Ashley Montagu, the London-born anthropologist and popular author whose energy, erudition and showmanship brought genetics, paleontology and other topics in the life sciences to a wide American audience, died Friday in Princeton, N.J. He was 94.
The author of more than 60 books, Mr. Montagu recently completed a substantial revision, published this year, of his influential 1953 book, “The Natural Superiority of Women,” and was collaborating with his biographer, Susan Sperling, when he was hospitalized in March. He died of protracted cardiovascular disease, Sperling said.
Mr. Montagu’s wide-ranging career as a free-lance commentator on nearly everything human, along with his white hair, owlish glasses and pipe, made him the public picture of the professor in the 1950s and 1960s. But despite a voluminous production of scholarly works, he was unable to win tenure at any of the universities where he taught, according to Sperling. That slight was due, in part, to his ideas about the equality of the races and the sexes, which were startling for their day, she said.
Mr. Montagu wrote books on anthropology, human anatomy, intelligence, marriage, why people cry and the history of swearing, as well as an account of John Merrick, the severely disfigured “Elephant Man” of Victorian England.
Montague Francis Ashley Montagu was born Israel Ehrenberg on June 28, 1905, in the largely working-class East End section of London. In previous biographical articles, Mr. Montagu apparently said or made it known that he was the son of a stockbroker in the City of London, the financial district, but his father really was a tailor, a Polish-born Jew, and his mother a Russian-born Jew, according to Sperling.
“I don’t know why exactly he changed his name,” Sperling said. “He was ambitious to do great things and as Israel, well, that would have been an impediment in British academia,” she said.
The classic autodidact, Mr. Montagu as a teenager puzzled his parents by visiting London’s used-book stores and buying second-hand copies of challenging authors such as Thomas Henry Huxley, the British biologist who championed Darwin. At 15, he won a literary contest and selected William McDougall’s “Introduction to Social Psychology” as his prize. He was perhaps the first undergraduate to study physical anthropology at the University of London.
He pursued his graduate studies at Columbia University in 1927, interrupting his studies there to work in ethnology and anthropology in Italy and physical anthropology at a medical museum in London. He got his PhD from Columbia in 1937 after studying under pioneers of anthropology like Franz Boas.
In 1953, he told an interviewer that the United States had had a profound effect on him. “I was brought up a stuffed-shirt Englishman. I wasn’t very human. What America did for me was to humanize me. Democratize me, beginning with the man who examined my luggage on the dock in 1927. He didn’t call me `sir’ and I resented it.”
Mr. Montagu won his first fame in the 1940s by arguing that race was a social construct, a product of perceptions about race, rather than a biological fact. He was a principal drafter of a UN “Statement on Race” in 1949 that incorporated these ideas.
His most noticed work, however, was his 1953 book “The Natural Superiority of Women,” in which he argued that men were a form of “incomplete” woman and that women were in many ways biologically superior. The attention and the sales from the book allowed him to resign his teaching position at Rutgers University in 1955.
The controversy, in those prefeminist days, was enormous, but non-threatening. With his willingness to return reporters’ telephone calls, Mr. Montagu was widely quoted and therefore influential. His professorial manner and dry wit made him a frequent guest on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson.
Mr. Montagu is survived by his wife, the former Marjorie Peakes, and three children.
