Around the world, many cultures have demonstrated that they believe men to be superior, even virtuous, while women are evil. Some tribes in Africa and Asia slice off the sensitive parts of the genitalia of young girls. The practice, known as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), is a shocking manifestation of this belief. While we in the West might feel that we are above such insanity, the denigration of women and girls exists in our “developed” countries as well. In early 2016, female genital mutilation was discovered in Sweden. The movie, The Magdalene Sisters, portrays a culture where girls in Ireland were locked away to keep them from tempting boys and men. While the movie may have exaggerated, the Irish government recently apologized to 10,000 women who, as children and teenagers, slaved in Catholic workhouses between 1922 and 1996.
The world is rapidly changing its attitudes and beliefs about women. In 1800, few people thought of educating girls. Throughout the nineteenth century, at least among civilized people, education became obligatory for everyone. Throughout the twentieth century, women obtained the right to vote, then slowly entered governments and businesses.
In 1952, Ashley Montagu published The Natural Superiority of Women(2), in which he proposed a reevaluation of the relationship between the sexes.
Montagu wrote:
Woman knows what true love is; let her not be tempted from her knowledge by false ideas that man has created for her to worship. Woman must stand firm and be true to her own inner nature; to yield to the prevailing false conceptions of love, of unloving love, is to abdicate her great evolutionary mission to keep human beings true to themselves, to keep them from doing violence to their inner nature, to help them to realize their potentialities for being loving and cooperative. Were women to fail in this task, all hope for the future of humanity would depart from the world.
What is holding us back from true gender equality?
Now, in the twenty-first century, the change toward gender equity is accelerating. True equality is within sight. What is holding us back? Why can’t we flip a switch and create the equality that every thinking person supports? For many people, perhaps most, sexism exists below the level of conscious thought. It is primal. Little girls and boys are born without gender prejudice. We must ensure that their education includes only gender equality.
Thanks for reading,
Ron
(2) Montagu, Ashley, The Natural Superiority of Women, 1952-1999, Macmillan Press, New York. ISBN 978-0761989820.
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