What Would Margaret Mead Say?
With Sarah Palin about to make her debut on the stage of national politics, I thought it appropriate to find a review of a book on gender politics. Here are a few excerpts from Florence Finch Kelly's May 26, 1935 New York Times review of Margaret Mead's Sex and Temperment: In Three Primitive Societies.
"This Margaret Mead is a dangerous person. She goes down to New Guinea, studies primitive tribes for two years and comes back with a book like a bomb that she drops into the complacent, fundamental conviction of the Occidental world, both scientific and social, that the sexes are innately different in their psychological attributes and that the male is dominant by right of brain and brawn. Her bomb explodes and scatters fragments over all the surrounding area and the first thing she knows some indignant voice will be crying out that this is an outrage and there out to be a law --.
... In the final chapters, keenly and clearly thought out and brilliantly written, Miss Mead reviews her findings, comes to her conclusions and casts her challenge to the theory and practice of the civilized world. She shows that 'we are forced to conclude that human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions' and that 'only to the impact of the whole of the integrated culture upon the growing child can we lay the formation of the contrasting types.'
She comes to the conclusion that the distinctive male and female personalities civilization believes to be inherent are 'socially produced,' that in America, 'without conscious plan but none the less surely,' social conditioning is doing away with the idea of male dominance, while in Europe, by the same means, fascism is forcing women back into an older and extreme type of subservience, while communism is endeavoring to make the two sexes as much alike as possible. Miss Mead would have civilization achieve a richer culture, with many contrasting values, by weaving 'a less arbitrary social fabric, in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place' and in which no individual will be forced by artifical distinctions, such as that of sex, 'into an ill-fitting mold.'
Would Margaret Mead see Sarah Palin as a woman being "forced into an ill-fitting mold" by Republican powerbrokers so they can exploit her conservatism, her youth, and her womb? Or would she see this as a step forward in America's trend in "doing away with male dominance?"
My suspicion is that if she'd seen this picture from today's New York Times she would have seen Sarah Palin's nomination for what it probably is -- more of the same old male dominance. Who are in the center of the photo? A woman holding Palin's baby and Palin's pregnant teenage daughter. What is John McCain doing? Waving the hand of a little girl for her. And where is Sarah Palin -- the Republican woman to be reckoned with, their VP candidate? So far to the side that she's nearly out of the picture. Right next to McCain's wife.