Male and Female

MALE AND FEMALE. By Margaret Mead. New York, William Morrow and Co., 1949. 477 pp. $5.00. Margaret Mead has made an assumption, not necessarily held by all present day sexologists, that there is a fundamental difference between the human male and the human female, and has utilized four hundred and seventy-seven pages in impressive documentation of this thesis. Seven Southwest Pacific societies, from the stone age cultures of the New Guinean mountains to the ritualistic civilization of Bali and the modern United States, furnish the experimental material for an analysis of the effect of primary sex membership upon the development of the individual within the society and upon the society itself. Her approach is popular and we may well speculate upon the validity of some of her conclusions based upon limited observations in strange and inconvenient environments, but one is forced to admire the skill with which Dr. Mead has interwoven her data into a plausible and stimulating discussion of the cultural results of sex differences. Her second chapter entitled, "How an Anthropologist Writes" stands as a brilliant apologia for the shortcomings of the anthropological method and a discriminating exposition of the field techniques by which this material was gathered. On the basis of this chapter, her insistance upon the basic differences in male and female assume a greater stature in terms of contemporary problems of sexual adjustment. If, as the author intimates, much of our present-day American marital misfunctioning springs from modern accentuation of the biological similarities of men and women and an over-emphasis of the competitive aspects of sex membership, the ultimate panacea may well be suggested by a comparative study of more primitive and stable societies. Time is short for such a comparison since the impact of western man has all but obliterated the stability of the remaining primitive cultures which suffer but a little time before they pass away.