Xll ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ment, and hospitality on the part of members of the Government, I am indebted to His Honour the Acting Administrator, Judge Wanless; to His Honour Judge Phillips; to Mr. Chinnery, Government Anthropologist; to District Officers T. E. McAdam and E. D. Robinson; to Patrol Officers MacDonald, Thomas, and Bloxam. 1 am specially indebted to Mr. and Mrs. M. V. Cobb of Karawop Plantation, who offered me the most extensive hospitality and permitted me the use of their plantation as a base during the Arapesh work. For many courtesies, especially in the matter of transportation of supplies, I have to thank Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Ifould of Boram, Mr. and Mrs. MacKenzie of the Lady Betty, and Messrs. Mason, Overall, Gibson, and Eichorn. This manuscript was prepared while the impressions derived from the Seminar on Human Relations, held at Hanover in the summer of 1934, were still fresh in my mind, and I wish to acknowledge my special indebtedness to Mr. Laurence K. Frank and Dr. Earle T. Engle for insights developed during the seminar. I am further most particularly indebted for criticisms of the theoretical approach and for detailed assistance in the organization of the manuscript to Dr. Ruth F. Benedict and Dr. John Dollard. For assistance in the preparation of the manuscript I have to thank my mother, Emily Fogg Mead, Miss Marie Eichelberger, Miss Isabel Ely Lord, and Mrs. Violet Whittington. Margaret Mead The American Museum of Natural History New York January 19)! INTRODUCTION hen we study the simpler societies, we cannot but be impressed with the many ways in which man has taken a few hints and woven them into the beautiful imaginative social fabrics that we call civilizations. His natural environment provided him with a few striking periodicities and contrasts—day and night, the change of seasons, the untiring waxing and waning of the moon, the spawning of fish and the migration-times of animals and birds. His own physical nature provided other striking points—age and sex, the rhythm of birth, maturation, and senescence, the structure of blood-relationship. Differences between one animal and another, between one individual and another, differences in fierceness or in tenderness, in bravery or in cunning, in richness of imagination or plodding dulness of wit—these provided hints out of which the ideas of rank and caste, of special priesthoods, of the artist and the oracle, could be developed. Working with clues as universal and as simple as these, man made for himself a fabric of culture within which each human life was dignified by form and meaning. Man became not merely one of the beasts that mated, fought for its food, and died, but a human being, with a name, a position, and a god. Each people makes this fabric differently, selects some clues and ignores others, emphasizes a different sector of the whole arc of human potentialities. Where one culture uses as a main thread the vulnerable ego, quick to take insult or perish of shame, another selects uncompromising bravery and even, so that there may be no admitted cowards, may like the Cheyenne Indians invent a specially complicated xiii w XIV INTRODUCTION social position for the overfearful. Each simple, homogeneous culture can give scope to only a few of the varied human endowments, disallowing or penalizing others too antithetical or too unrelated to its major emphases to find room within its walls. Having originally taken its values from the values dear to some human temperaments and alien to others, a culture embodies these values more and more firmly in its structure, in its political and religious systems, in its art and its literature} and each new generation is shaped, firmly and definitely, to the dominant trends. Now as each culture creates distinctively the social fabric in which the human spirit can wrap itself safely and intelligibly, sorting, reweaving, and discarding threads in the historical tradition that it shares with many neighbouring peoples, it may bend every individual born within it to one type of behaviour, recognizing neither age, sex, nor special disposition as points for differential elaboration. Or a culture may seize upon the very obvious facts of difference in age, in sex, in strength, in beauty, or the unusual variations, such as a native propensity to see visions or dream dreams, and make these dominant cultural themes. So societies such as those of the Masai and the Zulus make a grading of all individuals by age a basic point of organization, and the Akikiyu of East Africa make a major drama out of the ceremonial ousting of the older generation by the younger. The aborigines of Siberia dignified the nervously unstable individual into the shaman, whose utterances were believed to be supernaturally inspired and were a law to his more nervously stable fellow-tribesmen. Such an extreme case as this, where a whole people bows down before the word of an individual whom we would classify as insane, seems clear enough to us. The Siberians have imaginatively and from the point of view of our society unjustifiably, elevated an abnormal person into a socially important one. They have built upon a human INTRODUCTION XV deviation that we would disallow, or if it became troublesome, imprison. If we hear that among the Mundugumor people of New Guinea children born with the umbilical cord wound around their necks are singled out as of native and indisputable right artists, we feel that here is a culture which has not merely institutionalized a kind of temperament that we regard as abnormal—as in the case of the Siberian shaman—but also a culture that has arbitrarily associated, in an artificial and imaginative way, two completely unrelated points: manner of birth and an ability to paint intricate designs upon pieces of bark. When we learn further that so firmly is this association insisted upon that only those who are so born can paint good pictures, while the man born without a strangulating cord labours humble and unarrogant, and never attains any virtuosity, we see the strength that lies in such irrelevant associations once they are firmly embedded in the culture. Even when we encounter less glaring cases of cultural elaboration, when we read of a people in which the first-born son is regarded as different in kind from his later-born brethren, we realize that here again the human imagination has been at work, re-evaluating a simple biological fact. Although our own historical tradition hints to us that the first-born is "naturally" a little more important than the others, still when we hear that among the Maori the firstborn son of a chief was so sacred that only special persons could cut his infant locks without risking death from the contact, we recognize that man has taken the accident of order of birth and raised a superstructure of rank upon it. Our critical detachment, our ability to smile over these imaginative flights of fancy—which see in the first-born or the last-born, the seventh child of the seventh child, the twin, or the infant born in a caul a being specially endowed with precious or maleficent powers—remains undisturbed. XVI INTRODUCTION But if we turn from these "self-evident" primitive constructs to points of elaboration that we share with primitive peoples, to points concerning which we are no longer spectators, but instead are deeply involved, our detachment vanishes. It is no doubt purely imaginative to attribute ability to paint to birth with the cord about the neck, or the power to write poetry to one born a twin. To choose leaders or oracles from aberrant and unusual temperaments that we brand as insane is not wholly imaginative, but at least is based on a very different premise, which selects a natural potentiality of the human race that we neither use nor honour. But the insistence upon a thousand and one innate differences between men and women, differences many of which show no more immediate relationship to the biological facts of sex than does ability to paint to manner of birth, other differences which show a congruence with sex that is neither universal nor necessary—as is the case in the association of epileptic seizure and religious gift—this indeed we do not regard as an imaginative creation of the human mind busy patterning a bare existence with meaning. This study is not concerned with whether there are or are not actual and universal differences between the sexes, either quantitative or qualitative. It is not concerned with whether women are more variable than men, which was claimed before the doctrine of evolution exalted variability, or less variable, which was claimed afterwards. It is not a treatise on the rights of women, nor an inquiry into the basis of femininism. It is, very simply, an account of how three primitive societies have grouped their social attitudes towards temperament about the very obvious facts of sex-difference. I studied this problem in simple societies because here we have the drama of civilization writ small, a social microcosm alike in kind, but different in size and magnitude, from the complex social structures of peoples who, like our INTRODUCTION XV11 own, depend upon a written tradition and upon the integration of a great number of conflicting historical traditions. Among the gentle mountain-dwelling Arapesh, the fierce cannibalistic Mundugumor, and the graceful head-hunters of Tchambuli, I studied this question. Each of these tribes had, as has every human society, the point of sex-difference to use as one theme in the plot of social life, and each of these three peoples has developed that theme differently. In comparing the way in which they have dramatized sex-difference, it is possible to gain a greater insight into what elements are social constructs, originally irrelevant to the biological facts of sex-gender. Our own society makes great use of this plot. It assigns different roles to the two sexes, surrounds them from birth with an expectation of different behaviour, plays out the whole drama of courtship, marriage, and parenthood in terms of types of behaviour believed to be innate and therefore appropriate for one sex or for the other. We know dimly that these roles have changed even within our history. Studies like Mrs. Putnam's The Ľady 1 depict woman as an infinitely malleable lay figure upon which mankind has draped ever varying period-costumes, in keeping with which she wilted or waxed imperious, flirted or fled. But all discussions have emphasized not the relative social personalities assigned to the two sexes, but rather the superficial behaviour-patterns assigned to women, often not even to all women, but only to women of the upper class. A sophisticated recognition that upper-class women were puppets of a changing tradition blurred rather than clarified the issue. It left untouched the roles assigned to men, who were conceived as proceeding along a special masculine road, shaping women to their fads and whims in womanliness. All discussion of the position of women, of the character and tem- E. J. S. Putnam, The Lady, Sturgis & Walton, 1910. XVlll INTRODUCTION perament of women, the enslavement or the emancipation of women, obscures the basic issue—the recognition that the cultural plot behind human relations is the way in which the roles of the two sexes are conceived, and that the growing boy is shaped to a local and special emphasis as inexorably as is the growing girl. The Vaěrtings attacked the problem in their book The Dominant Sex2 with their critical imagination handicapped by European cultural tradition. They knew that in some parts of the world there had been and still were matriarchal institutions which gave to women a freedom of action, endowed women with an independence of choice that historical European culture granted only to men. By simple sleight-of-hand they reversed the European situation, and built up an interpretation of matriarchal societies that saw women as cold, proud, and dominant, men as weak and submissive. The attributes of women in Europe were foisted upon men in matriarchal communities—that was all. It was a simple picture, which really added nothing to our understanding of the problem, based as it was upon the limiting concept that if one sex is dominating in personality, the other sex must be ipso facto submissive. The root of the Vaěrtings' mistake lies in our traditional insistence upon contrasts between the personality of the two sexes, in our ability to see only one variation upon the theme of the dominant male, and that the hen-pecked husband. They did conceive, however, of the possibility of a different arrangement of dominance from our traditional one, mainly because to thinking based upon patriarchal institutions the very