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Authors: Ashley Montagu

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BOOK: The Natural Superiority of Women
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Notably, in 1873, Abba Goold Woolson, in her book
Woman in American Society,
prescientally wrote of women's long hair, having by males been "declared a glory to women, she heaps upon her head such a mass of heavy, cumbersome braids, and skewers them on with such a weight of metal hair pins, she can dream of heaven only as place where it will be permitted her to wear short hair." Forty-five years later, after World War I, women fully achieved that heaven. Meanwhile they also had taken to smoking in public and dancing in mushrooming dance halls, in spite of admonitions to the effect that "dancing was the source of all evil." Somehow the "new woman" not only managed to survive, but to prosper. I lived through the period and saw it all happen the development by women of a new attitude to life, the repudiation of the age-old androcracy, the government of women by men.
World War I saw the beginning of the erosion of a woman's bourgeois image as prostitute-parasite. With the emergence of new technology there was further attrition of the long-entrenched view that women were incapable of the strenuous work that was the exclusive domain of men. The period from 1918 to 1939 was essentially one of consolidation of gains, so that by the time World War II was created by a handful of men, the so-called "leaders of the world," there was no reluctance on the part of anyone in calling upon women to serve in civilian roles that were formerly considered to be exclusively male. The Korean War (1950-1953) and the Vietnam War (1954-1975) further enlarged women's opportunities to prove themselves, not merely as "Rosie the Riveter," but in almost every male-dominated occupation. Ethel Merman sang in
Annie Get Your Gun
(1964), anything men could do she could do better. The added significance here is that the words and music were written by a man, who was a sensitive observer and commentator on the human scene, Irving Berlin.
Women have some distance yet to travel before they achieve full emancipation. When men speak of human rights they usually mean the rights of menmen who will attend to the rights of everyone else. Unfortunately, today most countries remain delinquent in attending to the rights of women; and I am not speaking simply of political rights: I mean all the rights to which human beings, by virtue of their humanity, should be entitled. Since I have mentioned political rights, consider how

 

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appalling it is that as late as 1945, when the U.N. Charter was signed, only thirty-six countries in the whole world accorded women full political rights. Today men are still speaking of "mankind" when they should be speaking of "humankind."
In the United States, in so many ways one of the most progressive lands in the world, the only right truly guaranteed to women is the right to vote, and this by the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1919 largely through the work of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Yet many other rights are not constitutionally guaranteed to women; these are states' rights which are at the disposition of legislatures, and may be changed as the wind listeth. Since most of the "wind" is under the control of male legislators, change will continue to proceed at a slow exhalation. A proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution has, on several occasions, been an election-year promise by both the Democratic and the Republican parties at different times, but it has yet to be enacted into law. The proposed amendment reads: "Equality under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States nor by any state on account of sex." Even at this late date this proposed amendment has not become part of the United States Constitution. In 1948 a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee recommended, by a vote of seven to one, that the amendment "do pass," but no further action was taken. In 1972 the amendment was passed by Congress and went to the states for ratification, but failed to secure approval by the necessary minimum of thirty-eight states within ten years required for enactment. The most formidable opposition to the ERA came from conservative majorities in state legislatures. The most militant opposition has been that of STOP ERA, organized in 1972 under Phyllis Schlafly, editor of an influential conservative newsletter.
Apart from the right to vote, in some ways American women have no more constitutional rights than they had in 1789; in other words, medieval English common law is the law that still largely governs women and places upon them the stigma of inferiority and bondage. Constitutional and legal recognition of the equality of the sexes would be an important step in the right direction, but it can become part of the U.S. Constitution only if a sufficient number of citizens are in favor of it and are themselves effectively heard. The Family Medical Leave Act of 1993 is an important step in the right direction, as are the Violence Against

 

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Women Act of 1994, and the Gender Equity in Education Act signed into law that same year. And, by 1993 all fifty states had revised their laws so that under certain conditions husbands could be prosecuted for sexually assaulting their wives. However, legal equality does not mean that the relationships between the sexes will become automatically and harmoniously balanced. Such recognition is helping; but the basic age-old problems between the sexes can no more be solved by constitutional amendment than have the much younger racial and religious problems. These difficulties are all problems in human relations and until they are solved, human beings will in large numbers continue to behave unintelligently and ineffectually.
What, then, is the solution? It lies in a revaluation of our values; in a complete revaluation and reorganization of what today passes for education, but represents nothing more than
instruction,
a very different thing. Instruction is really just a training in techniques and skills, the three Rs. Such training is, of course, indispensably necessary, but it is only a limited part of what should be understood by
education .
The very word is derived from the Latin
educare,
meaning to nourish and to cause to grow. And what is it that one should nourish and cause to grow? It has taken us late into the twentieth century to at last discover the answer to that question. It is: the basic behavioral needs of the child, the needs for growth and development as a physically and mentally healthy person, a whole person, one who is able to love, to work, to play, and to think soundly. These are the four great chords of mental health, and that is what education should be about.
The basic behavioral needs are complementary to our basic physical needs, the latter are the needs for food, oxygen, water, shelter, respiration, activity, rest, sleep, bowel and bladder elimination, and the avoidance of dangerous and noxious stimuli. These physical needs must be satisfied if the organism is to survive. What has not been recognized is that there also exists a set of complementary basic emotional needs,
the basic behavioral needs
are the need for love, sensitivity, friendship, stimulation, curiosity, wonder, thinking, work, enthusiasm, imagination, creativity, song, dance exploration, experiment, learning, and many others. It is the nourishment and encouragement of these behavioral basic needs that should be the primary

 

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concern of all education, for our very survival depends upon our response to the supreme challenge, civilization: the race between education and catastrophe.

