Mead, Margaret (1901-1978)

American anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-1978) pioneered in the study of both sexuality and gender across cultures. In her best seller, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), she used examples from Samoan society to suggest that the idea about what was normal and expected concerning sex in American society was only one set of practices among many accepted in societies around the world. Samoan girls, she wrote, were allowed by their culture to experiment sexually before marriage, while American girls who experimented met cultural disapproval. She tried to persuade Americans to rethink what they had considered absolute moral values concerning sexuality and the belief that there was only one acceptable way to approach the subject.

Mead's third book, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), is often cited as a pioneer work, suggesting the relativity of masculinity and femininity across cultures. Studying the Arapesh, the Mundugumor (or Biwat), and the Tchambuli (or Chambri) of New Guinea, Mead saw these cultures as having gender roles and relationships that varied between the groups and also compared with those in American society. Among the Arapesh, Mead wrote, both men and women had traits that would be considered feminine in the United States. Mundugumor men and women both had dominant traits that would be considered masculine in America. Among the Tchambuli, men exhibited traits Americans would call feminine, and women exhibited traits Americans would call masculine.

In a later book, Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World (1949), Mead focused on the expression of maleness and femaleness across the seven cultures she had studied. She noted that ideal maleness and ideal femaleness differed from culture to culture and that within modern cultures like the United States where different peoples came together, such patterns were blurred. She showed that expected male behavior and female behavior differed between cultures as well. She suggested that parents in modern society not worry if their sons were interested in “female” behaviors or their daughters were interested in “male” behaviors, but merely accept what males did as male and what females did as female.

While Mead acknowledged the contradictory gender role differences between cultures—for example, that one culture might make women's work of what might be considered men's work in another culture— she also noted that all cultures differentiated between men and women, assigning them different gender roles. Mead revisited the question, which she and other anthropologists had spent so much energy debunking, as to whether there were innate differences between men and women beyond those of biological reproduction. She answered the question complexly. Most gender role characteristics within cultures she saw as arbitrary and many also as damaging to both men and women. But she also suggested that men and women do have different gifts that are sex-linked but that are often constructed by societies as positive or negative, or inferior or superior. The repression of some gender roles and elevation of others she saw as creating an imbalance that kept both men and women from becoming whole human beings. She ended by advocating study and recognition of what such gifts were and how they could be reconstructed on an equal plane, rather than a hierarchical one, and perhaps taught to the other sex as well.

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