If feminism crested in the waves associated with women's suffrage and women's liberation, the intervening decades would seem to represent a trough, lacking energy or momentum, even threatening to reverse the gains of other eras. The career of the anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901–78) spanned this period, and her reputation as a champion of women's causes rose and fell just as dramatically, but out of sync with the larger movement. According to her feminist critics, most notably Betty Friedan, Mead's early work—and her personal life—promised freedom that her later work snatched away. Friedan was especially vexed by what she saw as the contrast between the culturally constructed gender fluidity that Mead proclaimed in Sex and Temperament (1935) and the biologically based functionalism that she preached in Male and Female (1949). Mead, however, believed that all of her work took a both–and approach to culture and biology, and she claimed that anyone who thought otherwise had misread her. As she wrote to Viola Klein, a sociologist whose critique anticipated Friedan's, “In your phrasing I am made to say that masculine and feminine typing is relative and based on purely cultural conditioning, but I didn't say that, and I never believed it.” In fact, Mead did say words very much to that effect. Whether those words accurately conveyed what she believed is a harder question to answer.Footnote 2
This article first considers the position, popularized by Friedan but advanced by other writers as well, that Mead completely changed her mind about the production of gender between 1935 and 1949. Using lesser-known and unpublished sources, it then recovers Mead's articulation of the continuity running throughout her writing on what she termed “sex roles.”Footnote 3 Mead's correspondence with Klein provides especially helpful insight into what Mead understood to be the premises of her work. Lastly, instead of situating Mead between two waves of feminism, the article sets her writing within the context of a century bifurcated by the advent of atomic weapons, an ominous development that preoccupied her from 1945 to the end of her career. Peter Mandler has helpfully analyzed Mead's intercultural studies in a Cold War framework, but her arguments about gender have more often been related to the “nuclear family” than to nuclear weapons. Mead certainly was concerned about family formation in the postwar period, but she was even more concerned about the prospect of human annihilation. A renewed attention to women's reproductive capabilities, which Friedan disdained as a “functional freeze,” was a component of Mead's effort to help the human race survive the postwar period. From Mead's perspective, the world changed irrevocably in 1945, but her thinking about nature, nurture, and gender remained consistent.Footnote 4
From Sex and Temperament to Male and Female
Mead completed the research for Sex and Temperament at an exceptionally fraught, yet intellectually fertile, period in her life. She traveled to New Guinea in fall 1931 with her second husband, Reo Fortune, a mercurial New Zealand-born anthropologist she had met on her journey home from Samoa in 1926. Mead and Fortune divided their fieldwork based on their relative strengths, interests, and access. Fortune concentrated on linguistics, religion and mythology, and men's activities, while Mead expanded the focus of her first two books (Coming of Age in Samoa, Growing Up in New Guinea), on childhood and adolescence, into an investigation of the entire life cycle, continuing to pay special attention to women and sex roles. In the midst of the trip, Mead and Fortune encountered British anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who would become Mead's third husband. Mead also carried the manuscript that her former mentor and lover Ruth Benedict would publish in 1934 as Patterns in Culture. As the three fieldworkers discussed their own observations, and Benedict's, while huddled together in a tiny mosquito-netted room, Mead's research questions crystallized:
What if there were other kinds of innate differences—differences as important as those between the sexes, but that cut across sex lines? What if human beings, innately different at birth, could be shown to fit into systematically defined temperamental types, and what if there were male and female versions of each of these temperamental types? And what if a society—by the way in which children were reared, by the kinds of behavior that were rewarded or punished, and by its traditional depiction of heroes, heroines, and villains, witches, sorcerers, supernaturals—could place its major emphasis on one type of temperament … And what if the expectations about male–female differences, so characteristic of Euro-American cultures, could be reversed[?]Footnote 5
These questions encapsulated Mead's personal and scholarly preoccupations in the 1930s. Mead and Benedict, along with their senior colleague Franz Boas, established the “culture and personality” school of anthropology at Columbia University, which posited that entire cultures could be classified as peaceful or violent, passive or aggressive, possessive or generous, and so forth, just as individuals could. Within this school of thought, Mead was particularly interested in unusual combinations of sex type and cultural expectation—women who were aggressive in a culture that instructed them to be passive, for example, or cultures where men performed tasks that most other cultures assigned to women. Finding such unusual combinations in the field would illustrate the interplay of nature (“innate differences”) and nurture (“the way in which children were reared”) in shaping personality. On a more personal note, Mead and Benedict both considered themselves “deviants,” in a non-pejorative sense meaning individuals who did not match their culture's gendered expectations, so the search for deviants in other cultures was a quest to locate their own fictive kin. Additionally, Mead was trying to figure out at this point in her life whether she was better partnered with Fortune, an aggressive man's man, or Bateson, whose temperament was more similar to her own.Footnote 6
Whether by accident, as she described it, or by manipulative design, as critics accused, Mead found exactly what she was looking for in New Guinea. The three primitive societies she studied combined sex and temperament in starkly different ways. Among the Arapesh, both men and women displayed personality traits that Westerners would consider maternal. They were “trained to be co-operative, unaggressive, responsive to the needs and demands of others,” and they were seemingly uninterested in sex. The Mundugumor were exactly the opposite: “both men and women developed as ruthless, aggressive, positively sexed individuals, with the maternal cherishing aspects of personality at a minimum.” (The Mundugumor were so anti-maternal that they routinely killed their babies, a practice that horrified Mead.) The Tchambuli differentiated sex roles in a manner that reversed Western expectations, “with the woman the dominant, impersonal, managing partner, the man the less responsible and the emotionally dependent person.”Footnote 7
These observations added up to a powerful argument for nurture over nature, cultural contingency over biological destiny. Mead wrote,
If those temperamental attitudes which we have traditionally regarded as feminine—such as passivity, responsiveness, and a willingness to cherish children—can so easily be set up as the masculine pattern in one tribe, and in another be outlawed for the majority of women as well as for the majority of men, we no longer have any basis for regarding such aspects of behaviour as sex-linked.