existence of a matriarchal form of society carries with it an implication of an imaginary reversal of the temperamental position of the two sexes. But recent studies of primitive peoples have made us 2 Mathilde and Mathis Vaerting, The Dominant Sex, Doran, 1923. INTRODUCTION XIX more sophisticated.3 We know that human cultures do not all fall into one side or the other of a single scale and that it is possible for one society to ignore completely an issue which two other societies have solved in contrasting ways. Because a people honour the old may mean that they hold children in slight esteem, but a people may also, like the Ba Thonga of South Africa, honour neither old people nor children} or, like the Plains Indians, dignify the little child and the grandfather} or, again, like the Manus and parts of modern America, regard children as the most important group in society. In expecting simple reversals—that if an aspect of social life is not specifically sacred, it must be specifically secular} that if men are strong, women must be weak— we ignore the fact that cultures exercise far greater licence than this in selecting the possible aspects of human life which they will minimize, overemphasize, or ignore. And while every culture has in some way institutionalized the roles of men and women, it has not necessarily been in terms of contrast between the prescribed personalities of the two sexes, nor in terms of dominance or submission. With the paucity of material for elaboration, no culture has failed to seize upon the conspicuous facts of age and sex in some way, whether it be the convention of one Philippine tribe that no man can keep a secret, the Manus assumption that only men enjoy playing with babies, the Toda prescription of almost all domestic work as too sacred for women, or the Arapesh insistence that women's heads are stronger than men's. In the division of labour, in dress, in manners, in social and religious functioning—sometimes in only a few of these respects, sometimes in all—men and women are socially differentiated, and each sex, as a sex, forced to conform to the role assigned to it. In some societies, these socially defined roles are * See especially Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture, Houghton Mifflin, «934. XX INTRODUCTION mainly expressed in dress or occupation, with no insistence upon innate temperamental differences. Women wear long hair and men wear short hair, or men wear curls and women shave their heads j women wear skirts and men wear trousers, or women wear trousers and men wear skirts. Women weave and men do not, or men weave and women do not. Such simple tie-ups as these between dress or occupation and sex are easily taught to every child and make no assumptions to which a given child cannot easily conform. It is otherwise in societies that sharply differentiate the behaviour of men and of women in terms which assume a genuine difference in temperament. Among the Dakota Indians of the Plains, the importance of an ability to stand any degree of danger or hardship was frantically insisted upon as a masculine characteristic. From the time that a boy was five or six, all the conscious educational effort of the household was bent towards shaping him into an indubitable male. Every tear, every timidity, every clinging to a protective hand or desire to continue to play with younger children or with girls, was obsessively interpreted as proof that he was not going to develop into a real man. In such a society it is not surprising to find the berdache, the man who had voluntarily given up the struggle to conform to the masculine role and who wore female attire and followed the occupations of a woman. The institution of the berdache in turn served as a warning to every father j the fear that the son might become a berdache informed the parental efforts with an extra desperation, and the very pressure which helped to drive a boy to that choice was redoubled. The invert who lacks any discernible physical basis for his inversion has long puzzled students of sex, who when they can find no observable glandular abnormality turn to theories of early conditioning or identification with a parent of opposite sex. In the course of this investigation, we shall have occasion to ex- INTRODUCTION XXI amine the "masculine" woman and the "feminine" man as they occur in these different tribes, to inquire whether it is always a woman of dominating nature who is conceived as masculine, or a man who is gentle, submissive, or fond of children or embroidery who is conceived as feminine. In the following chapters we shall be concerned with the patterning of sex-behaviour from the standpoint of temperament, with the cultural assumptions that certain temperamental attitudes are "naturally" masculine and others "naturally" feminine. In this matter, primitive people seem to be, on the surface, more sophisticated than we are. Just as they know that the gods, the food habits, and the marriage customs of the next tribe differ from those of their own people, and do not insist that one form is true or natural while the other is false or unnatural, so they often know that the temperamental proclivities which they regard as natural for men or for women differ from the natural temperaments of the men and women among their neighbours. Nevertheless, within a narrower range and with less of a claim for the biological or divine validity of their social forms than we often advance, each tribe has certain definite attitudes towards temperament, a theory of what human beings, either men or women or both, are naturally like, a norm in terms of which to judge and condemn those individuals who deviate from it. Two of these tribes have no idea that men and women are different in temperament. They allow them different economic and religious roles, different skills, different vulnerabilities to evil magic and supernatural influences. The Arapesh believe that painting in colour is appropriate only to men, and the Mundugumor consider fishing an essentially feminine task. But any idea that temperamental traits of the order of dominance, bravery, aggressiveness, objectivity, malleability, are inalienably associated with one sex (as op- XXll INTRODUCTION posed to the other) is entirely lacking. This may seem strange to a civilization which in its sociology, its medicine, its slang, its poetry, and its obscenity accepts the socially defined differences between the sexes as having an innate basis in temperament and explains any deviation from the socially determined role as abnormality of native endowment or early maturation. It came as a surprise to me because I too had been accustomed to use in my thinking such concepts as "mixed type," to think of some men as having "feminine" temperaments, of some women as having "masculine" minds. I set as my problem a study of the conditioning of the social personalities of the two sexes, in the hope that such an investigation would throw some light upon sex-differences. I shared the general belief of our society that there was a natural sex-temperament which could at the most only be distorted or diverted from normal expression. I was innocent of any suspicion that the temperaments which we regard as native to one sex might instead be mere variations of human temperament, to which the members of either or both sexes may, with more or less success in the case of different individuals, be educated to approximate. PART ONE THE MOUNTAIN-DWELLING ARAPESH CHAPTER XVII THE STANDARDIZATION OF SEX-TEMPERAMENT e have now considered in detail the approved personalities of each sex among three primitive peoples. We found the Arapesh—both men and women—displaying a personality that, out of our historically limited preoccupations, we would call maternal in its parental aspects, and feminine in its sexual aspects. We found men, as well as women, trained to be co-operative, unaggressive, responsive to the needs and demands of others. We found no idea that sex was a powerful driving force either for men or for women. In marked contrast to these attitudes, we found among the Mundugumor that both men and women developed as ruthless, aggressive, positively sexed individuals, with the maternal cherishing aspects of personality at a minimum. Both men and women approximated to a personality type that we in our culture would find only in an undisciplined and very violent male. Neither the Arapesh nor the Mundugumor profit by a contrast between the sexes; the Arapesh ideal is the mild, responsive man married to the mild, responsive woman; the Mundugumor ideal is the violent aggressive man married to the violent aggressive woman. In the third tribe, the Tchambuli, we found a genuine reversal of the sex-attitudes of our own culture, with the woman the dominant, impersonal, managing partner, the man the less responsible and the emotionally dependent person. These three situations suggest, then, a very definite conclusion. If those temperamental attitudes which we have traditionally regarded as feminine—such as passivity, responsiveness, and a 279 w 280 SEX AND TEMPERAMENT willingness to cherish children—can so easily be set up as the masculine pattern in one tribe, and in another be outlawed for the majority of women as well as for the majority of men, we no longer have any basis for regarding such aspects of behaviour as sex-linked. And this conclusion becomes even stronger when we consider the actual reversal in Tchambuli of the position of dominance of the two sexes, in spite of the existence of formal patrilineal institutions. The material suggests that 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 head-dress that a society at a given period assigns to either sex. When we consider the behaviour of the typical Arapesh man or woman as contrasted with the behaviour of the typical Mundugumor man or woman, the evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of the strength of social conditioning. In no other way can we account for the almost complete uniformity with which Arapesh children develop into contented, passive, secure persons, while Mundugumor children develop as characteristically into violent, aggressive, insecure persons. Only to the impact of the whole of the integrated culture upon the growing child can we lay the formation of the contrasting types. There is no other explanation of race, or diet, or selection that can be adduced to explain them. We are forced to conclude that human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions. The differences between individuals who are members of different cultures, like the differences between individuals within a culture, are almost entirely to be laid to differences in conditioning, especially during early childhood, and the form of this conditioning is culturally determined. Standardized personality differences between the sexes are of this order, cultural creations to which each generation, male and female, is THE STANDARDIZATION OF SEX-TEMPERAMENT 281 trained to conform. There remains, however, the problem of the origin of these socially standardized differences. While the basic importance of social conditioning is still imperfectly recognized—not only in lay thought, but even by the scientist specifically concerned with such matters—to go beyond it and consider the possible influence of variations in hereditary equipment is a hazardous matter. The following pages will read very differently to one who has made a part of his thinking a recognition of the whole amazing mechanism of cultural conditioning—who has really accepted the fact that the same infant could be developed into a full participant in any one of these three cultures—than they will read to one who still believes that the minutiae of cultural behaviour are carried in the individual germ-plasm. If it is said, therefore, that when we have grasped the full significance of the malleability of the human organism and the preponderant importance of cultural conditioning, there are still further problems to solve, it must be remembered that these problems come after such a comprehension of the force of conditioning} they cannot precede it. The forces that make children born among the Arapesh grow up into typical Arapesh personalities are entirely social, and any discussion of the variations which do occur must be looked at against this social background. With this warning firmly in mind, we can ask a further question. Granting the malleability of human nature, whence arise the differences between the standardized personalities that different cultures decree for all of their members, or which one culture decrees for the members of one sex as contrasted with the members of the opposite sex? If such differences are culturally created, as this material would most strongly