Sex and Temperament

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According to Margaret Mead, masculine and feminine characteristics are results of cultural conditioning; Mead examines that gender linked societies exist because a society has promoted or reinforced those differences and Mead also discusses her exploration of societies that ease sex differences between men and women. She lastly, tells of her ideal society. Margaret Mead was an educated woman and led a life of excitement. Margaret Mead was born on December 16, 1901 and was the first of five children. Her father was a professor of finance at the Wharton School University of Pennsylvania, and her mother was a sociologist. Her family moved around frequently; however, she got her bachelor’s degree from Barnard University in 1923. Mead was married three times. She described her first marriage to Luther Cressman, an anthropologist as her “student marriage”. Mead’s second marriage was to Reo Fortune, also an anthropologist. Mead learned a great amount from these people; they gave mead insight on the anthology field. Her work on “Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies” became a cornerstone for feminists because it reasoned the idea of an equal society. From birth, society assigns people different roles depending on gender and surrounds them with the expectation to act differently. According to Mead, Some feminine characteristics include depend, passive, quiet, weak, soft, accepting, and graceful. Masculine characteristics include aggressive, clumsy, experienced, strong, active, competitive, and non-emotional. Children learn gender roles at an early age from their family, culture, religion, as well as outsides forces like television, magazines and other media. Adolescents read ads filled with airbrushed, perfect women; girls look... ... middle of paper ... ...ymore; businesses could recruit twice as many potential employers. Mead includes in Paragraph 25, “And it is here that can find a ground-plan for building a society that would substitute real differences for arbitrary ones”. Where our society now has patterns of behavior for men and women, society would have patterns of behavior that expressed the interests of everyone. No gift would go unrecognized because the child who possessed it was one gender or the other. No child shapes one pattern of behavior; but instead there would be many patterns, in a world that had learned to accept people for their actual temperaments. Mead ends with, “if we are to achieve a richer culture, rich 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”.

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