Editor’s Note: This article was written by Audrey Adrick in March of 1972. There was a lot of activism going on during this time period with the Vietnam War protests, the civil rights movement and women’s rights as well. March is women’s history month, and the evolution of where women stood in society is explained in this article. Adrick digs very far back into society to primitive times to establish where women were deemed inferior, how times have evolved and then questions if the theory is still applicable.
If women are men’s equals, how did they become inferior to men? This is a question which I have been confronted with and will try to answer. Throughout the history of mankind, women have been considered socially inferior because they were biologically inferior. But are we biologically inferior?
Man started out as hunters and food gatherers, much like our ancestral predecessors. In these early societies, it is assumed that males did the hunting. Females were confined by the demands of childbirth and child care. In pre-bottle days, childcare meant nursing an infant, sometimes up to the age of two years, every three or four hours. So childcare demanded a good part of the mothers’ time. Presumably, women had many more babies than they have today. Birth control was unheard of, and a majority of the infants died before reaching the age of five. This biological function of women left men free to hunt. By hunting, men increased their knowledge of the environment. He learned how to track, where the prey lived and hid, and the signs of certain weather conditions. Men began improving the tools they used to hunt with. This division of labor led men to a wider range of experience, so they seemed intelligent than the sedentary women.
As human life progressed, Ashley Montague believes that men became jealous of women’s power of childbirth. Consciously or unconsciously, they began to view pregnancy and menstruation as a handicap. In this early society, it did confine women to a small home territory. Women, themselves, thought of their role as an inferior one to men’s. Out of this developed the thinking that all women did was to let the child grow within them. Men planted the seed and women were like the passive earth which gave the seed nutrients. Men took away women’s creative role in procreation. In some primitive societies today, men conceive the idea of a child, and their wives merely act as a body in which the idea can grow.
Since pregnancy and menstruation were looked upon as a handicap, taboos were formed around them. Women became unclean during menstruation; it was called “the curse.” Social customs rather than biological function dictated the proper role women played in society. As the society grew more complex, so did these taboos. Childbirth was no longer a natural act, but it became a way of life surrounded by myths. For example, in our present society, a pregnant woman is discouraged if not prohibited from taking an active role in the working world. After childbirth, she is confined to a hospital for about five days. If a woman decides to return to her career after giving birth, she is considered a bad mother. In our society, a bad mother is a failure as a woman.
Another thing worth noting is that men are generally physically larger than women. When physical strength determined leadership, men naturally assumed this role. The leadership role was then defined as a man’s role and no longer a matter of physical strength.
Today, women are fighting for their equality because their biological role in reproduction is no longer a handicap. The modern woman does not want a large family if she has one at all. Women have discovered that they are more than baby machines. The leadership roles in our society no longer require any kind of physical strength. We are now struggling to change outdated customs which have no reasonable grounds. Now, many people are turning to animal societies to show that the male is superior. I suppose they do not realize that our brains and dexterity have evolved above the animal level. Our society has moved from physical power to mental, and there is no evidence that women are mentally inferior to men.