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By Root 1941 0

themselves…. The young Balinese girl to whom one says, “Your name is I Tewa?” and who draws herself up and answers, “I am Men Bawa” (Mother of Bawa) is speaking absolutely. She is the mother of Bawa; Bawa may die tomorrow, but she remains the mother of Bawa; only if he had died unnamed would her neighbors have called her “Men Belasin,” “Mother Bereft.” Stage after stage in women’s life-histories thus stand, irrevocable, indisputable, accomplished. This gives a natural basis for the little girl’s emphasis on being rather than on doing. The little boy learns that he must act like a boy, do things, prove that he is a boy, and prove it over and over again, while the little girl learns that she is a girl, and all she has to do is to refrain from acting like a boy.23

And so it goes, on and on, until one is inclined to say—so what? You are born, you grow, you are impregnated, you have a child, it grows; this is true of all cultures, recorded or unrecorded, the one we know from life and the recondite ones which only the far-traveled anthropologist knows. But is this all there is to life for a woman today?

It is not to deny the importance of biology to question a definition of woman’s nature that is based so completely on her biological difference from man. Female biology, woman’s “biological career-line,” may be changeless—the same in Stone Age women twenty thousand years ago, and Samoan women on remote islands, and American women in the twentieth century—but the nature of the human relationship to biology has changed. Our increasing knowledge, the increasing potency of human intelligence, has given us an awareness of purposes and goals beyond the simple biological needs of hunger, thirst, and sex. Even these simple needs, in men or women today, are not the same as they were in the Stone Age or in the South Sea cultures, because they are now part of a more complex pattern of human life.

As an anthropologist, of course, Margaret Mead knew this. And for all her words glorifying the female role, there are other words picturing the wonders of a world in which women would be able to realize their full capabilities. But this picture is almost invariably overlaid with the therapeutic caution, the manipulative superiority, typical of too many American social scientists. When this caution is combined with perhaps an over-evaluation of the power of social science not merely to interpret culture and personality, but to order our lives, her words acquire the aura of a righteous crusade—a crusade against change. She joins the other functional social scientists in their emphasis on adjusting to society as we find it, on living our lives within the framework of the conventional cultural definitions of the male and female roles. This attitude is explicit in the later pages of Male and Female.

Giving each sex its due, a full recognition of its special vulnerabilities and needs for protection, means looking beyond the superficial resemblances during the period of later childhood when both boys and girls, each having laid many of the problems of sex adjustment aside, seem so eager to learn, and so able to learn the same things…. But every adjustment that minimizes a difference, a vulnerability, in one sex, a differential strength in the other, diminishes their possibility of complementing each other, and corresponds—symbolically—to sealing off the constructive receptivity of the female and the vigorous outgoing constructive activity of the male, muting them both in the end to a duller version of human life, in which each is denied the fullness of humanity that each might have had.24

No human gift is strong enough to flower fully in a person who is threatened with loss of sex membership…. No matter with what good will we may embark on a program of actually rearing both men and women to make their full and special contributions in all the complex processes of civilization—medicine and law, education and religion, the arts and sciences—the task will be very difficult….

It is of very doubtful value to enlist the gifts of women if bringing