The Natural Superiority of Women (58 page)

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Authors: Ashley Montagu

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It well may be imagined what such "revolutionary ideas," as they seemed to me, had upon my mind. Having gone to the references that Ellis so abundantly provided, as well as to other authors, I was fully able to confirm Ellis's conclusions, and that, unfamiliar to Ellis, the phenomenon he referred to had a name:
neoteny,
a term comprised of two Greek words,
neos,
meaning young and
teino,
meaning to stretch out; in other words, evolution or development by prolongation or time extension of fetal or young traits into adulthood.
I have devoted a whole book to this subject, namely,
Growing Young,
and extended the idea of neoteny to the behavioral traits of humansthat as persons we are designed to grow and develop our childlike behavioral traits through all the days of our lives, and not to grow up into fossilized adults who have never developed those early behavioral traits.

3

But long before
Growing Young,
with the facts of neoteny I felt I was on solid ground in thinking of women as biologically more advanced than men. And so in the course of the years I collected all the evidence I could find bearing on the female's biological superiority,
against
as well as
for .
The evidence garnered from the scientific and medical literature was overwhelmingly in favor of the female's natural biological superiority, while that from my daily experience as an anatomist and biological anthropoligist in medical school and researcher in child growth and development, coupled with my years of everyday observation of the sexes, confirmed the fact that in virtually every respect the female was superior to the male.
From time to time I would talk to people about the superiority of women. Among those to whom I mentioned the idea was Norman Cousins, editor of
The Saturday Review,
and whenever we met he would say to me, "When are you going to write that article on women for us?" Time passed, until one day when I was a bit bored with what I was doing, I sat down at the typewriter and wrote the article from beginning to end without a single correction, and sent it to Cousins with the title "The Superiority of Women." Cousins approved the article and suggested the addition of the word "Natural," a suggestion I readily adopted. The article was published in the issue of March 1, 1952. The reader response to the article was so great (described as "an avalanche'') that a number of issues had to be devoted to the publication of selected letters. In the July 4 issue, Dorothy Thompson, the well-known journalist, wrote a splendid commentary entitled "An Enormous Power," in which she underscored the main task of women, as follows:

 

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What women need most of all, if they are to fulfill their social function, is to know themselves, and what they believe in as the result of their most profound and intimate experiences as lovers, wives, mothers and molders and conserves of the family; to trust that experience, and use it as a guide to their social and political decisions; and to find indomitable courage to stand up for their men and their children, in behalf of the power of Life and Love against the forces of Hatred and Death.
Doris Fleischman, a well-known publicist at the time, in her commentary entitled, "Facts Instead of Myths" in a subsequent issue, was highly critical of my article, both of its style and its content.
Observing the excitement generated by the article, the editors of
The Ladies Home Journal
and later
Look
reprinted the article in their pages. The president of the Macmillian Publishing Company got in touch with me and invited me to expand my article into a book. To this I agreed, and in the first week of May 1953 the book was published. I don't know of any book, before or since, which received so much attention from all the media, public and private. There were literally hundreds of reviews, and an immense correspondence initiated by readers of the book. There were many translations. A second edition appeared in 1968, a third in 1974, the fourth in 1991, and this, the fifth. In each edition I have endeavored to bring the book up-to-date while preserving the greater part of the original text.
Of all the reviews, one of my favorites was written by Max Eastman, the delightful writer, humanist, and early feminist.

4
The review was very full, critical, helpful, and concluded with the following words:

There is a poetic justice in Montagu's book that commands high praise. It must be something above a hundred thousand years now since men began hammering home upon women, and anything that would listen from the rocks at the cave mouth in the surrounding hills, the natural inferiority of the female sex. Faint voices were raised against it, I suppose from the beginning. Bold radicals have occasionally cried out that the sexes are really equal. But this, I believe, is the first time since humanity became articulate that any male has had the hardihood to stand up in public and assert that, tumult and shouting to the contrary notwithstanding, women are the naturally superior sex. It's an overdue revenge, it's a step toward social balance, and it's a good joke on men.
5

 

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Notes
Foreword
1. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray,
The Bell Curve
(New York: Free Press, 1994) J. Philippe Rushton, Race,
Evolution, and Behavior
(New York: Transaction Press, 1994).
2. For examples of this perspective in evolutionary psychology see Robert Wright's,
The Moral Animal
(New York: Pantheon Press, 1994) and John Townsend's,
What Women Want, What Men Want
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
3. Aldous Huxley, "Forward" to the First Edition, 1942, in Ashley Montagu,
Man's Most Dangerous Myth,
6
th
ed. (Walnut Creek, Ca.: AltaMira Press, 1997), 11-12.
4. Ashley Montagu,
The Natural Superiority of Women,
4
th
ed. (New York: Collier Books [Macmillan], 1992), 8.
5. Montagu,
Man's Most Dangerous Myth,
6
th
ed., 32.
6. Franz Boas,
Race, Language, and Culture
(New York: Macmillan, 1940).
7. Stephen Jay Gould,
The Mismeasure of Man
(New York: Norton, 1981).
8. Sir Arthur Keith in a famous rectoral address at the University of Aberdeen, as quoted by Boas in
Race, Language, and Culture,
8.
9. Ibid.
10. United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization,
The Race Concept: Results of an Inquiry
(Paris: UNESCO, 1952).
11. Ibid.
12. Donna Haraway refers to the UNESCO statements on race as "sacred texts of mid-century biological humanism" in her magnum opus about the history of primatology,
Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science
(New York: Routledge, 1989).

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