A few lines later, she stated even more emphatically, “We are forced to conclude that human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.” The urgency of this argument was underlined for Mead and the culture and personality school by the threat of Nazism and other racist ideologies, which slated individuals for greatness or destruction based solely on genetics. As Shira Tarrant wrote in When Sex Became Gender, “Boas and Mead favored culture over biology in explaining human behavior. But neither anthropologist rejected biology; they rejected biological explanations used for eugenic or political purposes.” Many readers at the time and later missed this nuance in Mead's argument.Footnote 8
Reviewers seized on human malleability as the message of the book. The New York Times review, written by feminist journalist Florence Finch Kelly, began,
This Margaret Mead is a dangerous person. She goes down to New Guinea, studies primitive tribes for two years and comes back with a book like a bomb that she drops into the complacent, fundamental conviction of the Occidental world, both scientific and social, that the sexes are innately different in their psychological attributes and that the male is dominant by right of brain and brawn.
Mead exploded that thinking, Kelly asserted, by demonstrating “that there is no inherent psychologic difference between the sexes and that the differences that seem and are believed to be inherent are merely the result of social environment and training.” The academic reviewer for the journal American Anthropologist, Austrian anthropologist Richard Thurnwald, agreed that Mead endeavored to show “the absence of innate temperamental differences between the sexes, and to prove that these are ‘socially produced’ (p. 310) and ‘do not occur in societies which disregard them,’ such as the societies described in the book (p. 164).” Unlike Kelly, Thurnwald did not find Mead's argument convincing, and he even suggested that Mead was “not herself convinced of her conclusions,” because the book contained numerous internal contradictions. The details of Mead's observations of men and women in the three societies were messier than her theoretical framework, which strengthened her claim to be a responsible field anthropologist but undermined what he took to be her overall argument.Footnote 9
Mead emphatically objected to Thurnwald's review and published a rebuttal in American Anthropologist the following year. “[N]owhere do I suggest that I have found any material which disproves the existence of sex differences,” she wrote. Rather, in her own estimation, her research suggested “that certain types of behavior which have been traditionally regarded as sex linked are not sex linked, but are temperamental—i.e., physiologically given—potentialities of some of the members of each sex.” To make her case, Mead drew distinctions between temperament (the “native equipment” with which a child is born), character (the result of interaction between temperament and cultural conditioning), and personality (“the sum total of temperament, character, and idiosyncratic traits which are characteristic of the whole individual”), calling her usage the “technical sense” of the terms. Observing cultural variation in the expectations for men and women demonstrated that those expectations were culturally conditioned, but it did not settle the question of what role biology, including the biology of reproduction, might play.Footnote 10
Heedless of Mead's objections, the reading of Sex and Temperament as proof of nurture over nature became even more entrenched in later works. Betty Friedan quoted from the above section of the book (“we no longer have any basis for regarding such aspects of behaviour as sex-linked”) approvingly in The Feminine Mystique. Although Friedan did not cite the line about human nature being “almost unbelievably malleable,” it appeared in countless other places, including monographs in women's studies (for example, Nancy Reeves, Womankind: Beyond the Stereotypes (1971); Alice G. Sargent, Beyond Sex Roles (1977); Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres (1982); Barbara Finlay, Before the Second Wave (2007); Mari Jo Buhle, Feminism and Its Discontents (2009)), social science textbooks (for example, Jerry S. Wiggins, The Psychology of Personality (1971); Bert N. Adams, The Family: A Sociological Interpretation (1975 and multiple later editions); Fred W. Voget, A History of Ethnology (1975); David E. Hunter and Phillip Whitten, Anthropology: Contemporary Perspectives (1975 and multiple later editions)), and books on human nature (for example, Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature (1992); Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2003); Robin Headlam Wells and Johnjoe McFadden, eds., Human Nature: Fact and Fiction (2006)). In sum, “that masculine and feminine typing is relative and based on purely cultural conditioning,” the statement Mead vehemently disavowed in her letter to Viola Klein, is the one aspect of Mead's thought that readers from a variety of disciplines have been most likely to encounter.
Readers who took this message from Sex and Temperament were understandably befuddled by Male and Female. Granted, Mead's life had changed markedly by the time she wrote the latter book. She had divorced Fortune to marry Bateson in 1936, and they had a child together, Mary Catherine, in 1939. Mead and Bateson spent much of World War II separated, both contributing their social-science expertise to various aspects of the Allies’ war effort.Footnote 11 The couple would divorce in 1950, and Mead would not return to fieldwork until 1953. Her primary publication in the interim, And Keep Your Powder Dry (1942), provided anthropological commentary on the United States in hopes of boosting morale and laying a foundation for an American-led postwar world order. For all of these reasons, Male and Female was more synthetic, less based on specific field observations, and even more oriented toward intervening in American culture than Sex and Temperament had been. This difference in tone and intention is evident from the two books’ opening lines. Sex and Temperament began, “When we study the simpler societies, we cannot but be impressed with the many ways in which man has taken a few hints and woven them into the beautiful imaginative social fabrics that we call civilizations.” Male and Female began, “How are men and women to think about their maleness and their femaleness in this twentieth century, in which so many of our old ideas must be made new?”Footnote 12
Friedan noted, correctly, that Freudian psychology and the biology of sexual reproduction figured more prominently in Male and Female than in Sex and Temperament. Whereas the earlier book provided thick descriptions of rituals, kinship networks, and belief systems in the three societies discussed, the third chapter of Male and Female segued quickly from thumbnail sketches of seven South Sea peoples to what Mead identified as the primary difference between men and women: their respective roles in reproduction. In a passage quoted at length in The Feminine Mystique, Mead wrote,
Out of bodies fashioned for complementary roles in perpetuating the race, what differences in functioning, in capacities, in sensitivities, in vulnerabilities, arise? How is what men can do related to the fact that their reproductive role is over in a single act, what women can do related to the fact that their reproductive role takes nine months of gestation, and until recently many months of breast feeding? What is the contribution of each sex, seen as itself, not as a mere imperfect version of the other?