suggest that they are, if the new-born child can be shaped with equal ease into an unaggressive Arapesh or an aggressive Mundugumor, why do these striking contrasts 282 SEX AND TEMPERAMENT occur at all? If the clues to the different personalities decreed for men and women in Tchambuli do not lie in the physical constitution of the two sexes—an assumption that we must reject both for the Tchambuli and for our own society— where can we find the clues upon which the Tchambuli, the Arapesh, the Mundugumor, have built? Cultures are man-made, they are built of human materials} they are diverse but comparable structures within which human beings can attain full human stature. Upon what have they built their diversities? We recognize that a homogeneous culture committed in all of its gravest institutions and slightest usages to a co-operative, unaggressive course can bend every child to that emphasis, some to a perfect accord with it, the majority to an easy acceptance, while only a few deviants fail to receive the cultural imprint. To consider such traits as aggressiveness or passivity to be sex-linked is not possible in the light of the facts. Have such traits, then, as aggressiveness or passivity, pride or humility, objectivity or a preoccupation with personal relationships, an easy response to the needs of the young and the weak or a hostility to the young and the weak, a tendency to initiate sex-relations or merely to respond to the dictates of a situation or another person's advances—have these traits any basis in temperament at all? Are they potentialities of all human temperaments that can be developed by different kinds of social conditioning and which will not appear if the necessary conditioning is absent? When we ask this question we shift our emphasis. If we ask why an Arapesh man or an Arapesh woman shows the kind of personality that we have considered in the first section of this book, the answer is: Because of the Arapesh culture, because of the intricate, elaborate, and unfailing fashion in which a culture is able to shape each new-born child to the cultural image. And if we ask the same question about a THE STANDARDIZATION OF SEX-TEMPERAMENT 283 Mundugumor man or woman, or about a Tchambuli man as compared with a Tchambuli woman, the answer is of the same kind. They display the personalities that are peculiar to the cultures in which they were born and educated. Our attention has been on the differences between Arapesh men and women as a group and Mundugumor men and women as a group. It is as if we had represented the Arapesh personality by a soft yellow, the Mundugumor by a deep red, while the Tchambuli female personality was deep orange, and that of the Tchambuli male, pale green. But if we now ask whence came the original direction in each culture, so that one now shows yellow, another red, the third orange and green by sex, then we must peer more closely. And leaning closer to the picture, it is as if behind the bright consistent yellow of the Arapesh, and the deep equally consistent red of the Mundugumor, behind the orange and green that are Tchambuli, we found in each case the delicate, just discernible outlines of the whole spectrum, differently overlaid in each case by the monotone which covers it. This spectrum is the range of individual differences which lie back of the so much more conspicuous cultural emphases, and it is to this that we must turn to find the explanation of cultural inspiration, of the source from which each culture has drawn. There appears to be about the same range of basic temperamental variation among the Arapesh and among the Mundugumor, although the violent man is a misfit in the first society and a leader in the second. If human nature were completely homogeneous raw material, lacking specific drives and characterized by no important constitutional differences between individuals, then individuals who display personality traits so antithetical to the social pressure should not reappear in societies of such differing emphases. If the variations between individuals were to be set down to accidents in the genetic process, the same accidents should not be repeated with simi- 284 SEX AND TEMPERAMENT lar frequency in strikingly different cultures, with strongly contrasting methods of education. But because this same relative distribution of individual differences does appear in culture after culture, in spite of the divergence between the cultures, it seems pertinent to offer a hypothesis to explain upon what basis the personalities of men and women have been differently standardized so often in the history of the human race. This hypothesis is an extension of that advanced by Ruth Benedict in her Patterns of Culture. Let us assume that there are definite temperamental differences between human beings which if not entirely hereditary at least are established on a hereditary base very soon after birth. (Further than this we cannot at present narrow the matter.) These differences finally embodied in the character structure of adults, then, are the clues from which culture works, selecting one temperament, or a combination of related and congruent types, as desirable, and embodying this choice in every thread of the social fabric—in the care of the young child, the games the children play, the songs the people sing, the structure of political organization, the religious observance, the art and the philosophy. Some primitive societies have had the time and the robustness to revamp all of their institutions to fit one extreme type, and to develop educational techniques which will ensure that the majority of each generation will show a personality congruent with this extreme emphasis. Other societies have pursued a less definitive course, selecting their models not from the most extreme, most highly differentiated individuals, but from the less marked types. In such societies the approved personality is less pronounced, and the culture often contains the types of inconsistencies that many human being display also; one institution may be adjusted to the uses of pride, another to a casual humility that is congruent neither with pride nor with inverted pride. Such societies, which have THE STANDARDIZATION OF SEX-TEMPERAMENT 285 taken the more usual and less sharply defined types as models, often show also a less definitely patterned social structure. The culture of such societies may be likened to a house the decoration of which has been informed by no definite and precise taste, no exclusive emphasis upon dignity or comfort or pretentiousness or beauty, but in which a little of each effect has been included. Alternatively, a culture may take its clues not from one temperament, but from several temperaments. But instead of mixing together into an inconsistent hotchpotch the choices and emphases of different temperaments, or blending them together into a smooth but not particularly distinguished whole, it may isolate each type by making it the basis for the approved social personality for an age-group, a sex-group, a caste-group, or an occupational group. In this way society becomes not a monotone with a few discrepant patches of an intrusive colour, but a mosaic, with different groups displaying different personality traits. Such specializations as these may be based upon any facet of human endowment—different intellectual abilities, different artistic abilities, different emotional traits. So the Samoans decree that all young people must show the personality trait of unaggressiveness and punish with opprobrium the aggressive child who displays traits regarded as appropriate only in titled middle-aged men. In societies based upon elaborate ideas of rank, members of the aristocracy will be permitted, even compelled, to display a pride, a sensitivity to insult, that would be deprecated as inappropriate in members of the plebeian class. So also in professional groups or in religious sects some temperamental traits are selected and institutionalized, and taught to each new member who enters the profession or sect. Thus the physician learns the bed-side manner, which is the natural behaviour of some temperaments and the standard behaviour of the general practitioner in the medical profession; the 286 SEX AND TEMPERAMENT Quaker learns at least the outward behaviour and the rudiments of meditation, the capacity for which is not necessarily an innate characteristic of many of the members of the Society of Friends. So it is with the social personalities of the two sexes. The traits that occur in some members of each sex are specially assigned to one sex, and disallowed in the other. The history of the social definition of sex-differences is filled with such arbitrary arrangements in the intellectual and artistic field, but because of the assumed congruence between physiological sex and emotional endowment we have been less able to recognize that a similar arbitrary slection is being made among emotional traits also. We have assumed that because it is convenient for a mother to wish to care for her child, this is a trait with which women have been more generously endowed by a carefully teleological process of evolution. We have assumed that because men have hunted, an activity requiring enterprise, bravery, and initiative, they have been endowed with these useful attitudes as part of their sex-temperament. Societies have made these assumptions both overtly and implicitly. If a society insists that warfare is the major occupation for the male sex, it is therefore insisting that all male children display bravery and pugnacity. Even if the insistence upon the differential bravery of men and women is not made articulate, the difference in occupation makes this point implicitly. When, however, a society goes further and defines men as brave and women as timorous, when men are forbidden to show fear and women are indulged in the most flagrant display of fear, a more explicit element enters in. Bravery, hatred of any weakness, of flinching before pain or danger—this attitude which is so strong a component of some human temperaments has been selected as the key to masculine behaviour. The easy unashamed display of fear or THE STANDARDIZATION OF SEX-TEMPERAMENT 287 suffering that is congenial to a different temperament has been made the key to feminine behaviour. Originally two variations of human temperament, a hatred of fear or willingness to display fear, they have been socially translated into inalienable aspects of the personalities of the two sexes. And to that defined sex-personality every child will be educated, if a boy, to suppress fear, if a girl, to show it. If there has been no social selection in regard to this trait, the proud temperament that is repelled by any betrayal of feeling will display itself, regardless of sex, by keeping a stiff upper lip. Without an express prohibition of such behaviour the expressive unashamed man or woman will weep, or comment upon fear or suffering. Such attitudes, strongly marked in certain temperaments, may by social selection be standardized for everyone, or outlawed for everyone, or ignored by society, or made the exclusive and approved behaviour of one sex only. Neither the Arapesh nor the Mundugumor have made any attitude specific for one sex. All of the energies of the culture have gone towards the creation of a single human type, regardless of class, age, or sex. There is no division into age-classes for which different motives or different moral attitudes are regarded as suitable. There is no class of seers or mediums who stand apart drawing inspiration from psychological sources not available to the majority of the people. The Mundugumor have, it is true, made one arbitrary selection, in that they recognize artistic ability only among individuals born with the cord about their necks, and firmly deny the happy exercise of artistic ability to those less unusually born. The Arapesh boy with a tinea infection has been socially selected to be a disgruntled, antisocial individual, and the society forces upon sunny co-operative children cursed with this affliction a final approximation to the behaviour appropriate to a pariah. With these two exceptions no emo- 288 SEX AND TEMPERAMENT tional rôle is forced upon an individual because of birth or accident. As there is no idea of rank which declares that some are of high estate and some of low, so there is no idea of sex-difference which declares that one sex must feel differently from the other. One possible imaginative social construct, the attribution of different personalities to different members of the community classified into sex-, age-, or caste-groups, is lacking. When we turn however to the Tchambuli, we find a situation that while bizarre in one respect, seems nevertheless more intelligible