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“I Didn't Say That”: Margaret Mead on Nature, Nurture, and Gender in the Nuclear Age
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 August 2019
Abstract
The anthropologist Margaret Mead is widely known for stating that human nature is “almost unbelievably malleable,” meaning that individual identity—including gender—is shaped more by culture than by biology. Many feminists, notably Betty Friedan, seized on this idea as a tool for dismantling sexist biases but were dismayed when Mead's later work seemed to relegate women to a biologically determined, maternal role. Mead, however, argued strenuously in print and correspondence that she never intended to set nature against nurture, for she believed that identity grew from the interplay of the two. The historical context for Mead's thinking changed, as the menace of eugenic politics in the 1930s yielded to the existential threat of nuclear annihilation after 1945, but Mead never fundamentally changed her mind about the production of gender.
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Footnotes
I would like to express sincere gratitude to the editors and anonymous reviewers at Modern Intellectual History, colleagues Andrea Turpin and B. M. Pietsch, and graduate students Sean Delehanty and Skylar Ray. Funding was provided by the Baylor University Office of the Vice Provost for Research. Portions of this research were presented at the 2017 meeting of the Society for US Intellectual History.
References
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3 Although “gender roles” is the more common term today, I retain Mead's use of “sex roles,” in part for consistency with my sources and in part to reflect Mead's emphasis on biology. On the distinctions between these terms see Acker, Joan, “From Sex Roles to Gendered Institutions,” Contemporary Sociology 21/5 (1992), 565–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For extended consideration of Mead's and Viola Klein's contributions on this topic see Tarrant, Shira, When Sex Became Gender (New York, 2006)Google Scholar. See also Gerhardt, Uta, “Margaret Mead's Male and Female Revisited,” International Sociology 10/2 (1995), 197–217CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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