That last line showed Mead moving beyond Sigmund Freud's conception of females as defective males, afflicted with penis envy, and toward Erik Erikson's more evenhanded treatment of sexual identification. Mead had encountered Freud as early as her undergraduate years at Barnard, but by her own account it was reading Erikson in the early 1930s that caused her to make these concepts “an integral part of my theoretical equipment.” This new mode of analysis exerted a significant influence on Male and Female, creating strong resemblance between it and Erikson's Childhood and Society, published in 1950.Footnote 13
Friedan interpreted Mead's attention to reproductive bodies in Male and Female as retrogressive on multiple levels. Mead had dredged up Freud, whom Friedan had sought to bury in the previous chapter of Feminine Mystique. Adopting this “Freudian lens” in turn caused Mead to pursue “what certain irreverent anthropologists call the toilet-paper theory of history,” taking unclothed, primitive bodies as normative and ignoring the ways that clothing and modern civilization mattered. In addition to setting the discipline of anthropology back several years, Friedan asserted that Mead's prose “made a great many American women envy the serene femininity of a bare-breasted Samoan, and try to make themselves into languorous savages, breasts unfettered by civilization's brassieres, and brains undisturbed by pallid man-made knowledge of the goals of human progress.” (Friedan did not explain how one book could simultaneously serve as “the cornerstone of the feminine mystique” and inspire hippie bra-spurning.) The effect of Mead's revival of Freudian functionalism, Friedan averred, would be to “freeze” women in their roles as mothers, convincing them that they could only want what their Stone Age foremothers had.Footnote 14
Overall, Friedan described Male and Female as a betrayal of the hopes Mead had raised with Sex and Temperament. Mead had once presented a vision of a world in which women could be anything they wished, Friedan lamented,
But this is not the vision the mystique took from Margaret Mead; nor is it the vision that she continues to offer. Increasingly, in her own pages, her interpretation blurs, is subtly transformed, into a glorification of women in the female role—as defined by their sexual biological function. At times she seems to lose her own anthropological awareness of the malleability of human personality, and to look at anthropological data from the Freudian point of view—sexual biology determines all, anatomy is destiny.
Excerpts from Friedan's takedown of Mead appear in the most recent edition of the widely used intellectual-history anthology The American Intellectual Tradition, but none of Mead's own writing is included. As with Mead's alleged support for the surpassing malleability of human nature in Sex and Temperament, her alleged denial of any such malleability in Male and Female became more widely known than Mead's actual, more complicated, position. Historian of feminism Louise M. Newman posited, “The dismissal of Mead from the early feminist tradition may have been encouraged by Betty Friedan's interpretation of Mead (post-1949) as a biological essentialist.”Footnote 15
Friedan's perception of Male and Female was not, initially, as widely shared as her perception of Sex and Temperament. The New York Times reviewer, anthropologist Bernard Mishkin, deemed the book “another exercise in cultural relativism,” building on insights from Sex and Temperament that had become common knowledge: “Everyone knows, too, the relations between the sexes are more cultural facts than biological and can be endlessly elaborated in accordance with a variety of themes.” Similarly, anthropologist S. F. Nadel, reviewing the book for American Anthropologist, wrote that in the later book Mead “resumed and greatly expanded the theme of her earlier study,” albeit with the alteration that “Dr. Mead now admits more fully the weight of physiological factors” on sex role development. Friedan was not, however, alone in reading Male and Female as a significant and disheartening departure from Mead's prior work. Sociologist Viola Klein (1908–73) shared Friedan's view, and her 1950 correspondence with Mead illumines both the plausibility of this reading and the firmness of Mead's objection to it.Footnote 16
Mead and Klein
Klein's road to academic success was much rockier than Mead's. Driven by political pressure, her Jewish family moved from Vienna to Prague, where she completed her first doctorate in a program that combined the study of languages, psychology, and philosophy. In 1938 she and her brother fled to England; their parents, who stayed behind, perished in concentration camps. Klein worked as a domestic servant until she secured entry into the London School of Economics, where she completed a second doctorate in sociology under the mentorship of fellow refugee Karl Mannheim. Despite her two graduate degrees, she was able to find only piecemeal writing and translation work for twenty years. She was finally appointed a lecturer in sociology at the University of Reading in 1964, a job she held for less than a decade before her retirement and death at age sixty-five.Footnote 17
