MEN, WOMEN AND SEX
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professional woman in our culture runs between the need to protect
and the wish to transcend her femininity.
If
we cannot easily imagine the
male anthropologist with a training and achievement equal to Dr.
Mead's who would think to preface even a popular book, as Dr. Mead
prefaces
Male and Female,
with the assurance that there is nothing
cold or inhuman about prying around in primitive groups, it is because
we realize that such a protestation constitutes a woman's apology for
being
in
a field where, by reason of her sex, she fears she ought not be;
it assures us that despite her "masculine" activity, the author has the
delicate feelings appropriate to femaleness. Dr. Mead's guarantees of
authority are, conversely, a demand that she be listened to even though
she is a woman. In other words, Dr. Mead's concessions to a popular
audience can be interpreted as concessions to a popular conception of
femininity; the ambivalence of her relation to her public-now patroniz–
ing, now flattering its intelligence-can be understood as a natural, if
excessive, response to the ambivalent regard in which our society holds
the woman who would dare to be as ambitious and successful as a man.
I speak here, of course, of cultural, not personal fact-I am not
calling Dr. Mead to individual account. This is the kind of social-sexual
influence of which she is herself pre-eminently aware, even if she is not
immune to its workings in her own literary instance.
Or, for another example, there is the large element of expository,
as apart from conceptual, incoherence in
Male and Female-the
dif–
ficulty of following the main line of its meaning from sentence to
sentence and page to page. This, too, I think, can at least in some part
be assigned to sexual conflict. Of course temperament is also in–
volved here: the author of
Male and Female
is a person of rare gifts
of energy and an enormous intellectual headlongness; and while a
temperament of this kind does not make for directness of exposition,
it is not to
be
depreciated-Dr. Mead's energy, which would gather us
all in its great onward rush, offers many rich compensations for the
dizzying effects we suffer as we move in its current. But if we look at the
work of our most talented women writers of fiction,
we
see how com–
monly it is obscured by private reference, hidden patterns of reasoning,
excessive discursion, over-modification of idea, and other forms of non–
declarativeness. Individual temperament cannot account for something
so endemic in our culture. We must conclude that the American woman
has reason to fear speaking in a way which cannot
be
misunderstood.
And then there is Dr. Mead's dramatic division against her own in–
tellectual self. Although the break in the continuity of Dr. Mead's
argument is not fully apparent until the last chapter of her book,
