Margaret Mead on Female vs. Male Creativity, the “Bossy” Problem, Equality in Parenting, and Why Women Make Better Scientists
by Maria Popova
“In the long run it is the complex interplay of
different capacities, feminine and masculine, that protects the humanity
of human beings.”
Margaret Mead
is celebrated as the world’s best-known and most influential cultural
anthropologist, having not only popularized anthropology itself but also
laid the foundation for the sexual revolution of the 1960s. She brought
the essential tools of anthropology — the art of looking,
coupled with a great capacity for listening, for asking and answering
questions — to her prolific university lectures, public talks, and
presentations at various organizations that claimed her time and
thought. In the sixteen-year period between 1963 and January of 1979, Redbook Magazine
published Mead’s answers to the best questions she had received from
audience members over her extensive career — questions about love, sex,
religion, politics, social dynamics, gender equality, personal choices,
and the human condition.
After Mead’s death in late 1978, her partner for the last twenty-two years, the anthropologist and Redbook editor Rhoda Metraux, collected the best of these questions and answers in Margaret Mead: Some Personal Views (public library).
As Metraux writes in the foreword, “Margaret Mead’s most winning gift
was surely her capacity for immediate, zealous response… She took for
granted that a sophisticated question required a sophisticated answer,
but she never rebuffed the person who had to struggle to find words. One
thing exasperated her: without hesitation she pricked the balloon of
the pompous, pretentious questioner.”
With her characteristic blend of scientific rigor, humanistic wisdom,
and strong personal conviction, Mead addresses a number of issues all
the timelier today, but none with more prescience than the question of
the shifting social norms and responsibilities for women and men.
In 1963, she offers a wonderfully dimensional answer to a question
about why “the most outstanding creative people in all fields have been
predominantly men,” folding into her rationale the still-radical assertion that women make naturally better scientists:
There are three possible positions one can take about
male and female creativity. The first is that males are inherently more
creative in all fields. The second is that if it were not for the
greater appeal of creating and cherishing young human beings, females
would be as creative as males. If this were the case, then if men were
permitted the enjoyment women have always had in rearing young children,
male creativity might be reduced also… The third possible position is
that certain forms of creativity are more congenial to one sex than to
the other and that the great creative acts will therefore come from only
one sex in a given field.
There is some reason to believe that males may always excel — by just
the small degree that makes the difference between good capacity and
great talent — in such fields as music and mathematics, where creativity
involves imposing form rather than finding it. There is also reason to
believe that women have a slightly greater potential in those fields in
which it is necessary to listen and learn, to find forms in nature or in
their own hearts rather than to make entirely new ones; these fields
could include certain areas of literature, and some forms of science
that depend on observation and recognition of pattern, such as the study
of living creatures or children or societies.
But Mead argues that the capacity for achievement is, above all, a
matter of context, which is invariably a social construct — something
that only intensifies our responsibility in creating a cultural context
that allows all creative abilities to shine:
When women work in a creative field, even one that is
particularly congenial to them, they must generally work with forms that
were created by men, or else struggle against special odds to develop
new forms. Until we have an educational system that permits enough women
to work within any field — music, mathematics, painting, literature,
biology and so on — so that forms which are equally congenial to both
sexes are developed, we shall not have a fair test of this third
possibility.
We do not know that what one sex has developed, members of the other
sex can learn — from cookery to calculus. In those countries of the
Eastern bloc in which women are expected to play an equal part with men
in the sciences, great numbers of women have shown a previously
unsuspected ability. We run a great risk of squandering half of our
human gifts by arbitrarily denying any field to either sex or by
penalizing women who try to use their gifts creatively.
In another question from December of the same year, Mead returns to
the cultural differences across the Iron Curtain. A few months earlier,
in June of 1963, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova had become the
world’s first woman in space. It would be twenty years until the second,
American astronaut Sally Ride,
launched into the cosmos. Considering the cultural context Russian vs.
American women have for achievement in space exploration, Mead writes:
On the question of woman cosmonauts, the Russians have
been able to be realistic and practical. If we are going to do anything
important with space, especially with space colonization, then we need
to know at once how well women can withstand the new conditions. The
American tendency to protect men’s sense of masculinity by keeping women
out of things results — as does our handling of race — simply in an
American loss.