in another. The Tchambuli have at least made the point of sex-difference; they have used the obvious fact of sex as an organizing point for the formation of social personality, even though they seem to us to have reversed the normal picture. While there is reason to believe that not every Tchambuli woman is born with a dominating, organizing, administrative temperament, actively sexed and willing to initiate sex-relations, possessive, definite, robust, practical and impersonal in outlook, still most Tchambuli girls grow up to display these traits. And while there is definite evidence to show that all Tchambuli men are not, by native endowment, the delicate responsive actors of a play staged for the women's benefit, still most Tchambuli boys manifest this coquettish play-acting personality most of the time. Because the Tchambuli formulation of sex-attitudes contradicts our usual premises, we can see clearly that Tchambuli culture has arbitrarily permitted certain human traits to women, and allotted others, equally arbitarily, to men. If we then accept this evidence drawn from these simple societies which through centuries of isolation from the main stream of human history have been able to develop more extreme, more striking cultures than is possible under historical conditions of great intercommunication between peoples and the resulting heterogeneity, what are the implications of THE STANDARDIZATION OF SEX-TEMPERAMENT 289 these results? What conclusions can we draw from a study of the way in which a culture can select a few traits from the wide gamut of human endowment and specialize these traits, either for one sex or for the entire community? What relevance have these results to social thinking? Before we consider this question it will be necessary to discuss in more detail the position of the deviant, the individual whose innate disposition is too alien to the social personality required by his culture for his age, or sex, or caste ever to wear perfectly the garment of personality that his society has fashioned for him. CHAPTER XVIII THE DEVIANT hat are the implications for an understanding of the social deviant of the point of view outlined in the last chapter? Under the term "deviant" I include any individual who because of innate disposition or accident of early training, or through the contradictory influences of a heterogeneous cultural situation, has been culturally disenfranchised, the individual to whom the major emphases of his society seem nonsensical, unreal, untenable, or downright wrong. The average man in any society looks into his heart and finds there a reflection of the world about him. The delicate educational process that has made him into an adult has assured him this spiritual membership in his own society. But this is not true of the individual for whose temperamental gifts his society has no use, nor even tolerance. The most cursory survey of our history is enough to demonstrate that gifts honoured in one century are disallowed in the next. Men who would have been saints in the Middle Ages are without vocation in modern England and America. When we take into account primitive societies that have selected far more extreme and contrasting attitudes than did our own ancestral cultures, the matter becomes even clearer. To the extent that a culture is integrated and definite in its goals, uncompromising in its moral and spiritual preferences, to that very extent it condemns some of its members—members by birth only—to live alien to it, in perplexity at the best, at the worst in a rebellion that may turn to madness. It has become the fashion to group together all of those by 290 w THE DEVIANT 291 whom the cultural norm is not accepted as neurotics, individuals who have turned from "reality" (that is, the present-day solutions of their own society) to the comfort or inspiration of fantasy situations, taking refuge in some transcendental philosophy, in art, in political radicalism, or merely in sexual inversion or some other elaborated idiosyncrasy of behaviour —vegetarianism or the wearing of a hair shirt. The neurotic is furthermore regarded as immature; he has not grown up sufficiently to understand the obviously realistic and commendable motivations of his own society. In this blanket definition two quite different concepts have become blurred and confused, each one rendering the other nugatory. Among the deviants in any society, it is possible to distinguish those who are physiologically inadequate. They may have weak intellects or defective glands; any one of a number of possible organic weaknesses may predetermine them to failure in any but the simplest tasks. They may— very, very rarely such an individual is found—have practically all of the physiological equipment of the opposite sex. None of these individuals are suffering from any discrepancy between a purely temperamental bent and social emphasis; they are merely the weak and the defective, or they are abnormal in the sense that they are in a group which deviates too far from human cultural standards—not particular cultural standards—for effective functioning. For such individuals any society must provide a softer, a more limited, or a more special environment than that which it provides for the majority of its members. But there is another type of neurotic that is continually being confused with these physiologically handicapped individuals, and this is the cultural deviant, the individual who is at variance with the values of his society. Modern psychiatric thought tends to attribute all of his maladjustment to early conditioning and so places him in the invidious category of the 292 SEX AND TEMPERAMENT psychically maimed. A study of primitive conditions does not bear out such a simple explanation. It does not account for the fact that it is always those individuals who show marked temperamental proclivities in opposition to the cultural emphases who are in each society the maladjusted persons; or for the fact that it is a different type of individual which is maladjusted among the Mundugumor from the type which is maladjusted among the Arapesh. It does not explain why materialistic, bustling America and a materialistic, bustling tribe in the Admiralty Islands both produce hoboes, or why it is the individual endowed with a capacity to feel strongly who is maladjusted in Zufii and Samoa. Such material suggests that there is another type of unadjusted person, whose failure to adjust should be referred not to his own weakness and defect, not to accident or to disease, but to a fundamental discrepancy between his innate disposition and his society's standards. When society is unstratified and the social personalities of both sexes are fundamentally alike, these deviants are drawn indiscriminately from both sexes. Among the Arapesh the violent man and the violent woman, among the Mundugumor the trustful, co-operative man and the trustful, cooperative woman, are the deviants. Too much positive self-feeling predetermines one to maladjustment among the Arapesh, too much negative self-feeling is an equal liability among the Mundugumor. In earlier chapters we have discussed the personalities of some of these deviating individuals, and shown how the very gifts that Mundugumor society would have honoured were disallowed among the Arapesh, how Wabe and Temos and Amitoa would have found Mundugumor life intelligible, and Ombléan and Kwenda would have been well placed among the Arapesh. But the alienness of both these groups in their own cultures, although it impaired their social functioning, reducing the uses to which THE DEVIANT 293 their gifts might have been put, nevertheless left their psycho-sexual functioning unimpaired. Amitoa's positive drive made her behave not like a man, but like a woman of the Plains. Ombléan's love for children and willingness to work strenuously in order to care for a number of dependents did not make him suspect that he was like a woman, nor did it provoke in his associates an accusation of effeminacy. In loving children and peace and order, he might be behaving like some white men or some tribe they had never seen, but certainly no more like a Mundugumor woman than like a Mundugumor man. There was no homosexuality among either the Arapesh or the Mundugumor. But any society that specializes its personality types by sex, which insists that any trait—love for children, interest in art, bravery in the face of danger, garrulity, lack of interest in personal relations, passiveness in sex-relations; there are hundreds of traits of very different kinds that have been so specialized—is inalienably bound up with sex, paves the way for a kind of maladjustment of a worse order. Where there is no such dichotomy, a man may stare sadly at his world and find it essentially meaningless but still marry and rear children, finding perhaps a definite mitigation of his misery in this one whole-hearted participation in a recognized social form. A woman may day-dream all her life of a world where there is dignity and pride instead of the mean shop-keeping morality that she finds all about her, and yet greet her husband with an easy smile and nurse her children through the croup. The deviant may translate his sense of remoteness into painting or music or revolutionary activity and yet remain in his personal life, in his relations to members of his own and the opposite sex, essentially unconfused. Not so, however, in a society which, like that of the Tcham-buli or that of historical Europe and America, defines some temperamental traits as masculine, some as feminine. In 294 SEX AND TEMPERAMENT addition to, or aside from, the pain of being born into a culture whose acknowledged ends he can never make his own, many a man has now the added misery of being disturbed in his psycho-sexual life. He not only has the wrong feelings but, far worse and more confusing, he has the feelings of a woman. The significant point is not whether this mal-orientation, which makes the defined goals of women in his society intelligible to him and the goals of the man alien and distasteful, results in inversion or not. In extreme cases in which a man's temperament conforms very closely to the approved feminine personality, and if there is in existence a social form behind which he can shelter himself, a man may turn to avowed inversion and transvesticism. Among the Plains Indians, the individual who preferred the placid activities of the women to the dangerous, nerve-racking activities of the men could phrase his preference in sex terms j he could assume women's dress and occupations, and proclaim that he really was more a woman than a man. In Mundugumor, where there is no such pattern, a man may engage in feminine activities, such as fishing, without its occurring to him to symbolize his behaviour in female attire. Without any contrast between the sexes and without any tradition of transvesticism, a variation in temperamental preference does not result in either homosexuality or transvesticism. As it is unevenly distributed over the world, it seems clear that transvesticism is not only a variation that occurs when there are different personalities decreed for men and women, but that it need not occur even there. It is in fact a social invention that has become stabilized among the American Indians and in Siberia, but not in Oceania. I observed in some detail the behaviour of an American Indian youth who was in all probability a congenital invert, during the period when he was just making his transvesticism explicit. This man had, as a small boy, showed such marked THE DEVIANT 295 feminine physical traits that a group of women had once captured him and undressed him to discover whether he was really a boy at all. As he grew older he began to specialize in women's occupations and to wear female underclothing, although he still affected the outer costume of a male. He carried in his pockets, however, a variety of rings and bangles such as were worn only by women. At dances in which the sexes danced separately, he would begin the evening dressed as a man and dancing with the men, and then, as if acting under some irresistible compulsion, he would begin to move closer and closer to the women, as he did so putting on one piece of jewelry after another. Finally a shawl would appear, and at the end of the evening he would be dressed as a berdache} a transvestite. The people were just beginning to speak of him as "she." I have cited his case in this connexion to make clear that this is the type of maladjusted individual with which this discussion is not concerned. His aberrancy appeared to have a specific physiological origin; it was not a mere temperamental variation that his society had decided to define as feminine. This discussion is concerned neither with