Banner - Intertwined lives: margaret mead, ruth benedict, and their circle

Acclaim for LOIS W. BANNERs

Intertwined Lives

RECIPIENT OF AN AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION STONEWALL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION HONOR BOOK FOR 2004

Banner has intertwined not only the lives of Mead and Benedict, but all the assumptions about women and sex in the first half of the twentieth century. The history of anthropology has never been so plainly set forth. An amazing, invaluable, unprecedented booka delight to read.

Carolyn Heilbrun, author of Writing a Womans Life

A most amazing, magnificent, and very moving chronicle of Lesbian brilliance. Lois Banner continues to break down bigoted barriers and write real history.

Larry Kramer

A canny book and a must-read for anyone interested in the history of sexuality and gender.

Alice Echols, author of Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin

We learn much about the details of Benedicts and Meads lives [and] about the broader social and historical contexts in which they read, wrote, worked and played.

Ms.

Intertwined Lives is an enticing and gorgeous adventure story about two brilliant divas, whose intellectual travels also involved extraordinary experiments in friendship and sexual love. Banners approach to these amazing women is both erudite and wonderfully imaginative.

Christine Stansell, author of American Moderns

Lois Banner has taught at Rutgers University, Princeton University, the University of Scranton, Hamilton College, the University of Maryland, and George Washington University. She is currently Professor of History and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California and is a past president of the American Studies Association and the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association. Her previous books include American Beauty; In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power, and Sexuality; and Finding Fran: History and Memory in the Lives of Two Women. She and her husband live in Santa Monica, California.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Radical for Womans Rights (1980)

American Beauty (1983)

In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power, and Sexuality (1992)

Women in Modern America: A Brief History (1974; 3rd ed., 1995)

Finding Fran: History and Memory in the Lives of Two Women (1998)

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, DECEMBER 2004

Copyright 2003 by Lois W. Banner

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2003.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

The Edna St. Vincent Millay Society: Poem First Fig by Edna St. Vincent Millay. From Collected Poems, HarperCollins. Copyright 1992, 1950 by Edna St. Vincent Millay. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Barnett, literary executor.

HarperCollins Publishers Inc.: Excerpt from Blackberry Winter by Margaret Mead.
Copyright 1972 by Margaret Mead. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

Houghton Mifflin Company: Excerpt from An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict, edited by Margaret Mead. Copyright 1959 by Margaret Mead. Renewed 1987 by Mary Catherine Bateson. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries: Excerpts from the papers of Ruth Benedict. Reprinted by permission of Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Banner, Lois W.
Intertwined lives : Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and their circle / Lois W. Banner.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Mead, Margaret, 19011978. 2. Benedict, Ruth, 18871948.
I. Title.
GN20.B36 2003306.092dc21 2002040659

eISBN: 978-0-307-77340-1

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

For John and Jill, for the past and the present;
For Owen, Christina, and Victoria, for the future;

And to John Laslett, with love.

PHOTOGRAPHS

Following :
Ruth Benedict, childhood, marrige, and adult life

Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Geoffrey Gorer, important men in Benedicts and Meads adult lives

Following :
Sibyl of Delphi, Michelangelos Sistine Chapel. A figure in Benedicts lifelong daydream.

Guido Reni, Aurora Leading the Dawn. A reproduction hung on Meads bedroom wall as a child.

El Greco, Fray Hortensio Felix Paravicino. Benedicts visualization of her dead father.

Following :
Margaret Mead, childhood, marriage, and adult life

The Ash Can Cats, Meads lifelong circle of college friends

I FIRST BECAME INTERESTED in Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead nearly twenty years ago, when I began teaching courses in feminist theory and the history of the womens movement and realized the importance of these two women to twentieth-century feminism. I wrote a preliminary paper on Mead, but I gave up the project when I learned that large portions of both the Benedict Papers, at Vassar College, and the Mead Papers, at the Library of Congress, were restricted until their close friends and associates had died. That is, in fact, the usual practice with such collections.

I returned to the venture a decade later, as mens studies began, womens studies turned to the study of gender, and lesbian and gay studies emerged. Meads and Benedicts writings, I realized, contained a past version of these new trends; charting their lives seemed even more important to me than it had ten years before. As I worked on this book, the restricted material in both the Benedict and Mead Papersamounting to hundreds of letters and documentsopened to scholars; the process culminated with the large body of Mead papers that was opened between December 2000 and November 2001, the centenary year of her birth. Indeed, my study is the first biographical account of the lives of these two women to draw on all their papers.

Because Benedicts papers dont contain the extensive materials regarding her ancestry and childhood that exist for Mead, I visited Norwich, New York, the seat of Chenango County, where Benedict spent many of her early years. I found new material on her in the Norwich Public Library, the Norwich First Baptist Church, the Chenango County Court House, and the Chenango County Historical Society, including a diary her mother kept at the ages of sixteen and seventeen. I am the first scholar to use the papers of Benedicts sister, Margery Fulton Freeman, in the special collections of Occidental College, Los Angeles, and those of Geoffrey Gorer at the University of Sussex, in England. Nearly every archive I consulted contained material not yet investigated by scholars, including the Robert H. Lowie Papers at Berkeley, the Lonie AdamsWilliam Troy Papers and the Karen Horney Papers at Yale, and the revealing oral interview with Louise Rosenblatt, Meads college roommate, in the Oral History Project at Columbia University.