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PARTISAN REVIEW
there was a time when the burden of domesticity was far lighter than
it is today, because the family unit had not been broken down to its
present small size; when we naturally assumed that our aging parents,
our spinster aunt or our brother's widow would share our home. Such
an intrusion we now find intolerable, with the result that, instead of
one big pot of coffee being brewed for six or eight people, we brew
four separate pots on four separate stoves; instead of having several
pairs of hands to care for the children and several pairs of feet to
divide the chores of housekeeping, the one wife-mother is expected to
do everything.* Surely it is our aversion from our own bodies, counter–
part of our aversion from our specific sexuality, that accounts for the
exacerbated fastidiousness of which we are so stupidly proud and of
which our exaggerated need for privacy is but a single manifestation.
I know of nothing written on the American sexual subject which
offers us anything like this warm illumination of Dr. Mead's cultural
analysis. In contrast, that popular predecessor of
Male and Female
in
the field of socia-sex, Dr. Farnham and Mr. Lundberg's
Modern Wo–
man: The Lost Sex,
is exposed in all its dull meanness of spirit. By
an act of the imagination, Dr. Mead has located what is unquestionably
the fundamental error in our sexual habitude--our failure to prize our
specific sexuality. And she has not only named the ill, she has most
usefully described some of its many cultural ramifications.
And yet, because of an inadequacy of imagination bred in her
own partisanship with the established American pattern of sexual non–
differentiation, Dr. Mead can then propose a remedy which is actually
a continuation of the disease. Dr. Mead believes that we fail to prize
our specific sexuality, including the specific sexuality of women. She
believes, that is, that we do not sufficiently value women for their
wife-mother activities, and for the qualities of mind and feeling which
derive from them. But she neglects to draw the obvious conclusion from
this insight-that because we do not value women for their femaleness,
we force them to seek social prestige by emulating the activities of
men. Her final chapter is thus not, as in logic it should be, an appeal
for a renewed affirmation of the high social importance of wifehood and
motherhood. It is an appeal for women to be given the same opportuni–
ties for prestige that are available to men. In other words, Dr. Mead
*
Ferenczi remarks on the full frightening range of requirements made of the
modern woman-she is expected to be wife, mother, sister, mistress, athletic
companion, intellectual colleague-and relates this excessive demand to the dis–
appearance from our society of the approved means by which men once gave
expression to their normal homosexual emotions.