the congenital invert nor with overt behaviour of the practising homosexual. There are, it is true, ways in which the different types of maladjustment intersect and reinforce each other, and the congenital invert may be found among those who have found shelter in transvesticism. But the deviants with whom we are concerned here are those individuals whose adjustment to life is conditioned by their temperamental affinity for a type of behaviour that is regarded as unnatural for their own sex and natural for the opposite sex. To produce this type of maladjustment, not only is it necessary to have a definite approved social personality, but also this personality must be rigidly limited to one of the two sexes. The coercion to behave like a member of one's own sex becomes one of the 296 SEX AND TEMPERAMENT strongest implements with which the society attempts to mould the growing child into accepted forms. A society without a rigid sex-dichotomy merely says to the child who shows aberrant behaviour traits: "Don't behave like that." "People don't do that." "If you behave like that, people won't like you." "If you behave like that you will never get married." "If you behave like that, people will sorcerize you"—and so on. It invokes—as against the child's natural inclination to laugh or cry or sulk in the wrong places, to see insult where there is none, or fail to see insult that is intended—considerations of human conduct as socially defined, not of sex-determined conduct. The burden of the disciplinary song is: "You will not be a real human being unless you suppress these tendencies which are incompatible with our definition of humanity." But it does not occur to either the Arapesh or the Mundugumor to add: "You aren't behaving like a boy at all. You are behaving like a girl"—even when actually this may be the case. It will be remembered that among the Arapesh, boys, owing to their slightly different parental care, do cry more than girls and have temper tantrums until a later age. Yet because the idea of sex-difference in emotional behaviour is lacking, this real difference was never invoked. In societies without a sex-dichotomy of temperament, one aspect, one very basic aspect, of the child's sense of its position in the universe is left unchallenged—the genuineness of its membership in its own sex. It can continue to watch the mating behaviour of its elders and pattern its hopes and expectations upon it. It is not forced to identify with a parent of opposite sex by being told that its own sex is very much in question. Some slight imitation of a father by a daughter, or of a mother by a son, is not seized upon and converted into a reproach, or a prophecy that the girl will grow up to be a tomboy or the boy a sissy. The THE DEVIANT 297 Arapesh and Mundugumor children are spared this form of confusion. Consider in contrast the way in which children in our culture are pressed into conformity: "Don't act like a girl." "Little girls don't do that." The threat of failing to behave like a member of one's own sex is used to enforce a thousand details of nursery routine and cleanliness, ways of sitting or relaxing, ideas of sportsmanship and fair play, patterns of expressing emotions, and a multitude of other points in which we recognize socially defined sex-differences, such as limits of personal vanity, interest in clothes, or interest in current events. Back and forth weaves the shuttle of comment: "Girls don't do that." "Don't you want to grow up to be a real man like Daddy?"—tangling the child's emotions in a confusion that, if the child is unfortunate enough to possess even in some slight degree the temperament approved for the opposite sex, may well prevent the establishment of any adequate adjustment to its world. Every time the point of sex-conformity is made, every time the child's sex is invoked as the reason why it should prefer trousers to petticoats, baseball-bats to dolls, fisticuffs to tears, there is planted in the child's mind a fear that indeed, in spite of anatomical evidence to the contrary, it may not really belong to its own sex at all. How little weight the anatomical evidence of own sex has, as over against the social conditioning, was vividly dramatized recently in a case in a Middle Western city, where a boy was found who had lived twelve years as a girl, under the name of Maggie, doing a girl's tasks and wearing a girl's clothes. He had discovered several years before that his anatomy was that of a boy, but that did not suggest to him the possibility of being classified as a boy socially. Yet when social workers discovered the case and effected the change of his classification, he did not show any traits of inversion} he was merely 298 SEX AND TEMPERAMENT a boy who had been mistakenly classified as a girl, and whose parents, for some reasons that were not discovered, refused to recognize and rectify their error. This bizarre case reveals the strength of social classification as over against merely anatomical membership in a sex, and it is this social classification which makes it possible for society to plant in children's minds doubts and confusions about their sex-position. Such social pressure exerts itself in a number of ways. There is first the threat of sex-disenfranchisement against the child who shows aberrant tendencies, the boy who dislikes rough-and-tumble play or weeps when he is rebuked, the girl who is only interested in adventures, or prefers battering her playmates to dissolving in tears. Second, there is the attribution of the emotions defined as feminine to the boy who shows the mildest preference for one of the superficial sex-limited occupations or avocations. A small boy's interest in knitting may arise from a delight in his own ability to manipulate a needle; his interest in cooking may derive from a type of interest that might later make him a first-class chemist; his interest in dolls may spring from no tender cherishing feelings but from a desire to dramatize some incident. Similarly, a girl's overwhelming interest in horseback-riding may come from a delight in her own physical co-ordination on horseback, her interest in her brother's wireless set may come from pride in her proficiency in handling the Morse code. Some physical or intellectual or artistic potentiality may accidentally express itself in an activity deemed appropriate to the opposite sex. This has two results: The child is reproached for his choice and accused of having the emotions of the opposite sex, and also, because the occupational choice or hobby throws him more with the opposite sex, he may come in time to take on much of the socially sex-limited behaviour of that opposite sex. THE DEVIANT 299 A third way in which our dichotomy of social personality by sex affects the growing child is the basis it provides for a cross-sex identification with the parents. The invocation of a boy's identification with his mother to explain his subsequent assumption of a passive role towards members of his own sex is familiar enough in modern psychiatric theory. It is assumed that through a distortion of the normal course of personality development the boy fails to identify with his father and so loses the clue to normal "masculine" behaviour. Now there is no doubt that the developing child searching for clues to his social role in life usually finds his most important models in those who stand in a parental relationship to him during his early years. But I would suggest that we have still to explain why these identifications occur, and that the cause lies not in any basic femininity in the small boy's temperament, but in the existence of a dichotomy between the standardized behaviour of the sexes. We have to discover why a given child identifies with a parent of opposite sex rather than with the parent of its own sex. The most conspicuous social categories in our society— in most societies—are the two sexes. Clothes, occupation, vocabulary, all serve to concentrate the child's attention upon its similarity with the parent of the same sex. Nevertheless some children, in defiance of all this pressure, choose the parents of opposite sex, not to love best, but as the persons with whose motives and purposes they feel most at one, whose choices they feel they can make their own when they are- grown. Before considering this question further, let me restate my hypothesis. I have suggested that certain human traits have been socially specialized as the appropriate attitudes and behaviour of only one sex, while other human traits have been specialized for the opposite sex. This social specialization is then rationalized into a theory that the socially de- 300 SEX AND TEMPERAMENT creed behaviour is natural for one sex and unnatural for the other, and that the deviant is a deviant because of glandular defect, or developmental accident. Let us take a hypothetical case. Attitudes towards physical intimacy vary enormously among individuals and have been very differently standardized in different societies. We find primitive societies, such as those of the Dobu and the Manus, where casual physical contact is so interdicted for both sexes, so hedged about with rules and categories, that only the insane will touch another person lightly and casually. Other societies, such as that of the Arapesh, permit a great deal of easy physical intimacy between individuals of different ages and both sexes. Now let us consider a society that has specialized to one sex this particular temperamental trait. To men has been assigned the behaviour characteristic of the individual who finds casual physical contact intolerable, to women, as their "natural" behaviour, that of individuals who accept it easily. To men, the hand on the arm or across the shoulder, sleeping in the same room with another man, having to hold another man on the lap in a crowded automobile—every contact of this kind would be, by definition, repellent, possibly even, if the social conditioning were strong enough, disgusting or frightening. To women in this given society, however, physical contact that was easy and unstylized would be, by definition, welcome. They would embrace each other, caress each other's hair, arrange each other's clothes, sleep in the same bed, comfortably and without embarrassment. Now let us take a marriage between a well-brought-up man in this society, who would be intolerant of any physical casual-ness, and a well-brought-up woman, who would consider it as natural when displayed by women and never expect it among boys or men. To this couple is born a girl who displays from birth a noli me tätigere attitude that nothing her mother can do will dispel. The little girl slips off her THE DEVIANT ßOI mother's lap, wriggles away when her mother tries to kiss her. She turns with relief to her father, who will not embarrass her with demonstrations of affection, who does not even insist upon holding her hand when he takes her for a walk. From such a simple clue as this, a preference that in the child is temperamental, in the father is socially stabilized male behaviour, the little girl may build up an identification with her father, and a theory that she is more like a boy than like a girl. She may come in time to be actually better adjusted in many other ways to the behaviour of the opposite sex. The psychiatrist who finds her later in life wearing mannish attire, following a male occupation, and unable to find happiness in marriage may say that identification with the opposite sex was the cause of her failure to adjust as a woman. But this explanation does not reveal the fact that the identification would not have occurred in these terms if there had been no dichotomy of sex-attitudes in the society. The Arapesh child who is more like a reserved father than like a demonstrative mother may feel that it resembles its father more than its mother, but this has no further effects on its personality in a society in which it is not possible to "feel like a man" or "feel like a woman." The accident of a differentiation of sex-attitudes makes these chance identifications dynamic in the adjustment of the child. This example is admittedly hypothetical and simple. The actual conditions in a modern society are infinitely more complicated. To list merely some of the kinds of confusions that occur should be sufficient to focus attention upon the problem. One of the child's parents may be aberrant, and therefore be a false guide to the child in its attempt to find its role. Both the children's parents may deviate from the norm in opposite ways, the mother showing more pronounced temperamental traits usually specialized as male, the father showing the opposite traits. This condition is very likely 302 SEX AND TEMPERAMENT to occur in modern society, in which, because it is believed