Margaret Mead Sex Quotations

Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful.

An occupation that has no basis in sex-determined gifts can now recruit its ranks from twice as many potential artists.

Those social behaviors which automatically preclude the building of a democratic world must go - every social limitation of human beings in terms of heredity, whether it be of race, or sex, or class. Every social institution which teaches human beings to cringe to those above and step on those below must be replaced by institutions which teach people to look each other straight in the face ...

to the extent that either sex is disadvantaged, the whole culture is poorer, and the sex that, superficially, inherits the earth, inherits only a very partial legacy. The more whole the culture, the more whole each member, each man, each woman, each child will be.

I had my father's mind, but he had his mother's mind. Fortunately, his mother lived with us and so I early realized that intellectual abilities of the kind I shared with my father and grandmother were not sex-linked.

Many women, particularly young women, have claimed the right to use the most explicit sex terms, including extremely vulgar ones, in public as well as private. But it is men, far more than women, who have been liberated by this change. For now that women use these terms, men no longer need to watch their own language in the presence of women. But is this a gain for women?

Both men and women are conceived as merely capable of response to a situation that their society has already defined for them as sexual, and so the Arapesh feel that it is necessary to chaperon betrothed couples who are too young... with their definition of sex as a response to an external situation rather than as spontaneous desire, both men and women are regarded as helpless in the face of seduction. Parents warn their sons even more than they warn their daughters against permitting themselves to get into situations in which someone can make love to them.

The suffering of either sex - of the male who is unable, because of the way in which he was reared, to take the strong initiating or patriarchal role that is still demanded of him, or of the female who has been given too much freedom of movement as a child to stay placidly within the house as an adult - this suffering, this discrepancy, this sense of failure in an enjoined role, is the point of leverage for social change.

Dancing is the only activity in which almost all ages and both sexes participate.

The differences between the two sexes is one of the important conditions upon which we have built the many varieties of human culture that give human beings dignity and stature.

And as I had my father's kind of mind-which was also his mother's-I learned that the mind is not sex-typed.

The mind is not sex-typed.

We need every human gift and cannot afford to neglect any gift because of artificial barriers of sex or race or class or national origin.

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.

Maleness in America is not absolutely defined; it has to be kept and re-earned every day, and one essential element in the definition is beating women in every game that both sexes play.

[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.

Standardized personality differences between the sexes are of this order, cultural creations to which each generation, male and female, is trained to conform.

Young people are moving away from feeling guilty about sleeping with somebody to feeling guilty if they are *not* sleeping with someone.

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.

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.