Klein's work was fairly similar to Mead's, although they took different methodological approaches. Klein's 1946 book The Feminine Character: History of an Ideology addressed reproductive biology, sex roles, and temperament; critiqued patriarchal constructions of femininity; and considered ways that women's roles and identities were changing in modern society. Criticized for militancy, and lacking a scholarly community to engage in Great Britain, the book languished until its rediscovery (and reissue) in the early 1970s, when it was hailed as an early exemplar of feminist analysis. The 1956 study Women's Two Roles: Work and Home, which Klein coauthored with Swedish sociologist and diplomat Alva Myrdal (wife of Gunnar Myrdal), received more attention. A statistics-heavy comparison of women's lives and labors in France, Great Britain, Sweden, and the United States, this book was rapidly translated into a half-dozen languages and adopted for use in sociology classes. (Friedan cited this book three times in The Feminine Mystique, but made no mention of The Feminine Character.) Klein favored statistical precision over theoretical generalization, concerned both that generalizations obscured the details of individual lives and that theoretical conceptualizations too easily created categories of “others” for purposes of social control. As a woman, and a Jew, Klein was all too aware of the marginalizing force of such categories. At the same time, though, she acknowledged in a letter that “every social situation consists not only of objective data but of the subjective attitudes of the people.” Numbers and discourses both mattered. Put differently, Klein applied the method of her second doctorate without abandoning the emphases of her first.Footnote 18
This background enabled Klein to be an especially keen reader of Mead as their paths crossed in 1950, when both contributed articles to a special edition of the Journal of Social Issues on the “problem” of career women. In her article, “The Stereotype of Femininity,” Klein perceived much the same contrast between Sex and Temperament and Male and Female that Friedan had flagged more than a decade later. In Sex and Temperament, Klein wrote, Mead “has done more than anybody else to underline the relativity of the terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ when applied to psychological characteristics.” Klein had emphasized this relativity in The Feminine Character. But in her estimation, Mead's later book repudiated this effort:
Recently, in Male and Female, however, Margaret Mead has come out in favor of a theory which explains feminine psychology in terms of women's biological function. Though she still maintains, as before, that to assign certain psychological traits and certain social roles to one sex rather than another means forcing Nature into a straight-jacket and causing frustration and neuroses to great numbers of individuals who won't fit into the mold, she nevertheless asserts that from birth on—which itself, in her view, is a different experience for the two sexes—the life and the mental outlook of a girl are shaped by her potential maternity. A boy has to be active and to prove himself through achievement; he has to “become” in order to be reassured; a girl simply is.
Klein attributed the shift in Mead's thinking to the ascendant influence of psychoanalysis. “Thus,” she wrote, “as a social anthropologist Margaret Mead stresses the variety of culture patterns and the purely conventional coincidence of the psychological traits with sex; under the influence of psycho-analytic theory she links the two.” Klein objected to this linkage, both as a scientist and as a student of language. Her own research showed that “femininity is a quality divorced from sex and possessed in varying degrees by individuals of either. It is impossible to nail down what the term, so widely used and so generally accepted, really means.” She cited the example of a London exhibition of paintings by Berthe Morisot and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Morisot's loving attention to detail was hailed by art critics for its “exquisite femininity,” even though the same quality was displayed equally by Renoir and other male impressionists. Because gendered categories were so arbitrary, and because women's social disadvantages were so evident, Klein declared that “the time has come to lay aside the battle-axe and to stop the competitive struggle between the sexes. What matters, at this point, is to re-emphasize the value of the individual personality and to call back to mind the common humanity of men and women.”Footnote 19
In correspondence, Mead pushed back against Klein's characterization of her two books, initially referring Klein to her published reply to Thurnwald's review of Sex and Temperament. As Mead had argued back in 1937, “Whether or not these temperamental traits are equally distributed among both sexes remains for further investigation, as does the whole problem of sex differences, whether those differences be regarded as innate or as functions of the character formation of individuals with different biological equipment.” To use Klein's example of the impressionist painters, perhaps it was mere cultural convention to regard loving attention to detail as “feminine,” or perhaps loving attention to detail was a temperamental trait usually but not exclusively found in humans who are biologically female. Observing that a small group of male and female painters produced similar works could not prove or eliminate either possibility.Footnote 20
This explanation failed to satisfy Klein. She insisted to Mead that, between Sex and Temperament and Male and Female,
something has happened that has produced in you a change of heart, if not of mind, and that you now maintain two contradictory points of view:
(A) The relativity of the terms “masculine” and “feminine” as applied to mental characteristics; the purely cultural conditioning on which this dichotomy is based; and the evil psychological effects which result from the convention of labelling some character traits, attitudes, interests, occupations, etc. either “masculine” or feminine”.
(B) The existence of fundamental, biologically conditioned differences in the mental make-up of the sexes which are universal, i.e. independent of cultural conditions, such as the difference in the experience of birth or the feminine passivity which is the outcome of the fact that a girl simply “is”, while the boy has to “prove himself” by achievement.