5

It is quite evident that because we have failed to understand the true meaning of education, we have become the most self-endangered species on this earth. Education should consist in satisfying the basic behavioral needs of the child. In addition, education should imply the encouragement, cultivation, and development of humane attributes and abilities. This, of course, implies a complete change of the prevailing educational system toward the recognition of the true worth of the child as a loving, brave, cooperative, independent thinker. There are already a number of private schools that have done just this, as well as a few public schools. The results are spectacularly good. In the recognition of the value of such schools, women have an important role to play.
Women have long been conditioned to believe that they are inferior to men, and though reluctant to do so have, like slaves, been forced to act as if they subscribed to what everyone believed to be the natural dispensature of nature. Because Scripture asserts it, and because men proverbially occupy the superior positions in almost all societies, male superiority has long been taken to be the natural dispensator of nature. Women's place is in the home, and man's place is in the counting house and on the board of directors. Women should not meddle in men's affairs, and so on. And yet change is occurring. Women have entered the counting houses and are seated as members of the boards of directors of large corporations. In the United States, women have become members of Congress and have attained cabinet rank; in many other parts of the world, in even greater numbers, women have attained similar positions. They have participated in peace conferences, in the General Assembly of the United Nations, and in international organizations of many different kinds. ''Nevertheless," I wrote in this book's 1953 edition, "it is still inconceivable to many persons that there should ever be a woman president or prime minister. And yet that day, too, will come"
And, indeed, it has. The world does move. In September of that very same year, 1953, the Eighth Assembly of the United Nations elected its first woman president, Vijaya Laksmi Pandit

 

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of India. In 1960 Sirimavo Bandaranaike became prime minister of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), the first woman in the world to hold such office. In January 1966 Indira Gandhi was sworn in as prime minister of India. In March 1969 Golda Meir was elected prime minister of Israel. These notable pioneers have been followed by other women serving as president, prime minister, and other offices around the world. Benazir Bhutto, the prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-1990 and again in 1993-1996, was the first woman prime minister of a Muslim country. Among other notable women leaders has been Kim Campbell, elected prime minister of Canada in 1993, the first woman political ruler in North America. That same year Agathe Uwilingiyimana became the first woman to serve as prime minister of Rwanda, and the following year was assassinated while in office. In November 1990 Mary Robinson was the first woman elected president of Ireland, an office held by Mary McAleese since 1997; McAleese is the first woman president to have succeeded another one. In addition to Ireland, women currently hold the highest offices in Sri Lanka (president and prime minister), Bangladesh, Guyana, San Marino, and New Zealand, where Jenny Shipley is the first New Zealand woman to hold the office of prime minister.
So much for the highest offices of many lands. It is an important beginning, but a small one. When one has enumerated all the advances that have been made, the truth remains that women are grossly underrepresented in the houses of parliament and legislatures of all lands. This constitutes a great loss to humanity, for as Matthew Arnold said more than hundred years ago, "If ever the world sees a time when women shall come together purely and simply for the benefit and good of mankind, it will be a power such as the world has never known."
It is curious, is it not, that so many who really accept the reality of a queen as ruler still have some hesitation accepting the idea of a woman president? Queen Elizabeth I of England has been a heroine of the English-speaking world for five centuries, and Queen Elizabeth II of England has been one of the most popular figures of the English-speaking world. Margreth II of Denmark, the first Danish queen in five centuries, has ruled since 1972. Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands has been equally popular, as was her mother Queen Juliana and grandmother Queen Wilhelmina. Queen Jadwiga (1373-99) of Poland is remembered as

 

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one of its greatest rulers and one of the truly inspired peacemakers of history. In an age of bloodshed and cruelty, she consistently tried to settle internal and international conflicts and resist aggression by diplomacy, arbitration, negotiation, and appeals to reason and justice. Believing in education as a basis for enlightenment, she left her jewels to endow the University of Krakow. Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria rank among the most notable English monarchs, and both their reigns coincided with a rise in prestige and prosperity such as England had never before experienced. It is important to observe that today in the United States there is probably a higher proportion of the population that would vote for a woman president than there has been at any other time in our history, and that is a healthy sign.
Having successfully freed herself from her thralldom to man, woman has now to emancipate herself from the myth of inferiority and to realize her potentials to the fullest. That seems a consummation well on its way to fulfillment.
It was asked earlier: Can one argue the natural superiority of woman in the face of all the evidence to the contrary? The evidence to the contrary merits our serious attention, and that it shall receive. What has, up to now, usually been omitted from discussions of this sort is the evidence in the pages which follow. Let me make it quite clear at the outset that the evidence does not consist of my opinions or speculations, but of the verifiable facts of science. As Mark Twain remarked, supposing is good, but finding out is better.
As we shall see, the findings of modern science controvert the age-old belief in feminine inferiority. It is not only possible to show that most of the things that have been said about women to their disadvantage are false; it is also possible to show that women are naturally biologically more richly endowed with genes that contribute to adaptability and survival than are men. Women, on the whole, possess a greater number of biological advantages than men, yet it is not their number but their overall quality that is important. These many qualitative differences confer biological advantages upon females. Many of these differences have not even been acknowledged, and where they have, they have usually been slighted or totally ignored. The traditional mythology has made it possible to bypass the facts or to render one insensible to them.

 

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