9 quotes
Human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)
Standardized personality differences between the sexes are of this order, cultural creations to which each generation, male and female, is trained to conform.
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)
[Partly as a consequence of male authority] prestige value always attaches to the activities of men.
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)
It [this book] 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.
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)
We must recognize that beneath the superficial classifications of sex and race the same potentialities exist, recurring generation after generation, only to perish because society has no place for them.
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)
We may say that many, if not all, of the personality traits which we have called masculine or feminine are as lightly linked to sex as are the clothing, the manners, and the form of headdress that a society at a given period assigns to either sex.
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)
[Mead described the Arapesh as a culture in which both sexes were] placid and contented, unaggressive and noninitiatory, noncompetitive and responsive, warm, docile, and trusting.
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)
No skill, no special aptitude, no vividness of imagination or precision of thinking would go unrecognized because the child who possessed it was of one sex rather than the other. No child would be relentlessly shaped to one pattern of behavior, but instead there should be many patterns, in a world that had learned to allow to each individual the pattern which was most congenial to his gifts.
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)
Historically our own culture has relied for the creation of rich and contrasting values upon many artificial distinctions, the most striking of which is sex. It will not be by the mere abolition of these distinctions that society will develop patterns in which individual gifts are given place instead of being forced into an ill-fitting mould. If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)