In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 [First Page] [53], (1) Lines: 0 to 48 ——— * 18.59999p ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [53], (1) chapter 3 Friendship with Margaret Mead Letters to and from the Field Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead wrote each other every few weeks or oftener during Mead’s frequent field trips. The correspondence records the dynamics of personal and intellectual encounter between these two quite extraordinary persons. Their correspondence has long been known through Mead’s selection of passages of letters for her book about Benedict, An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict (1959), and the full correspondence is part of Mead’s archived papers. Mead’s letters to Benedict and Benedict’s carbon copies of her letters to Mead were removed from Benedict’s papers by Mead, who was Benedict’s literary executor, so that the letters were not available until Mead’s papers were opened for research in the Library of Congress. Mead had culled the letters, leaving fewer than half initially available , while others were deposited but remained temporarily restricted for some years. The reserved letters were in the files of Rhoda Métraux and were added as the third deposit in the archive in November 2001. The reserved letters contain the correspondence when Mead was in Samoa and a large selection of later letters that perhaps were held back because they contain personal comments on colleagues still living at the time of Mead’s death in 1978. Biographers of both Benedict and Mead had skirted the question sometimes posed of whether they had a lesbian relationship. Mary Catherine Bateson wrote in her memoir about her parents,Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, that she had been told of this relationship by a close friend of her mother’s (1984). A recent biography by Hilary Lapsley, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict: The Kinship of Women (1999), gives strong evidence for such a relationship principally from the first two acquisitions of letters,which Mead had included in her papers. Lapsley’s surmise about a lesbian relationship is confirmed in the letters contained in the last deposit of papers, letters not available at the time of Lapsley’s research. Lois W. Banner, in Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict and Their Circle (2003), utilized the 53 Friendship with Margaret Mead 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 [54], (2) Lines: 48 to ——— 0.0pt Pg ——— Normal Pag PgEnds: TEX [54], (2) full collection of letters. She discusses the views and practices of sexuality in their times. The last deposit of papers includes the correspondence written to and from Samoa during Mead’s fieldwork there, and the letters make clear that Benedict and Mead had been lovers before Mead’s departure for Samoa in the summer of 1925. Benedict’s letters expressed deep love,and some were written daily. Mead’s letters were amorous as well. Benedict wrote joyously of her anticipation of their reunion planned for Europe the next summer. Both their husbands would be there, Luther Cressman waiting to join Mead and Stanley Benedict there for a professional conference. Ruth Benedict wrote that she would wait upon Luther’s prior claim to reunion but was counting the days untilherownecstaticmomentinsometrystingplacewouldcome.Whenthey arrived in Europe, Ruth Benedict and Luther Cressman found out that Mead had met Reo Fortune on shipboard and fallen in love with him. A husband had been an expected claimant, but a new lover was a shock to Benedict. As both women traveled from city to city in Europe, Benedict’s letters, no longer addressed“Dear One”but abruptly“Margaret,”expressed her disarray in trying to cope with her unabated love. With their return to New York, the record of correspondence ceased. Mead divorced Luther Cressman after a time and married Reo Fortune. When the correspondence resumed with Mead’s and Fortune’s trip to New Guinea in 1928, Benedict’s letters were not the ardent love letters she had sent to Samoa but still addressed a close friend and confidant with news of herself and the anthropology scene in New York. The letters often...

Share