Margaret Mead, Male and Female, 1975 ✓

One of the privileges of the modern publishing world, if one lives long enough, is the opportunity to comment on the continuing relevance or irrelevance of one’s work as successive editions appear.

[…]

[…] So, in 1955 I wrote my first new introduction.

But by 1962, when a new Pelican edition was to be issued in England and I was again given an opportunity for second thoughts, a still different phase was under way.

One of the pleasant by-products of publication in paperbacks is the opportunity it provides for second thoughts.

[…]

So here, in my comparative descriptive account of American manners, very drastic additions are needed. Some of these I indicated in the preface to the original American paperback edition, the New American Library Mentor edition, published in 1955.

The recurrent problem of civilization is to define the male role satisfactorily enough —whether it be to build gardens or raise cattle, kill game or kill enemies, build bridges or handle bank-shares— so that the male may in the course of his life reach a solid sense of irreversible achievement, of which his childhood knowledge of the satisfactions of child-bearing have given him a glimpse. In the case of women, it is only necessary that they be permitted by the given social arrangements to fulfil their biological role, to attain this sense of irreversible achievement. If women are to be restless and questing, even in the face of child-bearing, they must be made so through education. If men are ever to beat peace, ever certain that their lives have been lived as they were meant to be, they must have, in addition to paternity,culturally elaborated forms of expression that are lasting and sure. Each culture—in its own way—has developed forms that will make men satisfied in their constructive activities without distorting their sure sense of their masculinity. Fewer cultures have yet found ways in which to give women a divine discontent that will demand other satisfactions than those of child-bearing.