Mead recognized sex differences, clearly manifest in reproduction function and body parts. But her question was how much real difference flows from these male/ female differences? Almost all known societies from around the globe and over time have to some extent organized themselves by making gender distinctions, finding differences in character and roles flowing from sex differences, albeit widely different ones. What , if anything , is the common thread? These questions are what Mead set out to explore in some of her work, including her 1935 book, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, excerpted below:
This study is not concerned with whether there are or are not actual and universal differences between the sexes, either quantitative or qualitative. It is not concerned with whether women are more variable than men, which was claimed before the doctrine of evolution exalted variability, or less variable, which was claimed afterwards. It is not a treatise on the rights of women, nor an inquiry into the basis of feminism. It is, very simply, an account of how three primitive societies have grouped their social attitudes towards temperament about the very obvious facts of sex-difference. I studied this problem in simple societies because here we have the drama of civilisation writ small, a social microcosm alike in kind, but different in size and magnitude, from the complex social structures of peoples who, like our own, depend upon a written tradition and upon the integration of a great number of conflicting historical traditions. Among the gentle mountain-dwelling Arapesh, the fierce cannibalistic Mundugumor, and the graceful head-hunters of Tchambuli, I studied this question. Each of these tribes had, as has every human society, the point of sex-difference to use as one theme in the plot of social life, and each of these three peoples has developed that theme differently. In comparing the way in which they have dramatised sex-difference, it is possible to gain a greater insight into what elements are social constructs, originally irrelevant to the biological facts of sex-gender. (emphasis added).
Our own society makes great use of this plot. It assigns different rôles to the two sexes, surrounds them from birth with an expectation of different behaviour, plays out the whole drama of courtship, marriage, and parenthood in terms of types of behaviour believed to be innate and therefore appropriate for one sex or for the other. We know dimly that these rôles have changed even within our own history….All discussion of the position of women, of the character and temperament of women, the enslavement or the emancipation of women, obscures the basic issue — the recognition that the cultural plot behind human relations is the way in which the rôles of the two sexes are conceived, and that the growing boy is shaped to a local and special emphasis as inexorably as the growing girl….
[We are here] concerned with the patterning of sex-behaviour from the standpoint of temperament, with the cultural assumptions that certain temperamental attitudes are "naturally" masculine and others "naturally" feminine. In this matter, primitive people seem to be, on the surface, more sophisticated than we are. Just as they know that the gods, the food habits, and the marriage customs of the next tribe differ from those of their own people, and do not insist that one form is true or natural while the other is false or unnatural, so they often know that the temperamental proclivities which they regard as natural for men or for women differ from the natural tempera- ments of the men and women among their neighbours. Nevertheless, within a narrower range and with less of a claim for the biological or divine validity of their social forms than we often advance, each tribe has certain definite attitudes towards temperament, a theory of what human beings, either men or women or both, are naturally like, a norm in terms of which to judge and condemn those individuals who deviate from it.
Two of these tribes have no idea that men and women are different in temperament. They allow them different economic and religious rôles, different skills, different vulnerabilities to evil magic and supernatural influences. The Arapesh believe that painting in colour is appropriate only to men, and the Mundugumor consider fishing an essentially feminine task. But any idea that temperamental traits of the order of dominance, bravery, aggressiveness, objectivity, malleability, are inalienably associated with one sex (as opposed to the other) is entirely lacking. This may seem strange to a civilisation which in its sociology, its medicine, its slang, its poetry, and its obscenity accepts the socially defined differences between the sexes as having an innate basis in temperament and explains any deviation from the socially determined rôle as abnormality of native endowment or early maturation. It came as a surprise to me because I too had been accustomed to use in my thinking such concepts as “mixed type,” to think of some men as having “feminine” temperaments, of some women as having "masculine" minds. I set as my problem a study of the conditioning of the social personalities of the two sexes, in the hope that such an investigation would throw some light upon sex-differences. I shared the general belief of our society that there was a natural sex-temperament which could at the most only be distorted or diverted from normal expression. I was innocent of any suspicion that the temperaments which we regard as native to sex might instead be mere variations of human temperament, to which the members of either or both sexes may, with more less success in the case of different individuals, be educate approximate.
References
Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, Pub. William Morrow and Company, 1935, pp. xxxiv-xi.
Comments? Questions about this post? Send to worldwithoutgender@substack.com or post a public comment below.