Illustration from 'Blast-Off,' a visionary 1973 children's
book celebrating gender equality and ethnic diversity in space
exploration. Click image for more.
In November of 1965, Mead answers a question about women’s evolving
identity outside “their purely feminine role” and how they are to seek
fulfillment beyond the qualities of beauty and charm traditionally
rewarded as the height of female accomplishment:
It is probable that far more women can achieve lasting
contentment … where a woman can be honored as a person because she has
borne and cared for children, has taught in a school or cared for the
sick, has managed a business, has practiced a profession, has written
poems.
[…]
When marriage was for life and when death was likely to come early, a
woman’s career as wife and mother was often completely circumscribed by
her husband’s career as provider and achiever.
Today, however, this is no longer true. We educate girls so that they
are capable of greater intellectual accomplishment than our form of
marriage and housekeeping permits them to use. Marriages are not always
for life. And child rearing takes up only part of a woman’s adult life.
These three major changes have refocused our attention on the question
of woman’s identity and the relationship between the feminine arts and
feminine accomplishments.
But as these changes were afoot in the 1960s — the cusp of monumental
cultural change, propelled by such landmark events as the 1963
publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique
and the introduction of the oral contraceptive pill in the early 1960s —
many bemoaned the “defeminization” of society. Mead handles this term
with enormous semantic skepticism and addresses it in answering a
question from March of 1966:
Defeminization [may] refer to role. Where men have been
the traditional breadwinners, initially it seems defeminizing when women
go out to earn their living. Where all secretaries were men, as at one
time they were in the English-speaking world, it was defeminizing for a
woman to take a position as a secretary. Most roles of this kind are a
matter of convention in a particular society at a given time. Their
specific definitions as “masculine” or “feminine” often have very little
to do with the capacities of men and women.
There is a sense, however, in which certain changes in women’s roles
may be regarded as dehumanizing. Traditionally women have had to
consider their children’s long-time protection and well-being to be
their central goal. Where a society, by its moral conventions and
standards of living or by various coercive rules and regulations,*
forces women to neglect any of the necessary forms of prenatal and
maternal behavior, there may be a dehumanizing effect on the members of
that society — both men and women.
Before WWII, pink was a color associated with masculinity,
considered a watered-down red symbolizing the power generally associated
with that color. Photographs from Korean visual artist JeongMee Yoon's
'Pink and Blue Projects.' Click image for details.
Mead’s words ring with particular poignancy half a century later, in the Lean In era and its crusade against “bossy”,
as she considers how women can counter these claims of
“defeminization,” rooted in old values and male ideals, by claiming a
new context of evaluation:
Whenever women become part of an organization or an
activity that is defined as aggressively and ruthlessly competitive,
they must develop a style of behavior different from that of men in the
same occupation if they are not to become “defeminized.” … In the
conference room, women do better to insist on high standards of
courtesy, comfort and consideration in a mixed group of which they are
an integral part. In the long run it is the complex interplay of
different capacities, feminine and masculine, that protects the humanity
of human beings.
Mead’s prescience doesn’t end there — half a century before Shonda Rhimes addressed the issue in her superb commencement address,
Mead considers the impossible standards for women as they try to
reconcile inhabiting their capacities fully with fulfilling traditional
roles. In June of 1967, upon being asked whether modern women are
becoming “increasingly narcissistic,” Mead offers a brilliant answer at
once thoughtful and feisty:
The ideal of the all-purpose wife is perhaps the most difficult any society has set for its women.
[…]
It is taken for granted that [a woman] ought to be able to do
everything, however hard and tedious, and still give the impression that
she spends her days pleasantly and restfully, that she has the leisure
to keep her hair shining and smoothly waved, her skin soft and glowing,
her clothes fashion-model perfect and her smile warm and welcoming.
[…]
Educated women have never before been asked to pay so high a price
for the right to be wives and mothers. The demand that in spite of their
hard work they should be soignée, perfectly turned out and
always charming puts an almost intolerable burden on them. Calling them
narcissistic adds insult to injury.
All of this brings up an inevitable question: In June of 1967, nearly fifty years before our present age of “Be a man. Take paternity leave,” Mead explores the changing role of men in parenting:
We are evolving a new style of fatherhood, in which young
fathers share very fully with mothers in the care of babies and little
children… One question one can ask is what effect this is likely to have
on the next generation and the life of the wider community.