marriage must be based upon contrasting personalities, deviant men often choose deviant women. So the child, groping for clues, may make a false identification because its own temperament is like that decreed for the opposite sex, or a false identification because, while it is itself fitted for easy adjustment, the parent of its own sex is maladjusted. I have discussed first identification along temperamental lines, but the identification may also be made in other terms. The original identification may be through intelligence or specific artistic gifts, the gifted child identifying with the more gifted parent, regardless of sex. Then, if the double standard of personality exists, this simple identification on the basis of ability or interest will be translated into sex terms, and the mother will lament: "Mary is always working with Will's drafting instruments. She hasn't any more normal girl's interests at all. Will says it's a pity she wasn't born a boy." From this comment, it is very easy for Mary to come to the same conclusion. Worth mentioning here is the way in which the boy's plight differs from the girl's in almost every known society. Whatever the arrangements in regard to descent or ownership of property, and even if these formal outward arrangements are reflected in the temperamental relationships between the two sexes, the prestige values always attach to the occupations of men, if not entirely at the expense of the women's occupations, at least to a great extent. It almost always follows, therefore, that the girl "who should have been a boy" has at least the possibility of a partial participation in activities that are surrounded by the aura of masculine prestige. For the boy "who should have been a girl" there is no such possibility open. His participation in women's activities is almost always a matter for double reproach: he has shown himself unworthy to be categorized as a man, and THE DEVIANT 3°3 has thereby condemned himself to activities with a low prestige value. Furthermore, it is seldom that the particular attitudes and interests which have been classified as feminine in any society have been given any very rich expression in art or in literature. The girl who finds the defined masculine interests closer to her own can find for herself forms of vicarious expression; the boy who might have found similar outlets if there were a comparable feminine art and literature is denied such satisfactory escape. Kenneth Grahame has immortalized the perplexity of all small boys before the special and limited interests of girls in his famous chapter, "What They Talked About": "She's off with those Vicarage girls again," said Edward, regarding Selina's long black legs twinkling down the path. "She goes out with them every day now; and as soon as ever they start, all their heads go together and they chatter, chatter, chatter, the whole blessed time! I can't make out what they find to talk about. . . ." "P'raps they talk about birds'-eggs," I suggested sleepily . . . "and about ships, and buffaloes, and desert islands; and why rabbits have white tails; and whether they'd sooner have a schooner or a cutter; and what they'll be when they're men—at least, I mean there's lots of things to talk about, if you want to talk." "Yes; but they don't talk about those sort of things at all," Edward persisted. "How can they? They don't know anything; they can't do anything—except play the piano, and nobody would want to talk about that; and they don't care about anything—anything sensible, I mean. So what do they talk about? . . . But it's these girls I can't make out. If they've anything really sensible to talk about, how is it nobody knows what it is? And if they haven't—and we know they can't have, naturally—why don't they shut up their jaw? This old rabbit here—he doesn't want to talk. . . ." 304 SEX AND TEMPERAMENT "O but rabbits do talk!" interposed Harold. "I've watched them often in their hutch. They put their heads together and their noses go up and down, just like Selina's and the Vicarage girls'!" . . . "Well, if they do," said Edward unwillingly, "I'll bet they don't talk such rot as those girls do!" Which was ungenerous, as well as unfair; for it has not yet transpired— nor has it to this day—what Selina and her friends talked about.1 This perplexity is likely to remain throughout life. The woman who either by temperament or accident of training has become more identified with the interests of men, if she cannot adjust to the current sex-standards, loses out in her essentially feminine role of child-bearing. The man who has been disenfranchised from his own sex's interests suffers a subtler disenfranchisement, since a great part of the artistic symbolism of his society is rendered unavailable and there is no substitute to which he can turn. He remains a confused and bewildered person, unable to feel as men "naturally" feel in his society, and equally unable to find any satisfaction in roles that have been defined by women, although their social personality is more akin to his tem-permament. And so, in a thousand ways, the fact that it is necessary to feel not only like a member of a given society in a given period, but like a member of one sex and not like a member of the other, conditions the development of the child, and produces individuals who are unplaced in their society. Many students of personality lay these multiple, imponderable maladjustments to "latent homosexuality." But such a judgment is fathered by our two-sex standard; it is post hoc diagnosis of a result, not diagnosis of a cause. It is a 1 From The Golden Age, by Kenneth Grahame. Copyright 1895, 1922, by Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc. THE DEVIANT 305 judgment that is applied not only to the invert but to the infinitely more numerous individuals who deviate from the social definition of appropriate behaviour for their sex. If these contradictory traits of temperament which different societies have regarded as sex-linked are not sex-linked, but are merely human potentialities specialized as the behaviour of one sex, the presence of the deviant, who need no longer be branded as a latent homosexual, is inevitable in every society that insists upon artificial connexions between sex and bravery, or between sex and positive self-feeling, or between sex and a preference for personal relations. Furthermore, the lack of correspondence between the actual temperamental constitution of members of each sex and the role that a culture has assigned to them has its reverberations in the lives of those individuals who were born with the expected and correct temperament. It is often assumed that in a society which designates men as aggressive and dominating, women as responsive and submissive, the maladjusted individuals will be the dominant, aggressive woman and the responsive, submissive man. Theirs is, indubitably, the most difficult position. Human contacts of all sorts, and especially courtship and marriage, may present insoluble problems to them. But consider also the position of the boy naturally endowed with an aggressive, dominating temperament and reared to believe that it is his masculine role to dominate submissive females. He is trained to respond to responsive and submissive behaviour in others by a display of his self-conscious aggressiveness. And then he encounters not only submissive females, but also submissive males. The stimulus to dominating behaviour, to an insistence upon unquestioning loyalty and reiterated statements of his importance, is presented to him in one-sex groups, and a "latent homosexual" situation is created. Similarly, such a man has been taught that his ability to dominate is the 306 SEX AND TEMPERAMENT measure of his manhood, so that submissiveness in his associates continually reassures him. When he encounters a woman who is as naturally dominating as he is himself, or even a woman who, although not dominating temperamentally, is able to outdistance him in some special skill or type of work, a doubt of his own manhood is set up in his mind. This is one of the reasons why men who conform most closely to the accepted temperament for males in their society are most suspicious and hostile towards deviating women who, in spite of a contrary training, show the same temperamental traits. Their hold upon their conviction of their own sex-membership rests upon the non-occurrence of similar personalities in the opposite sex. And the submissive, responsive woman may find herself in an equally anomalous position, even though her culture has defined her temperament as the proper one for women. Trained from childhood to yield to the authority of a dominant voice, to bend all of her energies to please the more vulnerable egotism of dominant persons, she may often encounter the same authoritative note in a feminine voice and thus she, who is by temperament the ideal woman in her society, may find women so engrossing that marriage adjustments never enter the picture. Her involvement in devotion to members of her own sex may in turn set up in her doubts and questions as to her essential femininity. Thus the existence in a given society of a dichotomy of social personality, of a sex-determined, sex-limited personality, penalizes in greater or less degree every individual born within it. Those whose temperaments are indubitably aberrant fail to adjust to the accepted standards, and by their very presence, by the anomalousness of their responses, confuse those whose temperaments are the expected ones for their sex. So in practically every mind a seed of doubt, of anxiety, is planted, which interferes with the normal course of life. THE DEVIANT 3O7 But the tale of confusions is not ended here. The Tchambuli, and in a milder degree parts of modern America, represent a further difficulty that a culture which defines personality in terms of sex can invent for its members. It will be remembered that while Tchambuli theory is patrilineal, Tchambuli practice gives the dominant position to women, so that the position of the man with aberrant—that is, dominating—temperament is rendered doubly difficult by the cultural forms. The cultural formulation that a man has paid for his wife and can therefore control her continually misleads these aberrant individuals into fresh attempts at such control, and brings them into conflict with all their childhood training to obey and respect women, and their wives' training to expect such respect. Tchambuli institutions and the emphases of their society are, to a certain extent, at odds with one another. Native history attributes a high development of dominating temperaments to various neighbouring tribes, whose women have for many generations run away and married the Tchambuli. In explanation of its own inconsistencies, it invokes the situation that was just frequent enough among the Arapesh to confuse the adjustments of men and women there. These inconsistencies in Tchambuli culture were probably increased by a diminished interest in war and head-hunting and a greater interest in the delicate arts of peace. The importance of the women's economic activities may also have increased without any corresponding enhancement of the men's economic role. Whatever the historical causes, and they are undoubtedly multiple and complex, Tchambuli today presents a striking confusion between institutions and cultural emphases. And it also contains a larger number of neurotic males than I have seen in any other primitive culture. To have one's aberrancy, one's temperamental inability to conform to the prescribed role of responsive dancing attendance upon women, apparently con- 308 SEX AND TEMPERAMENT firmed by institutions—this is too much, even for members of a primitive society living under conditions far simpler than our own. Modern cultures that are in the throes of adjusting to women's changing economic position present comparable difficulties. Men find that one of the props of their dominance, a prop which they have often come to think of as synonymous with that dominance itself—the ability to be the sole support of their families—has been pulled from beneath them. Women trained to believe that the possession of earned income gave the right to dictate, a doctrine which worked well enough as long as women had no incomes, find themselves more and more often in a confused state between their real position in the household and the one to which they have been trained. Men who have been trained to believe that their sex is always a little in question and who believe that their earning power is a proof of their manhood are plunged into a double uncertainty by unemployment; and this is further complicated by the fact that their wives have been able to secure employment. All such conditions are