Book: The Natural Superiority of Women

Overview

Ashley Montagu’s 1953 book “The Natural Superiority of Women” challenges the long-standing presumption of male superiority by arguing that women possess biological, psychological, and social advantages that have been systematically overlooked or devalued. An anthropologist by training, Montagu gathers evidence from embryology, medicine, and cultural anthropology to contend that many qualities societies prize, cooperation, endurance, adaptability, and the capacity to sustain life, are more characteristic of women, and that recognizing this fact is essential to a humane and equitable civilization.

Core Thesis

Montagu’s central claim is that the female constitution represents the more stable and resilient human pattern, with the male as a more variable and vulnerable derivative. He presents the female as the biological “default, ” noting that sex differentiation proceeds from a basic female template, and argues that the costs of male specialization include greater susceptibility to disease and developmental disturbance. He reframes superiority not as sheer muscular strength or aggressive prowess but as the capacity to preserve, nurture, and adapt, the qualities that make social life possible.

Biological and Medical Evidence

Drawing on mid-century demographic and clinical data, Montagu highlights women’s longer average life expectancy, lower infant and childhood mortality, and greater resistance to many infectious diseases. He points to the male’s higher incidence of sex-linked defects and fetal loss to illustrate physiological vulnerability. Female hormonal cycles, pregnancy, and lactation are presented not as disabilities but as complex adaptive achievements that require remarkable homeostatic balance. He emphasizes women’s superior endurance in prolonged stress, their relative resistance to certain metabolic disorders, and their greater recovery rates from trauma and surgery, arguing that these measures better capture the essence of fitness than episodic displays of force.

Psychological and Social Capacities

The book links women’s biological endowment with social traits, empathy, nurturance, and cooperative orientation, that underpin child-rearing and communal stability. Montagu contends that these capacities are neither trivial nor confined to the private sphere; they are the very foundations of culture. He maintains that societies have mistakenly equated assertiveness and domination with merit while consigning the relational and generative work of women to invisibility, thereby distorting both science and social policy.

Critique of Androcentric Science

Montagu argues that much of what has passed for objective science was shaped by male-centered assumptions. He scrutinizes how researchers have coded aggression as “leadership, ” dependency as “weakness, ” and domestic labor as “unskilled.” By revisiting these categories, he proposes that attributes often dismissed as feminine, patience, care, foresight, are precisely those that make civilization survivable. He also notes cross-cultural evidence from matrilineal and more egalitarian societies to show that female authority is neither aberrant nor destabilizing.

Social Implications

The argument culminates in a program for equality rooted in a revaluation of human qualities. Montagu calls for coeducation that cultivates cooperation alongside competition, public policies that support maternal and child health, and economic arrangements that recognize caregiving as socially central. He insists that men benefit when permitted to develop so-called feminine virtues, and that the point is not female domination but an integrated humanism that brings women’s strengths fully into public life.

Style and Legacy

Written in accessible, polemical prose, the book provoked debate by turning a familiar hierarchy on its head. While some of its biological claims reflect the science of its time and have since been refined, the intellectual move, shifting the metric of superiority from force to life-sustaining capacity, anticipated later feminist critiques of knowledge and value. The title’s provocation serves a clarifying purpose: to expose bias, elevate neglected evidence, and argue that the health of society depends on recognizing and institutionalizing the strengths women have long embodied.