gatherers, and women later continued to hunt with men as well as with other women, and sometimes alone, as women still do in some indigenous cultures. For example, Drs. Agnes Estioko-Griffin and P. Bion Griffin have described the Agta, the Philippines Negrito peoples of Eastern Luzon, and characterized the women as "superb hunters" who eat animal

 

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