Male and Female

Margaret Mead

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780062566157
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études relatives au genre

With a new introduction by Helen Fisher, Ph.D., the classic gender study by renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead, which delivers pertinent insights into today's battle of the sexes.

Mead's anthropological examination of seven Pacific island tribes analyzes the dynamics of non-western cultures to explore the evolving meaning of "male" and "female" in modern American society. On its publication in 1949, the New York Times declared, "Dr. Mead's book has come to grips with the cold war between the sexes and has shown the basis of a lasting sexual peace." This edition, prepared for the centennial of Mead's birth, features introductions by Helen Fisher and Mead's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson. Male & Female remains an extraordinary document of great relevance, while Mead's research methods and fieldwork offer a blueprint for scholars in future generations.

part one

introductory

1

the significance of the questions we ask

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? Have we over-domesticated men, denied their natural adventurousness, tied them down to machines that are after all only glorified spindles and looms, mortars and pestles and digging sticks, all of which were once women’s work? Have we cut women off from their natural closeness to their children, taught them to look for a job instead of the touch of a child’s hand, for status in a competitive world rather than a unique place by a glowing hearth? In educating women like men, have we done something disastrous to both men and women alike, or have we only taken one further step in the recurrent task of building more and better on our original human nature?

These are questions which are being asked in a hundred different ways in contemporary America. Polls and tracts and magazine articles speculate and fulminate and worry about the relationship between the sexes. In the moving pictures beautiful girls in tortoise-shell spectacles and flat-heeled shoes are first humiliated for competing with men, then they are forgiven, loved, and allowed to be glamorous only when they admit their error. In the advertisements on the billboards, men are now told how they, if they wear the right hat, may be the chosen one, the loved one—a rôle that used to be reserved for women. The old certainties of the past are gone, and everywhere there are signs of an attempt to build a new tradition, which like the old traditions that have been cast aside will again safely enfold growing boys and girls, so that they may grow up to choose each other, marry, and have children. The fashions bear the imprint of this uncertainty; the “new look” of 1947 partly captured the fleeting image of the mothers of a generation ago, the boys could again find the girls marriageable—as their mothers were—while those same girls gained a new femininity by suiting their swinging gait to the remembered feeling of ruffled skirts like those their mothers once wore. In every pair of lovers the two are likely to find themselves wondering what the next steps are in a ballet between the sexes that no longer follows traditional lines, a ballet in which each couple must make up their steps as they go along. When he is insistent, should she yield, and how much? When she is demanding, should he resist, and how firmly? Who takes the next step forward or the next step back? What is it to be a man? What is it to be a woman?

No single book can hope to do more than touch a question that is so basic to human life. I have tried, in this book, to do three things. I try first to bring a greater awareness of the way in which the differences and the similarities in the bodies of human beings are the basis on which all our learnings about our sex, and our relationship to the other sex, are built. Talking about our bodies is a complex and difficult matter. We are so used to covering them up, to referring to them obliquely with slang terms or in a borrowed language to hiding even infants’ sex membership under blue and pink ribbons. It is difficult to become aware of those things about us which have been, and will always be, patterned by our own particular modesties and reticences. We reject, and very rightly, catalogues of caresses arranged in frequency tables, or accounts of childhood that read like a hospital chart. So to make it possible to think vividly, and yet at a comfortable distance, of the way in which our bodies have learned, throughout their lives, how to be male, how to be female, I draw—in the first part of this book—upon the seven South Sea cultures I have studied during the last quarter of a century. Their basic learnings are the same as our basic learnings; each human baby at its mother’s breast must learn that it is either of the same sex, or of the opposite sex, from the mother who has borne it, from the father who fathered it. The boy may grow up to carry spears and bows and arrows instead of brief-cases and fountain-pens, but also he must woo and win and keep a woman. The women may wear the scantiest clothing, and spend their days in the simplest tasks, but in their acceptance of their husbands, and in their child-bearing on some green mountain-side, sometimes not even sheltered from the rain, they face their essential womanhood as surely as the woman who bears her baby in a modern hospital. In following the steps by which their children learn about their sex membership, we can get some sense of the process of learning to be male, learning to be female, some recognition of how we ourselves arrived at our own sense of our own sex; so I have called this section, Part Two, “The Ways of the Body.”