Illustration by Øyvind Torseter from 'My Father's Arms Are a Boat' by Stein Erik Lunde. Click image for details.
Noting that the invention of bottle feeding and instant baby food has
enabled fathers to do for their children everything mothers can
physically do, she peers into the broader cultural liberation that equal
parenting makes possible, returning to the question of male and female
creative achievement:
Perhaps we are in the process of developing a style of
parenthood that has never before been attempted by a civilized people, a
style that will set children of both sexes free of some of the
constraints that have forced on them narrow occupational and personality
choices because of narrow sex identification. On the other hand, we may
be destroying the set of motives that have made men the great achievers
and innovators of civilization. At the same time we may not be
developing enough ambitious and highly motivated women to take the place
of the men whose chief delight is their children. It is still an open
question how our children, as adults, will respond to the challenges of
the wider society to become active in its concerns and interests.
In answering two questions in August of 1975, Mead considers the
necessary shifts in gender dynamics that would help both men and women
ease into such cultural change rather than tensing against it. Once
again, her words resound with extraordinary prescience and emanate the
bittersweet reminder that however far we may have come in resolving
these issues, they still gape raw and vulnerable for both sexes. Mead
writes:
It will take genuine commitment, not to labels such as
chauvinist or liberationist, but to the value of human relationships to
work out new ways for men and women to live together.
[…]
It isn’t really a question of men’s “getting over” [the liberation of women], but of men’s and women’s finding a new balance in their relationships.
Illustration from the parodic 1970 children's book 'I’m Glad
I’m a Boy!: I’m Glad I’m a Girl!' by New Yorker cartoonist Whitney
Darrow, Jr. Click image for details.
Mead examines the broader social dynamics underpinning the shift,
which apply equally to other, present-day areas of resistance to social
change, from immigration to marriage equality:
Whenever there are changes in the way tasks and roles,
obligations and privileges, opportunities and responsibilities are
apportioned between the sexes, among people of different ages or among
people of different national backgrounds or races, some group is bound
to feel threatened. But the curious thing is that those who are
proposing — insisting on — change tend to believe that those who feel
threatened must be hostile, and often they themselves become hostile in
response to what they believe they perceive.
I emphasize these feelings of threat and counterthreat because I
think that today, in the face of the Women’s Liberation Movement, we are
making far too much of the point of necessary anger on the part of
women and inevitable hostility on the part of men.
Roles are changing for both women and men. Women are being pressured
on every side to insist on living in a different way and to believe that
their past status was brought about by male oppression. At the same
time men who thought that they were being good husbands and fathers and
were working hard to care for and protect the mothers of their children
are being accused of being oppressors — and angry oppressors at that.
The whole process of change is taking place in an atmosphere of the
greatest bad temper and a tremendous amount of secondary hostility is
being generated that in itself poses a threat to a good outcome.
[…]
We should begin to realize that both men and women need liberation
from a life-style that is stultifying and destructive to both sexes.
But despite the challenges of her time — challenges still very much
present today — Mead saw the future of gender dynamics with unflinching
optimism:
I believe we are already beginning to create new manly
and womanly roles that will permit a great deal more individual choice
as well as better health for men and a fuller, more gratifying sense of
themselves for women.
Above all, she championed a vision for unmooring human potentiality
from imprisoning stereotypes about gendered creative ability — something
Susan Sontag memorably echoed a decade later — and creating the best possible conditions for individual gifts, male and female, to blossom:
There is encouraging evidence [that society] is moving —
gradually, at least — toward recognition of individual aptitudes and
inclinations, away from the automatic assignment of tasks based on
stereotyped expectations of the capacities of either sex.
Margaret Mead: Some Personal Views
is excellent in its entirety, brimming with Mead’s farsighted wisdom on
culture and society. Complement it with her equally prescient views on same-sex love and her symbolic dream about the meaning of life.
* Mead is most likely
referring to anti-abortion laws, which she consistently condemned for
forcing girls and women into motherhood who may be unfit, unwilling, or
socioeconomically unequipped to be mothers. In answering a question on
the subject in 1963, she asserted: “I believe that our abortion laws
should be changed… I believe that we should not prescribe the conditions
under which abortion is permissible… Wherever abortion is illegal,
unnumbered girls and women, married and unmarried, run frightful risks…”
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