Klein assured Mead that she still essentially agreed with her, despite what she saw as the deleterious effects of psychoanalytical theory. (In a separate bit of correspondence, Klein called Mead a psychoanalyst, which Mead vigorously denied.) Klein was concerned, though, that Mead was unable to see something in her two books that was obvious to other readers. “It is my impression that you are not aware of this contradiction,” she wrote, “but, unconsciously, give expression to a conflict which is characteristic of the present state of scientific development which, in turn, is the result of the specialization of the sciences.” Mead wrote as if cultural anthropology and psychoanalytic theory were compatible, but to Klein they were not.Footnote 21
Mead's response downplayed the influence of psychoanalysis on Male and Female, instead arguing that it and Sex and Temperament proceeded from the same premises. All along, in her own account, Mead assumed that varieties of cultural patterning were built on a complex foundation of differences between individuals, encompassing “temperamental characteristics … cross-cut by a series of innate sex characters.” Femaleness combined with one temperament would be quite different from femaleness combined with a different temperament, she thought, but “the two femalenesses can be systematically related to each other,” as could the malenesses of men with different temperaments. The pressures on individuals whose combinations deviated from their culture's norms could take different forms as well, depending on whether one was, as Mead phrased it, “a female A, in a culture which thinks only males should be A,” or “a female B in a culture that doesn't recognize any B's at all.” (Mead did not go so far as to call these pressures “evil psychological effects.”) “Using A's and B's like that is of course terrific oversimplification of the point,” she admitted, “but I do believe that the same temperaments occur in every human population, and can be identified.” Decades later, in an extended but never-published interview with Jean Houston, Mead made the same point in the form of advice:
So when I talk to a girl I don't say be a female, first. I'd say find out what temperament you are first, who you are, who you are. Who you are isn't being a woman. Who you are is what kind of a person you are, and then see what kind of a female version of that temperament you are, not what kind of temperamental version of femaleness you are, because I think the difference between different temperaments is at least as great and maybe greater than the difference between males and females.Footnote 22
The question whether certain pairings of sex and temperament were more common than others across societies remained open, but Mead declined to pursue it in 1950. Instead, she told Klein,
I came to two conclusions: (1) that temperament was not a very good place to put major emphasis at present, given the state of the world, and that while it should never be forgotten, I would not study it primarily, and (2) that the next thing to study was character formation, with an emphasis on the dynamic through which different sorts of children, born with different temperaments, were educated to approximate the ideal.
As Mead had asserted to Thurnwald, temperament, character, and personality were different things. If one wished to change the world, as Mead very much did, attention to that which was innate (temperament) promised less payoff than attention to that which could be molded (character). “There is really no difference in my premises throughout this entire period,” Mead concluded, “although with each field trip I have learned more about the role of the body and the role of inward bodily oriented thinking.”Footnote 23
Although they never came to agreement, Mead and Klein remained cordial throughout their correspondence. The same could not be said for Mead's exchanges with the anthropologist Jules Henry, her former student at Columbia who reviewed Male and Female for the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. Henry contended that Mead relied so heavily on bodily oriented thinking, derived from Erikson, Freud, and Bateson, that her analysis had become “unidimensional” and consequently useless. He dated this shift in Mead's approach to the 1942 publication (with Bateson) of Balinese Character and judged it a “complete reinterpretation of all her earlier works.” Henry's review hurt and enraged Mead. She drafted a short note to him, unsent, and the start of a fierce rejoinder for journal publication. Two days later, she instead wrote a longer note to Henry, describing her reaction to his review as “pretty close to dispair [sic],” asking whether he was reacting to some personal slight of which she was unaware, and suggesting that he write a retraction—or else she would publish a refutation. Walking Henry through several of her works, she argued that she did “not have a deterministic scheme” and had changed her thinking so little that she had just repurposed a paper she wrote in 1930 for publication in a new textbook. Henry declined to write a retraction, and Mead's rejoinder appeared in the journal in April 1951. Her premises had not changed since 1925, she insisted, although she allowed that she had engaged more thoroughly with “theoretical leads from the fields of psychoanalysis, gestalt and topological psychology, studies of child development and learning theory, as advances in these fields and increasing interdisciplinary communication made their theoretical formulations more cross culturally useful.” Henry's reading of Male and Female and his imputation of radical change from her earlier work were, to Mead, “quite inaccurate” and “likely to seriously mislead” students of anthropology.Footnote 24
Mead's interdisciplinary and persistently both–and approach to sex and temperament, male and female, nature and nurture, and related binaries perplexed her interlocutors, who wanted her to pick a side and reduce the number of variables in play. As Mead confided to Klein, “my graduate psychology students … were completely enraged after I had given a semester on cultural conditioning, when I gave a final lecture on temperament and [they] said with great bitterness that I couldn't have it both ways.” (Henry was one of those students.) But could cultural conditioning defy biology? Did the common humanity of men and women override the differences between and among them? Mead's answer to both questions was, consistently, no, but she remained vague on the relative strength of these forces. As far back as Sex and Temperament, just a few paragraphs after the much-quoted line about human nature being “almost unbelievably malleable,” she had written,
Granting the malleability of human nature, whence arise the differences between standardized personalities that different cultures decree for all of their members, or which one culture decrees for the members of one sex as contrasted with the members of the opposite sex? If such differences are culturally created, as this material would most strongly suggest that they are, if the new-born child can be shaped with equal ease into an unaggressive Arapesh or an aggressive Mundugumor, why do these striking contrasts occur at all? … Cultures are man-made, they are built of human materials; they are diverse but comparable structures within which human beings can attain full human stature. Upon what have they built their diversities?