In the next section, “The Problems of Society,” I draw not merely on the seven South Sea cultures I have studied myself, but on some of the knowledge we have of all human societies, as each has attempted to develop a myth of work, to bind men to women and children, to get the children fed and reared, and to settle the problems that arise whenever individual sex impulses must be disciplined into social forms. We can design forms of the family that fit our modern life better if we know what designs have been used in the past, what are the common elements that no society has yet found ways of ignoring, how rules about incest have made it possible to develop family life as we know it. What does the family do, how does it function, and what is the relationship between family life, with its strains and its prohibitions, its sacrifices and its rewards, and the natural springing potency of men and the spontaneous slower-flowering responsiveness of women? Each known human society has tried to come to grips with these problems, with the incompatibility between man’s spontaneity and the monotony of the domestic hearth, with the over-compatibility between women’s docility and the perpetuation of some tight, outworn tradition. In this age when millions of women are unmated and childless, or left alone to bring up their children, when so many men, restless and unsettled, wander again over the face of the earth, this old problem is as pressing as it ever has been, and as inescapable. No people who fail to meet it survive, as whole human beings.

In Part Four, “The Two Sexes in Contemporary America,” I come back to the known, the familiar, and the concretely pressing, to the relationship between the sexes in America to-day, to childhood and courtship and marriage in these United States as it looks when seen comparatively—contrasted with the ways of other societies.

And finally, I try to suggest ways in which we, as a civilisation, may make as full use of woman’s special gifts as we have of men’s, and in so doing develop forms of civilisation that can make fuller use of all human gifts. Each of these main parts of the book stands by itself. The reader may begin with human childhood in the South Seas, or with the problems of sex in society, or with sex in the United States to-day—according to temperament and taste. All three parts stem from the same method, from the discipline of anthropology, the science of custom, in which we have learned to look at the patterned ways in which men have built upon their common biological inheritance different and challenging human cultures.

The differences between the two sexes is one of the important conditions upon which we have built the many varieties of human culture that give human beings dignity and stature. In every known society, mankind has elaborated the biological division of labour into forms often very remotely related to the original biological differences that provided the original clues. Upon the contrast in bodily form and function, men have built analogies between sun and moon, night and day, goodness and evil, strength and tenderness, steadfastness and fickleness, endurance and vulnerability. Sometimes one quality has been assigned to one sex, sometimes to the other. Now it is boys who are thought of as infinitely vulnerable and in need of special cherishing care, now it is girls. In some societies it is girls for whom parents must collect a dowry or make husband-catching magic, in others the parental worry is over the difficulty of marrying off the boys. Some peoples think of women as too weak to work out of doors, others regard women as the appropriate bearers of heavy burdens, “because their heads are stronger than men’s.” The periodicities of female reproductive functions have appealed to some peoples as making women the natural sources of magical or religious power, to others as directly antithetical to those powers; some religions, including our European traditional religions, have assigned women an inferior rôle in the religious hierarchy, others have built their whole symbolic relationship with the supernatural world upon male imitations of the natural functions of women. In some cultures women are regarded as sieves through whom the best-guarded secrets will sift; in others it is the men who are the gossips. Whether we deal with small matters or with large, with the frivolities of ornament and cosmetics or the sanctities of man’s place in the universe, we find this great variety of ways, often flatly contradictory one to the other, in which the rôles of the two sexes have been patterned.

But we always find the patterning. We know of no culture that has said, articulately, that there is no difference between men and women except in the way they contribute to the creation of the next generation; that otherwise in all respects they are simply human beings with varying gifts, no one of which can be exclusively assigned to either sex. We find no culture in which it has been thought that all identified traits—stupidity and brilliance, beauty and ugliness, friendliness and hostility, initiative and responsiveness, courage and patience and industry—are merely human traits. However differently the traits have been assigned, some to one sex, some to the other, and some to both, however arbitrary the assignment must be seen to be (for surely it cannot be true that women’s heads are both absolutely weaker—for carrying loads—and absolutely stronger—for carrying loads—than men’s), although the division has been arbitrary, it has always been there in every society of which we have any knowledge.

