Free The Natural Superiority of Women by Ashley Montagu Page B

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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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.
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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