Male and Female, then, picked up that question right where Sex and Temperament left it: “The differences between the two sexes is [sic] one of the important conditions upon which we have built the many varieties of human culture that give human beings dignity and stature.” And Mead's article in the Journal of Social Issues, “Toward Mutual Responsibility,” explained why this interplay of sex differences, personalities, and man-made cultures was so critically important in the Cold War world.Footnote 25
Democracy, evolution, and survival
Most of the special edition of the Journal of Social Issues, on Professional Women in Modern Society, sounded themes consonant with the work of Betty Friedan and other prominent second-wave feminists. The “stereotype of femininity,” as described by Klein, anticipated the “feminine mystique”—a cultural force that reduced women to the status of “an appendage to man” and enforced conformity to a ladylike ideal on pain of a host of penalties, “from feelings of frustration and inferiority to social ostracism and outright condemnation.” The next three articles, “Women in the Professions,” “Women in Education,” and “The Woman Physician's Dilemma,” took the statistically driven approach of works such as Klein's 1956 book Women's Two Roles and the 1963 report of the President's Commission on the Status of Women, documenting women's underrepresentation in multiple sectors, identifying reasons for that underrepresentation, and suggesting policy changes to achieve better balance. Although issue editor, May V. Seagoe, a professor of education at the University of California, described this work as neutral rather than activist, “avoiding the twin hazards of convention and feminism,” it fed into arguments for the Equal Rights Amendment and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Feminists who formed the National Organization for Women in 1966 might have argued that these articles did not go far enough, but they would not have argued that they were headed in the wrong direction.Footnote 26
Tasked by the issue editor with formulating a synthesis of the preceding articles, Mead instead asserted, rather caustically, that her fellow authors had steered into a blind alley. All of their articles shared two assumptions that she considered false: (1) that the problems of professional women only affected the professional women themselves, and (2) that the problems of professional women were matters of personal autonomy, “in which the individual's choice is not fully implemented by society and should be.” Meanwhile, the other articles ignored two topics that Mead considered vital: the body (particularly women's bodies) and duty. All of the ideas Mead raised in this dense and provocative piece related to her overarching concerns about whether democracy, and indeed the human race, could survive the challenges of the Atomic Age. Mead was sounding that alarm loudly in 1950, proclaiming in a White House speech that humans were “rearing unknown children for an unknown world.” The speech frightened her listeners, but Mead was adamant that “at the time of the bomb it was perfectly clear that all the old ideas were finished and that the world was in a totally new state, and the only way we could protect our own children was to protect other people's children.”Footnote 27
At the most basic level, then, humanity could not survive without babies, but the other authors in the Journal of Social Issues did not want to broach that subject. Mead groused, “a foreign anthropologist combing the pages of this issue would find the statement from time to time that women do have children, but never a suggestion of bodily envolvement [sic] in the activity of such matters as bodily rhythms, menopause or lactation.” The making of babies was also absent from the articles: “There is, interestingly enough, no mention of what the Viennese call ‘LOVE.’ Marriage is discussed as a kind of job, involving night work of a sort of night watchman character at a specified spot, and combining marriage and a career as a matter of budgets, opportunities for part time work, and social attitudes toward married women.” Finally, the nurture of children—and especially, the father's role in that massive project—was, in Mead's view, overlooked. “Any forthright facing of the relationship between women in the professions and the division of the nurturing role must involve a revision in the attitudes of both men and women towards the roles of both men and women in the home,” she wrote. “Bottle feeding has made it possible for these roles to be interchanged or shared; any talk about how a woman can combine marriage and a career which does not include revision of the husband's role simply obscures the real issue.” Sociologist Arlie Hochschild would make the same argument about the need to rethink both women's and men's roles in her 1989 book The Second Shift, which was hailed as “groundbreaking” and “urgently needed,” and which made no reference to Mead's previous work on the subject.Footnote 28
Mead's proof that it was foolish to address women's professional lives while ignoring these other topics came from the Soviet Union. That country had made many of the structural changes that contributors to the Journal of Social Issues recommended, Mead wrote, but these changes had not solved women's problems. There, “women have been ‘freed’ to work in factories, ‘freed’ from the care of their babies during working hours, but remain saddled with problems of homemaking in a society filled with queues and wearisome shortages.” Mead expanded on this point in a December 1963 column for Redbook magazine. When asked by a reader if Soviet women enjoyed greater respect and equality than American women, Mead replied that Soviet women were more likely to be employed as professionals commensurate with their education, while American women were often limited to second-income work for which they were overqualified. The Russians had gained a competitive advantage, particularly in the space race (the first female cosmonaut flew in 1963, while the United States would not send a woman into space for another twenty years), because of the “American tendency to protect men's sense of masculinity by keeping women out of things.” But Mead insisted in 1963, as she had in 1950, that domestic responsibilities were the larger, as yet unsolved, problem. She told the Redbook readers, “The same difficulties occur in both countries: How to get a child into a nursery school. How to get a small child to school and home again. How to help an older child with his lessons. How to get the shopping done.” Incidentally, these problems remain unsolved. The Journal of Social Issues devoted a special issue to Sustainability in Combining Career and Care in 2012. It, too, made no reference to Mead's previous work on the subject.Footnote 29
Mead's thoughts in “Toward Mutual Responsibility” on individualism and duty also referenced the Soviet Union. Here, she seemed very conscious that she was writing against the grain of both feminism and broader American ideology. Nonetheless, she asserted,
Even if we were to decide that the present trend which prepares women to be self-supporting and favors their working outside their homes for at least those parts of their lives when they do not have young children were a desirable trend, a trend which made for more rounded human beings, a better relationship between the sexes, and a more democratic way of life, there would still be serious questions to answer as to whether women should enter the professions and, if so, which professions.
The way she framed this normative question reflected the hybrid nature-and-nurture approach described above, and its complexity necessitates quoting at length:
I want to pause here for a moment to underline what I mean by should. A totalitarian society which places the assumed welfare of the state above the welfare of the individual determines what an individual may and may not, must and must not do. A democracy ideally seeks to create conditions within which individuals will be able to make choices which integrate their own intentions and the welfare of the community as a whole. It is still possible, I believe, to discuss the question of whether women should enter professions, or whether women should plan to combine homemaking and a profession, or whether there are certain professions to which women may be expected to make more of a contribution than others—and yet stand firmly for the position that women should be allowed to try whatever they wish to try. When I say “should enter” I mean, with our present knowledge and in light of our present aspirations, is this a goal we should seek; but I do not mean that, if it does not seem to be such a goal, doors to professional schools should be closed, or women sent back to the home. We know far too little to risk losing the most precious privilege of a democratic society, free experimentation.