So in the twentieth century, as we try to re-assess our human resources, and by taking thought to add even a jot or a tittle to the stature of our fuller humanity, we are faced with a most bewildering and confusing array of apparently contradictory evidence about sex differences. We may well ask: Are they important? Do real differences exist, in addition to the obvious anatomical and physical ones—but just as biologically based—that may be masked by the learnings appropriate to any given society, but which will nevertheless be there? Will such differences run through all of men’s and all of women’s behaviour? Must we expect, for instance, that a brave girl may be very brave but will never have the same kind of courage as a brave boy, and that the man who works all day at a monotonous task may learn to produce far more than any woman in his society, but he will do it at a higher price to himself ? Are such differences real, and must we take them into account? Because men and women have always in all societies built a great superstructure of socially defined sex differences that obviously cannot be true for all humanity—or the people just over the mountain would not be able to do it all in the exactly opposite fashion—must some such superstructures be built? We have here two different questions: Are we dealing not with a must that we dare not flout because it is rooted so deep in our biological mammalian nature that to flout it means individual and social disease? Or with a must that, although not so deeply rooted, still is so very socially convenient and so well tried that it would be uneconomical to flout it—a must which says, for example, that it is easier to get children born and bred if we stylise the behaviour of the sexes very differently, teaching them to walk and dress and act in contrasting ways and to specialise in different kinds of work? But there is still the third possibility. Are not sex differences exceedingly valuable, one of the resources of our human nature that every society has used but no society has as yet begun to use to the full?

We live in an age when every inquiry must be judged in terms of urgency. Are such questions about the rôles and the possible rôles of the sexes academic, peripheral to the central problems of our times? Are such discussions querulous fiddling while Rome burns? I think they are not. Upon the growing accuracy with which we are able to judge our limitations and our potentialities, as human beings and in particular as human societies, will depend the survival of our civilisation, which we now have the means to destroy. Never before in history has mankind had such momentous choices placed in its hands. True, in the past a small group of savages could elect to wander too far north and freeze as the winter came; an angry little band of South Sea Islanders could bundle themselves into a canoe and sail away into the sunset never to return; neighbouring tribes could fight a war that destroyed the culture of both groups and left only a few battered human remnants who wandered away and learned the language and followed the ways of some other social group. Men could sell whole peoples into slavery, towns and cities could be razed to the ground, colonists could destroy the very soul-stuff of a people and leave them, with nothing but their meagre daily bread, to a way of life far less human than that of the simplest savage; military machines could regiment whole groups into a strict and impaired social existence and render them unfit for a whole human life. None of these powers—to kill individuals, to destroy the social integration of groups, and to unravel the fine mesh of human culture and leave those naked and ashamed who should have worn it proudly—none of these powers are new. They are powers man has had in his hands ever since he began to build a social tradition that contained the knowledge of how to make weapons as well as tools, of how to organise armies and practise diplomatic offensives as well as how to knit together hunting-parties and harvesting groups, a tradition that included the desire to convince other men that their customs were inferior and their gods false. But as long as men were scattered over the face of an earth that it took millennia to populate, and most of those who started on long journeys did not reach their journey’s end, as long as fifty canoes sank for one that reached another coral atoll, then, though men lived in jeopardy, societies lived in jeopardy, and human cultures were balanced precariously in the keeping of men who did not know how to preserve them, nevertheless the great, various, uneven tradition of human culture itself was safe. True, languages might vanish altogether, hard as it is to believe that any human invention as complex and perfect as a language—once made, once spoken lovingly by the tongues of old people and growing children—could vanish. Yet languages have vanished, and there are many American Indian languages that we know only in a few texts taken down from the lips of the last human being to speak that language. Our antiquarians pore over the hints of dead languages they find engraved in stone. But the power to have language at all, the assurance that all men who lived in groups would have nouns and verbs, of some phonetic pattern, with which to communicate with each other—that was safe. Because no matter how many languages died, others grew up in other places, among other peoples who were safe from the particular disaster of plague or earthquake or war that had engulfed some other part of mankind and wiped out all record of the language that people spoke.

