374
PARTISAN REVIEW
that they not
be
allowed to feel defeminized-indeed, women are to be
encouraged to bring to all their activities the special talents of their
femininity, the patience, delicacy, and intuition they learn in tending the
young and sick.
*
Similarly, men must not desert the usually female
professions as if they were sexually contaminated. Following as it does
on Dr. Mead's own very cogent arguments for specific male and female
sexuality, such a sexual prescription for our social salvation is more than
a disappointment, it is an embarrassment. We wonder how Dr. Mead
can deceive herself that this kind of pious sentimentality will remedy
any of the sexual ills of our time, and how she can so ignore her own
brilliant observations of some of the weaknesses at the base of our
social-sexual structure.
For brilliant indeed has been Dr. Mead's description of our sexual
culture, the contrast she has drawn, for instance, between the way in
which a primitive child first learns its sex membership and the expectable
early experience of the American middle-class child born to all the
"advantages" canonized by our science, our education, our advertising
and popular art-the hospital birth, on a delivery table, against the force
of gravity, with the baby at once removed from its mother to a row
of cribs in a nursery where it can cry its heart out until the appointed
feeding rounds; the next week or ten days in which the mother is
thoroughly purged of such maternal instincts as she may have brought
to the hospital with her and taught that the more distance she puts
between her own body and that of her child, the healthier for both;
the increasing mechanization of the baby's routine as the weeks and
months pass-regular feeding hours, regular sleeping hours, regular
evacuation, regular play. The American child, no less than any other
human baby, is of course gaining its first and lasting knowledge of its
body through this process, and Dr. Mead is right: it is learning as un–
sexual a body as it is possible to teach. To the American parent, a
baby is not primarily a baby-male or a baby-female, it is what we
think is so much finer-a baby-person, by which we mean a little
person making its way in the world:** Everything in our handling of
our young, Dr. Mead accurately points out, is designed to further their
powers of
achievement.
Whereas the process of growth for a primitive
child is the process of gradually taking on the adult bodily functions of
*
This is of course sexual cliche. There is much evidence that these qualities
are as often found in men as in women.
**
The advanced parent is even coming to eschew the blue and pink ribbons of
sex differentiation, in favor of the sexual purity of white or the ambiguity of
yellow.
