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Gender Roles Mead

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The American anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote extensively about gender. Many of her findings were based on observations of how gender was interpreted and performed in different societies, both “modern” and “primitive.” Our class reading from “Male and Female” (1949) focuses on questioning the essentialness of gender. It also analyzes the impact of our earliest physical experiences upon the formation of gender roles. In our reading from “Sex and Temperament (1935) Mead introduces us to three “primitive” societies, and shows us how gender is expressed differently in each, which points to the role of socialization in the formation of gender roles.
Male and Female
In “The Significance of the Questions We Ask,” Mead asserts most societies assign discrete traits and meanings to gender. Mead asks whether “real differences” between the sexes exist, and if so, just how and why are they so important? She asks the reader to consider whether gender roles are biologically fixed or socially determined: “Are we dealing not with a must that we dare not flout because it is rooted so deep in our biological mammalian nature that to flout it means individual and social disease? Or with a must that although not so deeply rooted still is so very socially …show more content…
Her evidence comes from observations of three different societies-the Arapesh, the Mundugumor and the Tchambuli- and reveals the diverse interpretations of gender that are possible. In Arapesh society, both sexes were characterized as “mild,” a refutation of the idea that men are naturally bellicose. Meanwhile, among the Mundugumor, we see that both sexes are aggressive. In both of these cases, neither society has privileged gender as an explanation for preferences or behaviors: “All of the energies of the culture [emphasis mine] have gone toward the creation of a single human type, regardless of class, age or sex.”

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