When those of us who are now middle-aged or old were children, we read in the history books romantic tales of lost arts, and our imaginations were caught first by tales of lost methods of tempering steel or making stained glass, later by the realisation that there were whole civilisations which were lost, in that to-day no single man or woman can carry in his gait and bearing, in his speech and way of living, the intricate pattern that had been Greece or Persia, Egypt or ancient Peru. The loss of useful art—as with the South Sea Islanders who no longer knew how to build canoes and so were forever prisoners on the tiny islands to which they had once come as bold mariners—could give the imaginative a horrid chill. If simple men on islands forgot how to build canoes, might not more complex people also forget something equally essential to their lives? Was it possible that modern man might forget his relationship with the rest of the natural world to such a degree that he separated himself from his own pulse-beat, wrote poetry only in tune with machines, and was irrevocably cut off from his own heart? In their new-found preoccupation with power over the natural world might men so forget God that they would build a barrier against the wisdom of the past that no one could penetrate? People asked such questions; poets and philosophers of an earlier day sensed that mankind might some day hold too much power in its hands. But however imaginative we were, however much we wept for the glories that were Greece or Elizabethan England or Quattrocento Florence and wondered if human culture would ever be cast again in such a perfect mould, we were still only taking spiritual exercises, practising our minds and hearts for greater sensitivity to our whole human tradition—not dealing with a real and pressing problem.

To-day we live in another world, a world so closely knit that no smallest group can go down to disaster—by plague or revolution or by foreign aggression or famine—without shaking the structure of the whole world. No matter how much they may wish to do so, it is no longer possible for a people to keep inventions like gunpowder to use in firecrackers rather than in cannon. We are approaching the place where every step we take not only may be important for the whole world and for the whole of future history, but where we can almost say it will be important for the whole world. As the culture of each small human society in the past grew, changed, blossomed or decayed, vanished or was transformed into some other culture, and no act within that structure was wholly insignificant for the whole, so to-day the culture of the world is becoming one—one in its interdependence, though far from one in the contrasts and discrepancies within it.

The decisions we make now, as human beings, and as human beings who are members of groups with power to act, may bind the future as no men’s decisions have ever bound it before. We are laying the foundations of a way of life that may become so world-wide that it will have no rivals, and men’s imaginations will be both sheltered and imprisoned within the limits of the way we build. For in order to think creatively, men need the stimulus of contrast. We know by sad experience how difficult it is for those who have been reared within one civilisation ever to get outside its categories, to imagine, for instance, what a language could be like that had thirteen genders. Oh, yes, one says, masculine, feminine, and neuter—and what in the world are the other ten? For those who have grown up to believe that blue and green are different colours it is hard even to think how any one would look at the two colours if they were not differentiated, or how it would be to think of colours only in terms of intensity and not of hue. Most American and European women simply cannot imagine what it would be like to be a happy wife in a polygamous family and share a husband’s favours with two other women. We can no longer think of the absence of medical care as anything but a yawning gap to be filled at once. Inevitably, the culture within which we live shapes and limits our imaginations, and by permitting us to do and think and feel in certain ways makes it increasingly unlikely or impossible that we should do or think or feel in certain ways that are contradictory or tangential to it.

So, as we stand at the moment in history when we still have choice, when we are just beginning to explore the properties of human relationships as the natural sciences have explored the properties of matter, it is of the very greatest importance which questions we ask, because by the questions we ask we set the answers that we will arrive at, and define the paths along which future generations will be able to advance.

The relationships between men and women and parents and children are the crucial areas of human relationships. As these relationships are patterned, so are they conveyed to the infant at his mother’s breast, who before he can toddle has absorbed a particular style of sex relations and learned to rule out other styles.

We can recognise how our experience limits our questions by exploring the possible results of asking different questions. Suppose we ask: “Aren’t women just as capable of performing activity x as men are?” Or the reverse: “Aren’t men as capable of activity y as women?” Investigations of this sort usually lead to quantitative comparisons, in which it may be found that men are a little faster than women, or women a little faster than men, or that there is no difference. Or the answer may be a little more complicated, so that women are found to be slower but more accurate, or men quicker but lacking in small-muscle precision for the particular task. Once we have given such an answer, then, in terms of our present cultu...