Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead,
Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle
by Lois W. Banner
Knopf. 540 pages, $30.
Margaret Mead (1901-1978) is a fixture in the American imagination: a superhero of anthropology; intrepid explorer; a woman leaps and bounds ahead of her time. Mead’s bisexuality and her lifelong relationship with like-minded anthropologist and writer Ruth Benedict, which Lois W. Banner explores thoroughly in Intertwined Lives, is not an entirely new thesis. Of the countless books written by and about her, the influential handful—most notably her first, Coming of Age in Samoa (originally published in 1930) and her subsequently published Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)—give more than a passing nod to her interest in cultures with permissive attitudes toward sexuality, including the acceptance of multiple sex partners and the practice of homosexuality.
Since homosexuality at the time was more tolerated in “primitive societies” than in her own, Mead felt compelled to edit out references to her own bisexual explorations in her memoir, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years. She did, however, leave earlier drafts of this work among her writings, leaving a paper trail with which future biographers could conduct their own “ethnographies” of her life. When her memoir was published in 1972, Mead was a prominent woman who still lived in fear of being discredited. She was also a grandmother. Banner conjectures that this fact may account for her decision to conceal “her free-love behavior and her sexual involvements with women—as well as with men other than her husbands.” Still, given that society was changing by the time this memoir was published, and also that Mead, divorced from her third husband, was living in a lesbian partnership with Rhoda Metraux, it’s possible that she intentionally left these early drafts behind with an eye toward later disclosure.
The scope of Intertwined Lives—which goes back not only to the childhoods of Mead and Benedict but to the eras of their mothers and grandmothers, complete with a reference to certain forebears on the Mayflower—is almost too grand; what keeps the book from getting out of control is the page-turning story of the relationship between the two women, which was fated to change both of their lives. This relationship is set against the backdrop of flapper-era free love and intellectual ferment, particularly in the progressive and incestuous circle of anthropologists in which they traveled. Of her philosophy of free love, Mead observed that “you drink one good wine with one dish and another good wine with another.”
Both women came from upper-middle-class backgrounds with reform-minded mothers and grandmothers; both were married to men and became involved in relationships with others, both male and female; and, in their professional lives, both ended up studying traditional cultures in a way that led them to conclude—and to inform the “civilized” world—that conventional heterosexuality wasn’t the only game in town.
Mead and Benedict met in 1922 at Bar-nard in Franz Boas’s introductory course in anthropology. Older than Mead by fourteen years, Benedict was Boas’s graduate instructor and Mead was her student. Anyone who has ever had a passionate interlude with a teacher (regardless of whether it became sexual) can attest to the resulting intellectual frisson. Mead would sometimes ride the New York subway line at key times, as Banner reports, “looking for her teacher, to strike up conversations.”
Benedict was won over. She recognized the potential greatness in Mead and also saw in her student a potential ally against other factions in the anthropology department. She told Mead that if she wanted to follow her mother in studying an immigrant culture—Mead’s mother had studied the Italian immigrant community in Hammonton, New Jersey—she could do so in anthropology. She also emphasized the importance of studying tribal societies before they and their unrecorded traditions and histories disappeared. Mead continued to pursue her masters degree in psychology at Barnard (she originally intended to become a high school psychologist), but with Benedict’s encouragement she pursued her doctorate in anthropology at the same time.
In addition to her intellectual interest in Mead, Benedict “was desiring a female lover,” in Banner’s words. She was married, and while the marriage couldn’t be described as loveless, it certainly seems to have been wanting for passion. While Benedict had been dismissive of homosexuality in earlier academic writings, she soon changed her mind. Writes Banner: “She had decided that heterosexuality and homosexuality moved on ‘separate sets of wheels,’ that they drew from different parts of the self and that both drives needed to be fulfilled.”
Several years later, in 1924, with Mead safely married to her high school sweetheart (both of them agreeing to “divorce on demand” and the “elimination of jealousy” in their marriage), she and Benedict began a “no-strings” sexual love affair that did not require a career-jeopardizing public commitment to lesbianism. Benedict and Mead lived together only briefly. But they traveled, studied, and attended conferences together. Benedict, in her role of teacher, mentor, and lover, saw to it that Mead did not make any mistakes that would prove fatal to the future of anthropology. She also intervened when Mead fell in love with a male colleague of Benedict’s who was intent on “reforming” Mead away from what he called her “prostitution complex.”
Along with chronicling the love affairs of Mead, Benedict, and others in their circle (at times in exhausting detail, albeit relieved by humor), Banner provides readers with a wide canvas of the excitement surrounding the anthropological world at the time. After attending a 1924 conference in Toronto, Mead wrote: “Exploration was in the air. That was the year, that Roy Chapman Andrews brought back dinosaur eggs from the Gobi Desert [to the Museum of Natural History], and everything ancient stirred the public imagination. People were talking about prehistoric American mound buildings, the British excavations in Athens; the lively dispute over King Tutankhamen’s tomb in Egypt.”
Banner spotlights the influence that the progressive anthropologist Franz Boas had on the two women. She describes him as “the leader of the team,” playing an “Olympian role” in the direction of their research, their careers, and their lives. Boas, a German Jew who had faced persecution in his own country and anti-Semitism in the U.S., was known for the controversial stands he had taken against the racism that was so entrenched in society at large and in academic anthropology.
Boas clearly had a knack for encouraging his students to discover themselves by studying others. He suggested that Mead focus on female adolescence when she went to do her fieldwork in Samoa. Also, having some insight into her (perhaps gleaned from her interest in his graduate assistant, Benedict), he suggested that she investigate the phenomenon of adolescent girls having “crushes” on each other. Mead later reported that the adolescent girls she studied, interviewed, and interacted with daily during her time in Samoa did not have crushes on each other. Instead, they engaged in same-sex sexual exploration and play. The crushes—a well known practice (called “smashing”) in her mother’s and grandmother’s generation, encouraged until it became threatening—were reserved for the Samoan girls who attended the Christian missionary single-sex boarding schools.
Janet Mason, whose literary commentary is syndicated on This Way Out radio, has appeared in over sixty literary anthologies and journals.
