Margaret Mead. Male and Female : A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1949.
First Edition. pp. 477. Bound in green publisher's cloth, with title and motifs in black on cover and spine. Some bumping or shelfwear to endbands. Dust jacket present but in poor condition. Ownership inscription on front flyleaf. Minor staining to fore edges. Text block clean and bright. Overall GOOD condition.
Controversial yet foundational cultural anthropologist and Associate Curator of Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History, Margaret Mead profoundly shaped twentieth-century Western understandings of sex, gender, and human development. Through influential works such as Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), and later Male and Female (1949), Mead argued that sexual behavior, adolescent experience, and gender roles are not biologically fixed universals but are culturally patterned and socially constructed. Her comparative fieldwork in Samoa and New Guinea challenged rigid Western gender binaries and helped create an intellectual climate in which sexuality could be understood as historically and culturally contingent—an idea that resonated powerfully in mid-century psychology, feminism, and the emerging sexual revolution. Although her Samoan research became the subject of intense debate in the Mead–Freeman controversy—most notably in Derek Freeman’s Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth—Mead’s broader contribution to reframing sexuality as culturally mediated rather than biologically predetermined remains enduring and influential.
In Male and Female (1949), Mead synthesized decades of cross-cultural research to examine how societies construct ideas of masculinity and femininity from infancy through adulthood. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Pacific as well as comparative psychological and sociological data, she argued that temperament, parental roles, sexual expectations, and ideals of maturity are culturally patterned rather than biologically inevitable. The book moves beyond her earlier case studies to offer a broader theoretical meditation on the interplay between biology and culture, insisting that while biological difference exists, its social meaning is shaped by custom, child-rearing practices, and institutional structures. Published at mid-century, Male and Female became a landmark in popular and academic discussions of gender, helping to unsettle rigid Western binaries and contributing significantly to evolving debates about sexuality, family life, and the social construction of gender roles.