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PARTISAN REVIEW
Mead, came of age in the period of feminism's firmest assertion.
Anyone who would wish to make a program for the sexes today must set–
tle this major conflict of women, between feminism and "female-ism."
To come out unequivocally for either the one side or the other in the
struggle is, however, to be either ahead of or behind our times, for
uncertainty is the very essence of this stage in our development. The
largest part of the burden of Dr. Mead's contemporaneity lies in her
strenuous effort to reconcile the extra-domestic privileges of her sex
which, at the last, turn out still to be her deeply-rooted preference, and
the wife-mother character which current sentiment is so eager to
establish. Now subtly and now crudely, both in its manner and in the
unsteady line of its reasoning, but especially in the discontinuity between
its main arguments and its conclusion,
Male and Female
demonstrates
the exhausting tension between these two polarities to which the educated
and talented woman of our day is subjected.
For instance, there is the long and unhappy introduction to Dr.
Mead's study, the 47 pages which Dr. Mead spends imposing herself on
her audience. Dr. Mead tells us, as the social scientist should, who she
is; she does not tell us who are the men and women she had in mind
as her readers although it is clear she must have been thinking of a
wider than merely professional public, because she makes such elaborate
condescension from her professional height, introducing herself with
the explanation that the anthropologist is really no less (by which she
also means no more) human than anyone else, at the same time that
she fortifies her professional authority by reference to all the possible
tokens of prestige-awards, degrees, publications-which may guaranty
her ideas to unsympathetic readers. And yet, on the other hand, despite
this too great consciousness of intellectual advantage, Dr. Mead crowds
her work with assumptions special to her training. There are any num–
ber of anthropological and psychoanalytical concepts employed in
Male
and Female
which no one outside Dr. Mead's own or allied professions
could conceivably be expected to understand-an amusing example is
the repeated appearance in its pages of the little mental patient given
to eating his parents' theater tickets, the sad implications of whose
strange appetite are never revealed to us.
The projection of Dr. Mead's book on these two widely-separated
intellectual planes can of course be referred to the wide rift in our in–
tellectual culture, the pronounced though never to be admitted (on pain
of excommunication from the liberal camp) stratifications of class in
even our literate society. But the shuttle Dr. Mead runs between being
a popularizer and being a professional is also the shuttle every sensitive
