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9781558492950

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Portrays with originality and provocative detail the development of anthropology from its earliest days. ... Lapsley's story becomes a powerful reminder of how friendship and love between women once flourished.

Lapsley's bookflows along like a well-written novel, complete with heroines and villains, well-developed characters, plots and subplots. It includes descriptions and analyses that anthropologists and psychologists will welcome, as will feminist and gender study readers.--Nathalie Woodbury Anthropology Newsletter

Anyone who has ever taken an introduction to cultural anthropology course should enjoy this biography. . . . This account traces the career of Mead as she popularizes ethnographies with her commentary on the people and cultures of the South Pacific and that of Benedict as she fights the misogyny of academia. . . . An easily read and enjoyable narrative.--Booklist Portrays with originality and provocative detail the development of anthropology, from its earliest days. . . . Once [Mead and Benedict] have met, Lapsley's story becomes a powerful reminder of how friendship and love between women once flourished.--Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Women's Review of Books A fascinating, detailed account. . . . What is especially significant about this book is that it approaches Mead and Benedict from a new perspective, one informed by women's studies, feminist psychology, and lesbian studies. . . . The reader gains a wealth of knowledge about the work, relationships, and lives of two of the most influential women in 20th-century social science.--Journal of Lesbian Studies Lapsley's book is not simply about two innovative, 'self-actualized' women but also about the 'kinship of women, ' its loyalties, its commitments, and the courage required to sustain it, which nurtures collegiality and synergistic collaboration. The professional consequences of this kinship are seldom explored in print. Mead and Benedict encouraged each other for more than 30 years. That such focus, attention, and regard should be thought peculiar, require courage, or be cloaked in secrecy is a question Lapsley implicitly raises in a beautifully documented and crafted text.--Choice Lapsley's bookflows along like a well-written novel, complete with heroines and villains, well-developed characters, plots and subplots. It includes descriptions and analyses that anthropologists and psychologists will welcome, as will feminist and gender study readers.--Nathalie Woodbury, Anthropology Newsletter Lapsley casts a fresh eye on a complex friendship that lasted 25 years. . . . Feminist scholars, anthropologists, and students of that post-WWI era when gender roles were in motion will appreciate this complex tale.--Kirkus Reviews

This book offers both respectable fieldwork and a respectful interpretation of a singular relationship between two world-famous anthropologists. Since Margaret Mead's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, wrote a memoir of her parents (With a Daughter's Eye, 1984), the lesbian link between Mead and Ruth Benedict has been no secret. Lapsley (Women's Studies/Univ. of Waikato, New Zealand) casts a fresh eye on a complex friendship that lasted 25 years. Mead and Benedict first met in 1922, when Mead was a student at Barnard College and Benedict was a teaching assistant to famed anthropologist Franz Boas. The two women probably became lovers a year or so later, but their love affair deepened into an intellectual and emotional compatibility that survived Mead's three husbands, Benedict's failed marriage and later lesbian commitments, and even a kind of triangle with linguist Edward Safir. Beginning with the duo's early years, Lapsley echos their professional insights by trying to frame their experiences within the culture that formed them. Part of this includes the accepted romantic attachments between young women in college prior to marriage and the so-called Boston Marriages of women in womanly careers (social work, teaching) that marked the early 1900s. Lapsley follows Mead to Samoa, New Guinea, and Bali and Benedict in her struggles to establish herself in a chauvinist academic sphere at Columbia/Barnard. Throughout their long history was the need to hide any hints of lesbianism, which, in the climate of the 1920s and even later, would have destroyed careers and reputations. The important question, of course, is, how fundamentally did these lesbian relationships influence the conclusions of their ground-breaking research? Significantly is the answer posed here, at least for Mead. Feminist scholars, anthropologists, and students of that post-WWI era when gender roles were in motion will appreciate this complex tale of two friends who stuck it out. (Kirkus Reviews)

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HILARY LAPSLEY is a psychologist and writer who until recently taught women's studies at the University of Waikato, New Zealand.

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