In many ways, this paragraph smacked of the sexism for which Harvard president Lawrence Summers was excoriated in 2005, when he posited that women might be underrepresented in science and engineering because of “intrinsic aptitude” rather than the “lesser factors involving socialization and continued discrimination.” Mead's article reads somewhat differently, though, when placed in conversation with one of her actual conversation partners at the time, Gregory Bateson.Footnote 30
Although Mead and Bateson met as anthropologists, her additional interests ran to the humanities (theology, poetry) while his ran to the natural sciences (biology, ecology). As their daughter described them, Mead cared about the human world but had scant interest in other animals, while Bateson cared about “the entire biological world, often withdrawing in distaste from human beings and concerned that what makes us so distinctively human—our consciousness—is the source of our potential for destruction.” There was enough of an overlap in their lives and interests, however, for them to collaborate before, during, and after their marriage. Some of this collaboration occurred at the cybernetics conferences sponsored by the Macy Foundation between 1946 and 1953, which were wide-ranging and multidisciplinary. The title of the 1950 conference, for example, was Cybernetics: Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems. It included discussions on topics as varied as analog and digital interpretations of mind, psychoanalysis, mathematical modeling, and the speech of parrots.Footnote 31
Like Mead, Bateson wrote about the interplay of biology and conditioning, although he expressed this notion in different terms and applied it to different questions. In an essay on schizophrenia, he wrote, “All organisms are partially determined by genetics, i.e., by complex constellations of messages carried principally in the chromosomes. We are products of a communicational process, modified and qualified in various ways by environmental impact.” This observation comports with Mead's description of personality as “the sum total of temperament, character, and idiosyncratic traits which are characteristic of the whole individual.” Later in the essay, Bateson likened the interaction of individuals in a group to shaking irregular stones in a bag, a process that rounds all of the stones, but not identically. “If there are differences between the impacting entities, these differences will undergo change, either in the direction of reducing the difference, or in the direction of achieving a mutual fitting or complementarity,” he wrote. “Among groups of people, whether the direction of change is toward homogeneity or toward complementarity, the achievement is a sharing of premises regarding the meaning and appropriateness of messages and other acts in the context of the relationship.” Both the title of Mead's article, “Toward Mutual Responsibility,” and her insistence that changes for professional women would require changes for everyone around them reflect a similar attention to “the context of the relationship.”Footnote 32
Another Bateson essay, “The Role of Somatic Change in Evolution,” described the adjustments that organisms must make to survive environmental changes. Bateson did not resuscitate the discredited theory of Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) that animals could pass on acquired traits, but he sought an explanation for how random genetic mutations could produce beneficial adaptations. As Lamarck had, he used the example of the giraffe, which (contra Lamarck) could not have developed its long neck over generations of intentional stretching but did, somehow, gain this useful anatomy. Bateson took as settled premises that somatic (bodily) change is necessary for survival and that such change, even where adaptive, incurs costs. A long neck burdens the circulatory system, so the giraffe that happened to get the genes for a long neck also needed genes for a large heart. This trade-off led Bateson to posit an “economics of flexibility,” a calculation that encompassed both how much change an individual organism could withstand and how much variation was required within a population to ensure that at least some members survived whatever environmental upheaval might occur. In the economics of flexibility, both overdramatic change and enforced genetic conformity (typical of monoculture farming) were potentially fatal. For the most part, Bateson confined this argument to the plant and non-human-animal kingdoms, but he did write that “genotypic change in an organism becomes comparable to legislative change in a society.” Mucking about with the literal genes of an organism, or the metaphorical genes of a society, would have far-reaching, likely irreversible, consequences that may prove beneficial or disastrous, hence the “wise legislator will only rarely initiate a new rule of behavior; more usually he will confine himself to affirming in law that which has already become the custom of the people.” Experimentation at the somatic level, the level of the body, was safer, and the long-term survival of the species depended on it.Footnote 33
Connections between this discussion of adaptive evolution and the problems of professional women might not be readily apparent, but they were present for Mead. The totalitarian state of the Soviet Union was analogous to the “farmers and breeders” in Bateson's essay “who demand 100 per cent phenotypic uniformity in a highly select crop” at the expense of “the multiple genetic possibilities accumulated through hundreds of generations in the wild population.” Democracy and capitalism provided a more congenial environment for the “economics of flexibility” to produce variations that were necessary for survival. As it was impossible to know how nuclear weapons, suburbanization, the mechanization of labor, and new communications technologies—all topics about which Mead wrote extensively in the 1950s and 1960s—would affect human families, it was prudent to experiment cautiously with new social arrangements and preserve space for a range of approaches to manhood and womanhood, fatherhood and motherhood, always conscious that a change in one part of the system would affect all of the others. As Mead concluded her article, “Mutual responsibility means in fact creating a world in which men and women's gifts are used mutually, in all their great similarity, in all their possible deep difference, to build a world in which no human gift is disallowed because there are not cultural forms through which it can be expressed.” Bateson's words about all organisms being “partially determined by genetics” and somatic change being absolutely necessary for survival were not present in Mead's concluding sentence, but the ideas were there. The two scholars were equally convinced that organisms and ecologies, individual persons and societies, were all “products of a communicational process.” Additionally, both employed the methodology of somatotyping, studying (and photographing) bodies in an attempt to better understand individual personalities and cultural patterns.Footnote 34
