MEN, WOMEN AND SEX
367
trolling the determining processes in all spheres of life. And such has
remained the dominant cultural tone of this last decade. The pro–
gressive spirit of our day is nothing if not active, nothing if not alert to
emergency, nothing if not impatient of the barriers which any complica–
tion of thought may place in the straight path to our social goals-and
in sex as in politics, art or education. We note the new authority of
the social sciences in all our progressive thinking-the standing they are
given, for instance, in Dr. Conant's educational program-and we are
not surprised that in our sexual program-making, too, the social scientist
displaces the doctor. Our present-day sexual literature is a literature
not of sex but of society.
Of this immediate historical moment, Margaret Mead's
Male and
Female
is a strikingly comprehensive document. Although the author is
an anthropologist rather than a sociologist, the anthropological sections
of her study have the announced purpose of serving a practical social
end: they are intended to help us, Dr. Mead's civilized readers trained
in so much sexual reticence, think "vividly, and yet at a comfortable
distance, of the way in which our bodies have learned . . . how to be
male, how to be female" in order that we may make the best possible
social use of our sex membership-in a world threatened with atomic
destruction, we need all the resources we can muster, including our
sexual resources. Despite Dr. Mead's concern with this most primary .Jf
sexual material-the knowledge of our bodies in relation to their
sex differentiation-her book is as remote from actual erotic activity as
if our differing sexual organs had been given us merely to distinguish
the different jobs we would do in society ; it says no word for
sex
as a
pleasure, for sex as a physical urgency, for sex as an act or aspect of the
imagination. Dr. Mead gives evidence of extensive grounding in Freudian
theory and procedure, but she has the contemporary aptitude for using,
bending or discarding the Freudian principles at will.
But in nothing is
Male and Female
so unmistakably the product
of its time as in its attitudes, both conscious and unconscious, toward
the woman problem. We are now in a period of intense reaction against
the feminism of thirty or forty or even twenty years ago. The career–
woman who grew up to the passionate assertion of her "rights" is now
almost as passionate in abdicating them in favor of allegiance to her
home; our latest generation of college girls scoffs at the pretense of
setting itself important work-goals; the tending of babies becomes the
boasted rather than the lamented occupation of educated women. Yet
the benefits which have accrued to women in the long battle for sexual
equality are not easily forfeited, especially by those of us who, like Dr.