aggravated in America also by the large number of different patterns of decreed behaviour for each sex that obtain in different national and regional groups, and by the supreme importance of the pattern of intersex behaviour that children encounter within the closed four walls of their homes. Each small part of our complex and stratified culture has its own set of rules by which the power and complementary balance between the sexes is maintained. But these rules differ, and are sometimes even contradictory, as between different national groups or economic classes. So, because there is no tradition which insists that individuals should marry in the group within which they were reared, men and women are continually marrying whose pictures of the interrelationships between the sexes are THE DEVIANT 3°9 entirely different. Their confusions are in turn transmitted to their children. The result is a society in which hardly anyone doubts the existence of a different "natural" behaviour for the sexes, but no one is very sure what that "natural" behaviour is. Within the conflicting definitions of appropriate behaviour for each sex, almost every type of individual is left room to doubt the completeness of his or her possession of a really masculine or a really feminine nature. We have kept the emphasis, the sense of the importance of the adjustment, and at the same time we have lost the ability to enforce the adjustment. CONCLUSION The knowledge that the personalities of the two sexes are socially produced is congenial to every programme that looks forward towards a planned order of society. It is a two-edged sword that can be used to hew a more flexible, more varied society than the human race has ever built, or merely to cut a narrow path down which one sex or both sexes will be forced to march, regimented, looking neither to the right nor to the left. It makes possible a Fascist programme of education in which women are forced back into a mould that modern Europe had fatuously believed to be broken forever. It makes possible a Communist programme in which the two sexes are treated as nearly alike as their different physiological functions permit. Because it is social conditioning that is determinative, it has been possible for America, without conscious plan but none the less surely, partially to reverse the European tradition of male dominance, and to breed a generation of women who model their lives on the pattern of their school-teachers and their aggressive, directive mothers. Their brothers stumble about in a vain attempt to preserve the myth of male dominance in a society in which the girls have come to consider dominance their natural right. As one fourteen-year-old girl said in commenting on the meaning of the term "tomboy," "Yes, it's true that it used to mean a girl who tried to act like a boy, dress like a boy, and things like that. But that belonged to the hoop-skirt era. Nowadays all girls have to do is to act exactly like boys, quite quietly." The tradition in this country has been changing so rapidly that the term "sissy," which 310 CONCLUSION 31I ten years ago meant a boy who showed personality traits regarded as feminine, can now be applied with scathing emphasis by one girl to another, or can be defined by a small girl as "the kind of boy who always wears a baseball glove and goes about shouting, 'Put her there! Put her there!' and when you throw him a soft one he can't catch it." These penetrating comments are sharply indicative of a trend that lacks the concerted planning behind Fascist or Communist programmes, but which has nevertheless gained in acceleration in the last three decades. Plans that regiment women as home-makers, or which cease to differentiate the training of the two sexes, have at least the virtue of being clear and unambiguous. The present development in this country has all the insidious ambiguity of the situation that we found illustrated among the Tchambuli head-hunters, where the man is still defined as the head of the house, although the woman is trained to a greater celerity and sureness in taking that position. The result is an increasing number of American men who feel they must shout in order to maintain their vulnerable positions, and an increasing number of American women who clutch unhappily at a dominance that their society has granted them—but without giving them a charter of rules and regulations by which they can achieve it without damage to themselves, their husbands, and their children. There are at least three courses open to a society that has realized the extent to which male and female personality are socially produced. Two of these courses have been tried before, over and over again, at different times in the long, irregular, repetitious history of the race. The first is to standardize the personality of men and women as clearly contrasting, complementary, and antithetical, and to make every institution in the society congruent with this standardization. If the society declared that woman's sole function was motherhood and the teaching and care of young children, it could 312 SEX AND TEMPERAMENT so arrange matters that every woman who was not physiologically debarred should become a mother and be supported in the exercise of this function. It could abolish the discrepancy between the doctrine that women's place is the home and the number of homes that were offered to them. It could abolish the discrepancy between training women for marriage and then forcing them to become the spinster supports of their parents. Such a system would be wasteful of the gifts of many women who could exercise other functions far better than their ability to bear children in an already overpopulated world. It would be wasteful of the gifts of many men who could exercise their special personality gifts far better in the home than in the market-place. It would be wasteful, but it would be clear. It could attempt to guarantee to each individual the role for which society insisted upon training him or her, and such a system would penalize only those individuals who, in spite of all the training, did not display the approved personalities. There are millions of persons who would gladly return to such a standardized method of treating the relationship between the sexes, and we must bear in mind the possibility that the greater opportunities open in the twentieth century to women may be quite withdrawn, and that we may return to a strict regimentation of women. The waste, if this occurs, will be not only of many women, but also of as many men, because regimentation of one sex carries with it, to greater or less degree, the regimentation of the other also. Every parental behest that defines a way of sitting, a response to a rebuke or a threat, a game, or an attempt to draw or sing or dance or paint, as feminine, is moulding the personality of each little girl's brother as well as moulding the personality of the sister. There can be no society which insists that women follow one special person- CONCLUSION 313 ality-pattern, defined as feminine, which does not do violence also to the individuality of many men. Alternatively, society can take the course that has become especially associated with the plans of most radical groups: admit that men and women are capable of being moulded to a single pattern as easily as to a diverse one, and cease to make any distinction in the approved personality of both sexes. Girls can be trained exactly as boys are trained, taught the same code, the same forms of expression, the same occupations. This course might seem to be the logic which follows from the conviction that the potentialities which different societies label as either masculine or feminine are really potentialities of some members of each sex, and not sex-linked at all. If this is accepted, is it not reasonable to abandon the kind of artificial standardizations of sex-differences that have been so long characteristic of European society, and admit that they are social fictions for which we have no longer any use? In the world today, contraceptives make it possible for women not to bear children against their will. The most conspicuous actual difference between the sexes, the difference in strength, is progressively less significant. Just as the difference in height between males is no longer a realistic issue, now that lawsuits have been substituted for hand-to-hand encounters, so the difference in strength between men and women is no longer worth elaboration in cultural institutions. In evaluating such a programme as this, however, it is necessary to keep in mind the nature of the gains that society has achieved in its most complex forms. A sacrifice of distinctions in sex-personality may mean a sacrifice in complexity. The Arapesh recognize a minimum of distinction in personality between old and young, between men and women, and they lack categories of rank or status. We have seen that such a society at the best condemns to personal frustration, and at the worst to maladjustment, all of those men 3H SEX AND TEMPERAMENT and women who do not conform to its simple emphases. The violent person among the Arapesh cannot find, either in the literature, or in the art, or in the ceremonial, or in the history of his people, any expression of the internal drives that are shattering his peace of mind. Nor is the loser only the individual whose own type of personality is nowhere recognized in his society. The imaginative, highly intelligent person who is essentially in tune with the values of his society may also suffer by the lack of range and depth characteristic of too great simplicity. The active mind and intensity of one Arapesh boy whom I knew well was unsatisfied by the laissez-faire solutions, the lack of drama in his culture. Searching for some material upon which to exercise his imagination, his longing for a life in which stronger emotions would be possible, he could find nothing with which to feed his imagination but tales of the passionate outbursts of the maladjusted, outbursts characterized by a violent hostility to others that he himself lacked. Nor is it the individual alone who suffers. Society is equally the loser, and we have seen such an attenuation in the dramatic representations of the Mundugumor. By phrasing the exclusion of women as a protective measure congenial to both sexes, the Arapesh kept their tamberan cult, with the necessary audiences of women. But the Mundugumor developed a kind of personality for both men and women to which exclusion from any part of life was interpreted as a deadly insult. And as more and more Mundugumor women have demanded and been given the right of initiation, it is not surprising that the Mundugumor ceremonial life has dwindled, the actors have lost their audience, and one vivid artistic element in the life of the Mundugumor community is vanishing. The sacrifice of sex-differences has meant a loss in complexity to the society. So in our own society. To insist that there are no sex- CONCLUSION 3 J 5 differences in a society that has always believed in them and depended upon them may be as subtle a form of standardizing personality as to insist that there are many sex-differences. This is particularly so in a changing tradition, when a group in control is attempting to develop a new social personality, as is the case today in many European countries. Take, for instance, the current assumption that women are more opposed to war than men, that any outspoken approval of war is more horrible, more revolting, in women than in men. Behind this assumption women can work for peace without encountering social criticism in communities that would immediately criticize their brothers or husbands if they took a similarly active part in peace propaganda. This belief that women are naturally more interested in peace is undoubtedly artificial, part of the whole mythology that considers women to be gentler than men. But in contrast let us consider the possibility of a powerful minority that wished to turn a whole society whole-heartedly towards war. One way of doing this would be to insist that women's motives, women's interests, were identical with men's, that women should take as bloodthirsty a delight in preparing for war as ever men do. The insistence upon the opposite point of view, that the woman as a mother prevails over the woman as a citizen at least puts a slight drag upon agitation for war, prevents a blanket enthusiasm for war from being thrust upon the entire younger generation. The same kind of result follows if the clergy are professionally committed to a belief in peace. The relative bellicosity of different individual clerics may be either offended or gratified by the prescribed pacific role, but a certain protest, a certain dissenting note, will be sounded in society. The dangerous standardization of attitudes that disallows every type of deviation is greatly reinforced if neither age nor sex nor religious belief is regarded as automatically predisposing certain individuals to hold minority attitudes. 