Mead's next big research project after Male and Female confirmed that she had turned her attention to consideration of evolution under the pressures of the Cold War. In 1953 she returned to Manus, an island off the coast of New Guinea where she had conducted fieldwork twenty-five years earlier, to see how the residents of the island were coping with the effects of what would now be termed globalization. Japanese, American, British, and Australian forces had all occupied the island during the war, and when Mead returned an indigenous leader, Paliau, was attempting to westernize Manus society all at once. She wrote in the introduction to her book on this subject, New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation in Manus, 1928–1953, that “the mid-twentieth century is an emergency for humankind.” As Hitler's racist ideology had compelled anthropologists in the 1930s to emphasize culture over heredity (which Mead had done in Sex and Temperament), the postwar pace of cultural change at what Bateson might call the “genotypic level” compelled anthropologists in the 1950s to inquire, “What was happening to those who were asked to skip centuries in the way they ordered their lives? How did these rapid changes inevitably involve those individuals which would leave their mark on society for many generations to come?” Mead found Paliau's campaign on Manus dizzying in its scope and speed, but she also deemed it a victory in the Cold War race for hearts and minds. “I suspect that one of the ways in which we have steadily lost out vis-à-vis Communist-style social change in the East is that we have not only been in favor of going slowly, but we also have wanted to select which bits of our social pattern to pass on,” she mused in a letter from the field. Neither ironclad Soviet social control nor the American impulse to spoon-feed social change was suited to the range of experimental conditions created by postwar forces. Following no one else's playbook, and ignoring what Mead herself would have advised, Manus society seemed to be navigating the economics of flexibility brilliantly.Footnote 35
Other pieces of unpublished and published evidence underscored the importance of evolution to Mead's thinking in the 1950s. Anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell (1918–94) was never Mead's student, but he was one of her protégés, and they corresponded frequently. Mead even served as godmother to his daughters. On 17 April 1956, Mead typed a short, cryptic letter to Birdwhistell that ended, “I've wonderful things to talk over with you. I've at last discovered what I have been studying all my life, not cultural anthropology, nor yet culture and personality, but human evolution. It all fits together.” Mead expounded these ideas at greater length in Continuities in Cultural Evolution, which was published in 1963 but began as her Terry Lectures at Yale in 1957. Mead's preface to the book traced the thread of cultural evolution through conversations with Birdwhistell, Bateson, and many others, all the way back to her graduate-school notes on Franz Boas's lectures. The book as a whole emphasized evolutionary continuity in human history, and in the history of anthropology, while acknowledging that continuity could be punctuated by “quantum leaps” of progress or obscured by shifting political realities. In the latter category, she repeatedly invoked Nazis and Soviets as extreme examples, of biological determinism and cultural programming respectively, between which responsible social scientists must steer a course.Footnote 36
Mead's attention to evolution undercut the charge of her foremost anthropological opponent, Derek Freeman, that the “Mead paradigm” within their field was antibiological, antievolutionary, and culturally deterministic. To rescue anthropology from Mead's errors, Freeman proposed a new paradigm, “a synthesis in which there will be, in the study of human behavior, recognition of the radical importance of both the genetic and exogenetic and their interaction, both in the past history of the human species and our problematic future.” Yet again, if Mead had been alive to respond, she would have used her words in the letter to Viola Klein, “In your phrasing I am made to say that masculine and feminine typing is relative and based on purely cultural conditioning, but I didn't say that, and I never believed it.” Mead consistently held that cultural differences were built upon a bedrock of gendered, biological realities, and if “anatomy is destiny” was putting the point too strongly, it was simultaneously true that without sexual reproduction, the human race would die out. The topics that Freeman accused her of ignoring were actually central to Mead's work.Footnote 37
* * *
Recovering Mead's nuanced perspective on nature, nurture, and gender corrects several misperceptions about her work. Contrary to the charges of her loudest critics, Mead was neither beholden to biology (Friedan) nor dismissive of it (Freeman). Contrary to the cheers of many of her admirers, she never believed that gender was purely culturally constructed or that it could be refashioned in an infinite variety of ways if only cultural barriers were lifted. Both Mead herself and the world about which she wrote changed over time, but there was more continuity than discontinuity across a career spanning five decades. Scholarly collaboration with Bateson, study of child development, and concerns about human survival in the nuclear age, rather than a reversion to (as Friedan called it) the “sexual solipsism of Sigmund Freud,” increased her attention to bodies and reproduction after World War II. And her attention to women's labor at home as well as in the workplace was not an attempt to institute a “functional freeze” but a realistic—and prescient—consideration of the cascade effects of rising women's employment. Caricatures of Mead obscure this entire picture.
Of course, Mead's critics are not entirely to blame for the ways she has been misperceived. Mead was a prolific and not always careful writer, particularly when writing for popular outlets such as Redbook.Footnote 38 Some of her attempts to clarify her meaning, as in her correspondence with Klein, created new confusion. Perhaps the biggest reason for Mead's misrepresentation, though, was that her both–and approach to nearly every subject blunted the political utility of her thought. The history of feminism is a story of tension between essentialist and nonessentialist accounts of gender, with greater weight given at various times and by various individuals either to women's attributes as women (including their reproductive capabilities) or to the ways that women as humans suffer discrimination. As Harry Brod observed in the feminist journal Hypatia, “Those attempting to re-create a unified theory of feminist studies consequently found themselves stranded between Scylla and Charybdis. The [nonessentialist] sex role model seemed too fragmenting, yet the most common essentialist framework available entailed a return to a naturalistic biologism most were unwilling to accept.” It was always difficult to steer between the mythical, female monsters, and far easier to stray into one while overcorrecting to avoid the other. Mead, as a complicated and high-profile middle figure, could not fully be claimed by either side and subsequently caught derision from both. Or maybe Mead was just unusually prone to misrepresentation. Her most famous quote, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world”—she never said that, either.Footnote 39
