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January-February, 2004
Volume 11, Number 1
Going Native
by Janet Mason
Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle
by Lois W. Banner
Knopf. 540 pages, $30.
Margaret Mead (1901-1978) is a fixture in the American imagination: a superhero of anthropology; intrepid explorer; a woman leaps and bounds ahead of her time. Mead’s bisexuality and her lifelong relationship with
like-minded anthropologist and writer Ruth Benedict, which Lois W. Banner explores thoroughly in Intertwined Lives, is not an entirely new thesis. Of the countless books written by and about her, the influential handful—most
notably her first, Coming of Age in Samoa (originally published in 1930) and her subsequently published Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)—give more than a passing nod to her interest in cultures with
permissive attitudes toward sexuality, including the acceptance of multiple sex partners and the practice of homosexuality.
Since
homosexuality at the time was more tolerated in “primitive societies”
than in
her own, Mead felt compelled to edit out references to her own bisexual
explorations in her memoir, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years. She
did,
however, leave earlier drafts of this work among her writings, leaving
a paper
trail with which future biographers could conduct their own
“ethnographies” of
her life. When her memoir was published in 1972, Mead was a prominent
woman who
still lived in fear of being discredited. She was also a grandmother.
Banner
conjectures that this fact may account for her decision to conceal “her
free-love behavior and her sexual involvements with women—as well as
with men
other than her husbands.” Still, given that society was changing by the
time
this memoir was published, and also that Mead, divorced from her third
husband,
was living in a lesbian partnership with Rhoda Metraux, it’s possible
that she
intentionally left these early drafts behind with an eye toward later
disclosure.
The scope of
Intertwined Lives—which goes back not only to the childhoods of Mead
and
Benedict but to the eras of their mothers and grandmothers, complete
with a
reference to certain forebears on the Mayflower—is almost too grand;
what keeps
the book from getting out of control is the page-turning story of the
relationship between the two women, which was fated to change both of
their
lives. This relationship is set against the backdrop of flapper-era
free love
and intellectual ferment, particularly in the progressive and
incestuous circle
of anthropologists in which they traveled. Of her philosophy of free
love, Mead
observed that “you drink one good wine with one dish and another good
wine with
another.”
Both women
came from upper-middle-class backgrounds with reform-minded mothers and
grandmothers; both were married to men and became involved in
relationships
with others, both male and female; and, in their professional lives,
both ended
up studying traditional cultures in a way that led them to conclude—and
to
inform the “civilized” world—that conventional heterosexuality wasn’t
the only
game in town.
Mead and Benedict
met in 1922 at Bar-nard in Franz Boas’s introductory course in
anthropology.
Older than Mead by fourteen years, Benedict was Boas’s graduate
instructor and
Mead was her student. Anyone who has ever had a passionate interlude
with a
teacher (regardless of whether it became sexual) can attest to the
resulting
intellectual frisson. Mead would sometimes ride the New York subway
line at key
times, as Banner reports, “looking for her teacher, to strike up
conversations.”
Benedict was
won over. She recognized the potential greatness in Mead and also saw
in her
student a potential ally against other factions in the anthropology
department.
She told Mead that if she wanted to follow her mother in studying an
immigrant
culture—Mead’s mother had studied the Italian immigrant community in
Hammonton,
New Jersey—she could do so in anthropology. She also emphasized the
importance
of studying tribal societies before they and their unrecorded
traditions and
histories disappeared. Mead continued to pursue her masters degree in
psychology at Barnard (she originally intended to become a high school
psychologist), but with Benedict’s encouragement she pursued her
doctorate in
anthropology at the same time.
In addition
to her intellectual interest in Mead, Benedict “was desiring a female
lover,”
in Banner’s words. She was married, and while the marriage couldn’t be
described as loveless, it certainly seems to have been wanting for
passion.
While Benedict had been dismissive of homosexuality in earlier academic
writings, she soon changed her mind. Writes Banner: “She had decided
that
heterosexuality and homosexuality moved on ‘separate sets of wheels,’
that they
drew from different parts of the self and that both drives needed to be
fulfilled.”
Several years
later, in 1924, with Mead safely married to her high school sweetheart
(both of
them agreeing to “divorce on demand” and the “elimination of jealousy”
in their
marriage), she and Benedict began a “no-strings” sexual love affair
that did
not require a career-jeopardizing public commitment to lesbianism.
Benedict and
Mead lived together only briefly. But they traveled, studied, and
attended
conferences together. Benedict, in her role of teacher, mentor, and
lover, saw
to it that Mead did not make any mistakes that would prove fatal to the
future
of anthropology. She also intervened when Mead fell in love with a male
colleague of Benedict’s who was intent on “reforming” Mead away from
what he
called her “prostitution complex.”
Along with
chronicling the love affairs of Mead, Benedict, and others in their
circle (at
times in exhausting detail, albeit relieved by humor), Banner provides
readers
with a wide canvas of the excitement surrounding the anthropological
world at
the time. After attending a 1924 conference in Toronto, Mead wrote:
“Exploration was in the air. That was the year, that Roy Chapman
Andrews
brought back dinosaur eggs from the Gobi Desert [to the Museum of
Natural
History], and everything ancient stirred the public imagination. People
were
talking about prehistoric American mound buildings, the British
excavations in
Athens; the lively dispute over King Tutankhamen’s tomb in Egypt.”
Banner
spotlights the influence that the progressive anthropologist Franz Boas
had on
the two women. She describes him as “the leader of the team,” playing
an
“Olympian role” in the direction of their research, their careers, and
their
lives. Boas, a German Jew who had faced persecution in his own country
and
anti-Semitism in the U.S., was known for the controversial stands he
had taken
against the racism that was so entrenched in society at large and in
academic
anthropology.
Boas clearly
had a knack for encouraging his students to discover themselves by
studying
others. He suggested that Mead focus on female adolescence when she
went to do
her fieldwork in Samoa. Also, having some insight into her (perhaps
gleaned
from her interest in his graduate assistant, Benedict), he suggested
that she
investigate the phenomenon of adolescent girls having “crushes” on each
other.
Mead later reported that the adolescent girls she studied, interviewed,
and
interacted with daily during her time in Samoa did not have crushes on
each
other. Instead, they engaged in same-sex sexual exploration and play.
The
crushes—a well known practice (called “smashing”) in her mother’s and
grandmother’s generation, encouraged until it became threatening—were
reserved
for the Samoan girls who attended the Christian missionary single-sex
boarding
schools.
Janet Mason, whose literary commentary is syndicated on This Way Out radio, has appeared in over sixty literary anthologies and journals.
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