Margaret Mead - Sex and Temperament (1935)

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The knowledge that the personalities of the two sexes are socially produced is congenial to every programme that looks forward towards a planned order of society. It is a two-edged sword.

Margaret Mead
We must recognize that beneath the superficial classifications of sex and race the same potentialities exist, recurring generation after generation, only to perish because society has no place for them.

Margaret Mead
Human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.

Margaret Mead
Just as the difference in height between males is no longer a realistic issue, now that lawsuits have been substituted for hand-to-hand encounters, so the difference in strength between men and women is no longer worth elaboration in cultural institutions.

Margaret Mead
[Among the Arapeh... both father and mother are held responsible for child care by the entire community...] If one comments upon a middle-aged man as good-looking, the people answer: 'Good-looking? Ye-e-e-s? But you should have seen him before he bore all those children'.

Margaret Mead
[Partly as a consequence of male authority] prestige value always attaches to the activities of men.

Margaret Mead
We must bear in mind the possibility that the greater opportunities open in the twentieth century to women may be quite withdrawn, and that we may return to stricter regimentation of women.

Margaret Mead
Standardized personality differences between the sexes are of this order, cultural creations to which each generation, male and female, is trained to conform.

Margaret Mead
I have been accused of having believed when I wrote Sex and Temperament that there are no sex differences … This, many readers felt, was too much. It was too pretty. I must have found what I was looking for. But this misconception comes from a lack of understanding of what anthropology means, of the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder, that which one would not have been able to guess.

Margaret Mead
[Mead described the Arapesh as a culture in which both sexes were] placid and contented, unaggressive and noninitiatory, noncompetitive and responsive, warm, docile, and trusting.

Margaret Mead
An occupation that has no basis in sex-determined gifts can now recruit its ranks from twice as many potential artists.

Margaret Mead
Historically our own culture has relied for the creation of rich and contrasting values upon many artificial distinctions, the most striking of which is sex. It will not be by the mere abolition of these distinctions that society will develop patterns in which individual gifts are given place instead of being forced into an ill-fitting mould. If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.

Margaret Mead
It [this book] is, very simply, an account of how three primitive societies have grouped their social attitudes towards temperament about the very obvious facts of sex-difference.

Margaret Mead
We may say that many, if not all, of the personality traits which we have called masculine or feminine are as lightly linked to sex as are the clothing, the manners, and the form of headdress that a society at a given period assigns to either sex.

Margaret Mead
No skill, no special apti­tude, no vividness of imagination or precision of thinking would go unrecognized because the child who possessed it was of one sex rather than the other. No child would be relentlessly shaped to one pattern of behavior, but instead there should be many patterns, in a world that had learned to allow to each individual the pattern which was most congenial to his gifts.

Margaret Mead
Both men and women are conceived as merely capable of response to a situation that their society has already defined for them as sexual, and so the Arapesh feel that it is necessary to chaperon betrothed couples who are too young... with their definition of sex as a response to an external situation rather than as spontaneous desire, both men and women are regarded as helpless in the face of seduction. Parents warn their sons even more than they warn their daughters against permitting themselves to get into situations in which someone can make love to them.

Margaret Mead