3l6 SEX AND TEMPERAMENT The removal of all legal and economic barriers against women's participating in the world on an equal footing with men may be in itself a standardizing move towards the wholesale stamping-out of the diversity of attitudes that is such a dearly bought product of civilization. Such a standardized society, in which men, women, children, priests, and soldiers were all trained to an undifferentiated and coherent set of values, must of necessity create the kind of deviant that we found among the Arapesh and the Mundugumor, the individual who, regardless of sex or occupation, rebels because he is temperamentally unable to accept the one-sided emphasis of his culture. The individuals who were specifically unadjusted in terms of their psycho-sexual role would, it is true, vanish, but with them would vanish the knowledge that there is more than one set of possible values. To the extent that abolishing the differences in the approved personalities of men and women means abolishing any expression of the type of personality once called exclusively feminine, or once called exclusively masculine, such a course involves a social loss. Just as a festive occasion is the gayer and more charming if the two sexes are dressed differently, so it is in less material matters. If the clothing is in itself a symbol, and a woman's shawl corresponds to a recognized softness in her character, the whole plot of personal relations is made more elaborate, and in many ways more rewarding. The poet of such a society will praise virtues, albeit feminine virtues, which might never have any part in a social Utopia that allowed no differences between the personalities of men and women. To the extent that a society insists upon different kinds of personality so that one age-group or class or sex-group may follow purposes disallowed or neglected in another, each individual participant in that society is the richer. The arbitrary conclusion 317 assignment of set clothing, set manners, set social responses, to, individuals born in a certain class, of a certain sex, or of a certain colour, to those born on a certain day of the week, to those born with a certain complexion, does violence to the individual endowment of individuals, but permits the building of a rich culture. The most extreme development of a society that has attained great complexity at the expense of the individual is historical India, based, as it was, upon the uncompromising association of a thousand attributes of behaviour, attitude, and occupation with an accident of birth. To each individual there was given the security, although it might be the security of despair, of a set role, and the reward of being born into a highly complex society. Furthermore, when we consider the position of the deviant individual in historical cultures, those who are born into a complex society in the wrong sex or class for their personalities to have full sway are in a better position than those who are born into a simple society which does not use in any way their special temperamental gifts. The violent woman in a society that permits violence to men only, the strongly emotional member of an aristocracy in a culture that permits downright emotional expression only in the peasantry, the ritualistically inclined individual who is bred a Protestant in a country which has also Catholic institutions—each one of these can find expressed in some other group, in the society the emotions that he or she is forbidden to manifest. He is given a certain kind of support by the mere existence of these values, values so congenial to him and so inaccessible because of an accident of birth. For those who are content with a vicarious spectator-rôle, or with materials upon which to feast the creative imagination, this may be almost enough. They may be content to experience from the sidewalks during a parade, from the audience of a theatre or from the nave of a church, those emotions the direct expression of which is 31 8 SEX AND TEMPERAMENT denied to them. The crude compensations offered by the moving pictures to those whose lives are emotionally starved are offered in subtler forms by the art and literature of a complex society to the individual who is out of place in his sex or his class or his occupational group. Sex-adjustments, however, are not a matter of spectator-ship, but a situation in which the most passive individual must play some part if he or she is to participate fully in life. And while we may recognize the virtues of complexity, the interesting and charming plots that cultures can evolve upon the basis of accidents of birth, we may well ask: Is not the price too high? Could not the beauty that lies in contrast and complexity be obtained in some other way? If the social insistence upon different personalities for the two sexes results in so much confusion, so many unhappy deviants, so much disorientation, can we imagine a society that abandons these distinctions without abandoning the values that are at present dependent upon them? Let us suppose that, instead of the classification laid down on the "natural" bases of sex and race, a society had classified personality on the basis of eye-colour. It had decreed that all blue-eyed people were gentle, submissive, and responsive to the needs of others, and all brown-eyed people were arrogant, dominating, self-centred, and purposive. In this case two complementary social themes would be woven together— the culture, in its art, its religion, its formal personal relations, would have two threads instead of one. There would be blue-eyed men, and blue-eyed women, which would mean that there were gentle, "maternal" women, and gentle, "maternal" men. A blue-eyed man might marry a woman who had been bred to the same personality as himself, or a brown-eyed woman who had been bred to the contrasting personality. One of the strong tendencies that makes for homosexuality, the tendency to love the similar rather than the antithetical conclusion 319 person, would be eliminated. Hostility between the two sexes as groups would be minimized, since the individual interests of members of each sex could be woven together in different ways, and marriages of similarity and friendships of contrast need carry no necessary handicap of possible psycho-sexual maladjustment. The individual would still suffer a mutilation of his temperamental preferences, for it would be the unrelated fact of eye-colour that would determine the attitudes which he was educated to show. Every blue-eyed person would be forced into submissiveness and declared maladjusted if he or she showed any traits that it had been decided were only appropriate to the brown-eyed. The greatest social loss, however, in the classification of personality on the basis of sex would not be present in this society which based its classification on eye-colour. Human relations, and especially those which involve sex, would not be artificially distorted. But such a course, the substitution of eye-colour for sex as a basis upon which to educate children into groups showing contrasting personalities, while it would be a definite advance upon a classification by sex, remains a parody of all the attempts that society has made through history to define an individual's role in terms of sex, or colour, or date of birth, or shape of head. However, the only solution of the problem does not lie between an acceptance of standardization of sex-differences with the resulting cost in individual happiness and adjustment, and the abolition of these differences with the consequent loss in social values. A civilization might take its cues not from such categories as age or sex, race or hereditary position in a family line, but instead of specializing personality along such simple lines recognize, train, and make a place for many and divergent temperamental endowments. It might build upon the different potentialities that it now 320 SEX AND TEMPERAMENT attempts to extirpate artificially in some children and create artificially in others. Historically the lessening of rigidity in the classification of the sexes has come about at different times, either by the creation of a new artificial category, or by the recognition of real individual differences. Sometimes the idea of social position has transcended sex-categories. In a society that recognizes gradations in wealth or rank, women of rank or women of wealth have been permitted an arrogance which was denied to both sexes among the lowly or the poor. Such a shift as this has been, it is true, a step towards the emancipation of women, but it has never been a step towards the greater freedom of the individual. A few women have shared the upper-class personality, but to balance this a great many men as well as women have been condemned to a personality characterized by subservience and fear. Such shifts as these mean only the substitution of one arbitrary standard for another. A society is equally unrealistic whether it insists that only men can be brave, or that only individuals of rank can be brave. To break down one line of division, that between the sexes, and substitute another, that between classes, is no real advance. It merely shifts the irrelevancy to a different point. And meanwhile, individuals born in the upper classes are shaped inexorably to one type of personality, to an arrogance that is again uncongenial to at least some of them, while the arrogant among the poor fret and fume beneath their training for submissiveness. At one end of the scale is the mild, unaggressive young son of wealthy parents who is forced to lead, at the other the aggressive, enterprising child of the slums who is condemned to a place in the ranks. If our aim is greater expression for each individual temperament, rather than any partisan interest in one sex or its fate, we must see these historical developments which have aided in freeing conclusion 321 some women as nevertheless a kind of development that also involved major social losses. The second way in which categories of sex-differences have become less rigid is through a recognition of genuine individual gifts as they occurred in either sex. Here a real distinction has been substituted for an artificial one, and the gains are tremendous for society and for the individual. Where writing is accepted as a profession that may be pursued by either sex with perfect suitability, individuals who have the ability to write need not be debarred from it by their sex, nor need they, if they do write, doubt their essential masculinity or femininity. An occupation that has no basis in sex-determined gifts can now recruit its ranks from twice as many potential artists. And it is here that we can find a ground-plan for building a society that would substitute real differences for arbitrary ones. 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. Just as society now permits the practice of an art to members of either sex, so it might also permit the development of many contrasting temperamental gifts in each sex. It might abandon its various attempts to make boys fight and to make girls remain passive, or to make all children fight, and instead shape our educational institutions to develop to the full the boy who shows a capacity for maternal behaviour, the girl who shows an opposite capacity that is stimulated by fighting against obstacles. 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 behaviour, 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. 322 SEX AND TEMPERAMENT Such a civilization would not sacrifice the gains of thousands of years during which society has built up standards of diversity. The social gains would be conserved, and each child would be encouraged on the basis of his actual temperament. Where we now have patterns of behaviour for women and patterns of behaviour for men, we would then have patterns of behaviour that expressed the interests of individuals with many kinds of endowment. There would be ethical codes and social symbolisms, an art and a way of life, congenial to each endowment. Historically our own culture has relied for the creation of rich and contrasting values upon many artificial distinctions, the most striking of which is sex. It will not be by the mere abolition of these distinctions that society will develop patterns in which individual gifts are given place instead of being forced into an ill-fitting mould. If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in 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. INDEX AND GLOSSARY