Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead

Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead

By age 15-16 I was -- after a privileged, middle-class, teenage fashion -- involved in various movements: against racism, for nuclear disarmament, against

imperialism and war in general, against class oppression, for labor organization rights. . . Then I read Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead (1926),

and all of a sudden I realized I had a personal stake in another such struggle. I had long been aware of gender injustices. I felt stifled by the narrow bounds

set for girls’ lives in 50s-60s USA. I felt jealous of the greater freedoms allowed for boys. But what could one do? Mead’s book had a message to me on

that point. The bounds around gendered lives were different elsewhere. Ergo, they were culturally determined. (I’ve later learned to call this "socially

constructed.") Ergo, they could be made different where I was too. Awareness that "things could be otherwise" was an important first step to loosening the

iron grip of things as they were. So when I started university at 17, I set out to be a feminist, constructivist (though I didn’t have that name for it then),

anthropologist.

Well, department syllabus soon put that project on hold, to the point where I almost lost sight of it permanently. Anthropology, I was taught, was about

structural functionalism. Not much incentive for change there. But it was still pretty fascinating and I finished my degree, went on to Norway.

Now fast forward to 1975. I am a graduate student in Trondheim. Because the anthro department here was a one-man operation, run by a reactionary

psychologist, I defaulted (not defected!) over to Sociology. Students at that department were battling to get Marx, Mao and women’s studies on the

sociology syllabus and I joined those battles. But when it came to pursuing a research program, I chose not to let myself get side-tracked into a research

ghetto. Just because I was a woman, and a feminist at that, didn’t mean I had to do research only on women -- research which "malestream" sociology

pushed firmly out to the margins of the discipline. I would, I thought, maintain my interest in destabilizing gender bounds. But I would do it as a "mole,"

burrowing into central areas of the discipline and then sneaking gender issues subtly into them, even if only by my mere presence there demonstrating

female competence.

Well, career options don’t open up with a magic word, so I took what I got.