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Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict
The Kinship of Women
by Hillary Lapsley
Review by: Loralee MacPike, Editor of The Lesbian Review of Books and professor emerita of English at California State University, San Bernardino.
THE KINSHIP OF WOMEN
by Hilary Lapsley, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict:
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999, 351 pp., $34.95 ISBN 1-55849- 181-3.
This marvelous volume makes explicit what we've "known" forever but never had fully laid out for us to see in all its passion, intensity, and productivity: the ongoing lesbian relationship between the first fully acknowledged female anthropologist, Ruth Benedict, and her student and later colleague, Margaret Mead. The two met when Mead was an undergraduate at Barnard College and Benedict a doctoral candidate at Columbia University and a teaching assistant in Franz Boas's acclaimed anthropology class. Despite Mead's initial coolness toward Benedict, when Mead enrolled in the Columbia graduate program, the two began working together.
In 1914 Benedict had married Stanley Benedict, a professor at Cornell Medical School, and that marriage lasted 16 years despite Ruth's affairs with women and despite her near-permanent residence in New York City. Mead, as we know, married three times: a short-lived early marriage to Luther Cressman, an on-the-fly marriage to young Australian anthropologist Reo Fortune, and a much more settled union with famed British anthropologist Gregory Bateson. Like Ruth, she had a long friendship with linguist Edward Sapir, and possibly both women had sexual relationships with Sapir as well. However, the two remained one another's closest friends emotionally, despite Margaret's frequent brusque dismissals of Ruth and Ruth's subsequent two intimate relationships with women. They became lovers in 1923 or 1924 and remained very close until Benedict's death. At a memorial service for Benedict in 1948, Mead said of her that Benedict had read every word Mead had ever written, and that Mead had read every word Benedict had ever written. True, Mead's marriages, and particularly the birth of her daughter Mary Catherine
Bateson, led to long periods when Mead's attention was elsewhere; and of course their diverging work caused lengthy separations. Still, it is fair to say, on the basis of Lapsley's research and analysis, that they were always the closest of friends. Interspersed in the compelling story of this famous friendship are Benedict's and Mead's poems, often written for one another or about an aspect of their relationship. There too you will find accounts of other high-profile lesbians of the time, including Louise Bogan, Leonie Adams, Louise
Rosenblatt, and Marie Eichelberger, as well as cogent summaries of Mead's fieldwork in Polynesia and Benedict's analytical studies, which were instrumental in creating the modern field of
anthropology. All in all, this is a marvelous book. Reading it is like opening a door into a new house and making it your home. You will feel you understand these two women, their love and their troubles. And you will see how their love helped create the lives we are able to live today. We owe Hilary Lapsley a debt of thanks for her excellent work.
Loralee MacPike
Editor, The Lesbian Review of Books
The Lesbian Review of Books
PO Box 515
Hilo HI 96721-0515
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