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By Root 1973 0

was a necessary step after the masculine protest made by some of the feminists. Margaret Mead was one of the first women to emerge into prominence in American life after rights for women were won. Her mother was a social scientist, her grandmother a teacher; she had private images of women who were fully human, she had education equal to any man’s. And she was able to say with conviction: it’s good to be a woman, you don’t need to copy man, you can respect yourself as a woman. She made a resounding feminine protest, in her life and in her work. And it was a step forward when she influenced emancipated modern women to choose, with free intelligence, to have babies, bear them with a proud awareness that denied pain, nurse them at the breast and devote mind and body to their care. It was a step forward in the passionate journey—and one made possible by it—for educated women to say “yes” to motherhood as a conscious human purpose and not a burden imposed by the flesh. For, of course, the natural childbirth-breastfeeding movement Margaret Mead helped inspire was not at all a return to primitive earth-mother maternity. It appealed to the independent, educated, spirited American woman—and to her counterparts in western Europe and Russia—because it enabled her to experience childbirth not as a mindless female animal, an object manipulated by the obstetrician, but as a whole person, able to control her own body with her aware mind. Perhaps less important than birth control and the other rights which made woman more equal to man, the work of Margaret Mead helped humanize sex. It took a scientific super-saleswoman to re-create in modern American life even a semblance of the conditions under which primitive tribesmen jealously imitated maternity and bled themselves. (The modern husband goes through the breathing exercises with his wife as she prepares for natural childbirth.) But did she oversell women?

It was, perhaps, not her fault that she was taken so literally that procreation became a cult, a career, to the exclusion of every other kind of creative endeavor, until women kept on having babies because they knew no other way to create. She was often quoted out of context by the lesser functionalists and the women’s magazines. Those who found in her work confirmation of their own unadmitted prejudices and fears ignored not only the complexity of her total work, but the example of her complex life. With all the difficulties she must have encountered, pioneering as a woman in the realm of abstract thought that was the domain of man (a one-sentence review of Sex and Temperament indicates the resentment she often met: “Margaret, have you found a culture yet where the men had the babies?”), she has never retreated from the hard road to self-realization so few women have traveled since. She told women often enough to stay on that road. If they only heard her other words of warning, and conformed to her glorification of femininity, perhaps it was because they were not as sure of themselves and their human abilities as she was.

Margaret Mead and the lesser functionalists knew the pains, the risks, of breaking through age-old social strictures.27 This awareness was their justification for qualifying their statements of women’s potentiality with the advice that women not compete with men, but seek respect for their uniqueness as women. It was hardly revolutionary advice; it did not upset the traditional image of woman any more than Freudian thought upset it. Perhaps it was their intention to subvert the old image; but instead they gave the new mystique its scientific authority.

Ironically, Margaret Mead, in the 1960’s, began to voice alarm at the “return of the cavewoman”—the retreat of American women to narrow domesticity, while the world trembled on the brink of technological holocaust. In an excerpt from a book titled American Women: The Changing Image, which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post (March 3, 1962), she asked:

Why have we returned, despite our advances in technology, to the Stone Age picture?…Woman has gone back, each