“Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.” -Margaret mead
During this Women’s History Month, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, addressed the General Assembly with his analysis of the social position of women in the world, and it is not pretty. At the same time, a New York Times Annotated story about persistent violence against women. “The evidence is pervasive,” the Times noted. “Despite the many advances women have made in education, health and even political power in the course of a generation, violence against women and girls around the world persists at alarmingly high levels.”
Interview with an original
On the day in 1977 that I was sent to interview Margaret Mead, she was speaking at a United Nations Conference on the Status of Women in the Third World. During my assignment in Washington at the State Department, I coached diplomats for online interviews, interviewed members of Congress on Capitol Hill. But on this November day I was terrified of one of the world’s most influential cultural anthropologists. Famous and energetic, Dr. Mead had been curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History when I was an admiring teenager. Now I was about to come face to face with this icon of the 20th century. From single pioneer and groundbreaking scientist, to wife, mother, and grandmother, Mead could not be categorized except perhaps by her critics who sought to discredit her work.
butterflies and blasphemies
My bosses sent me to interview Dr. Mead for a documentary he was making about US Peace Corps volunteers and embassy/USAID workers in Samoa. She had done her research there in 1925, where it was at a time when young American women did not travel alone to exotic places off the beaten path. After living with and studying these primitive native women, Mead wrote about his findings and their sexual mores in her groundbreaking book, “Coming of Age in Samoa, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies; Growing Up in New Guinea.” Although she had her detractors, Margaret Mead’s legendary work and charismatic personality endure to this day.
We had arranged to meet in the lobby of the Dupont Circle Hotel in Washington, DC where I found her on a sofa surrounded by disciples on the rug at her feet. When she saw me and my camera crew approaching her, I thought she was going to throw her cane at me. She had aged a lot and looked ill, but her physical condition hadn’t dampened her spirit. “What the hell is going on?” she screamed. “This is supposed to be a recorded radio interview. I told you no, damn TV cameras!”
Reds
The scenario could not be worse: me with a red jacket. Mead in a flowing red cape in front of a red wall! But the controversial anthropologist who had made history investigating sexual cultural patterns in the Western Pacific; whose home away from home was the American Museum of Natural History in Central Park; who inspired a feminist movement that continues today – all while she collected three husbands and an assortment of lovers – she was mine for the afternoon if she didn’t let her faze me. With a smile and a deep yogic breath, I reminded her that she had agreed to do the video interview long before the conference.
“What difference does it make if it’s radio or television?” I said. “You belong to the world and the world is entitled to a part of you.”
A culture of 100 culturess
I always regretted that arrogant response, but something changed. She was perhaps too sick and tired to argue the point. She certainly did. Once in the conversation she relaxed, she forgot about the camera and talked about one of her favorite topics: family. Mead placed great importance on having intense contact between younger and older generations, a fact in developing countries largely absent from American life. She considered grandparents absolutely essential to the growth and development of the whole person, something I missed so much in my own life.
Incessantly vocal about world peace and reducing international violence, Mead said, “Americans need to learn from other cultures to build one culture out of a hundred cultures; to build a better understanding of each other, even our enemies and give the world a very human gift.” Comfortable on our North American continent, we Americans are reluctant to fully embrace this concept. (Could it be that Secretary of State Kerry’s diplomacy is attempting this delicate balance with Iran today? )
A tree grows in New Guinea
His manner of speaking was simple and direct: “I have spent most of my life studying the life of distant peoples, so that Americans can better understand themselves,” he said. “Because of history and geography, these cultures had developed so differently from ours that knowledge of them could shed light on us, on our potentialities and our limitations.”
I still have pictures of myself and Dr. Mead on that day in 1977. It was to be his last “blackberry winter.” A year later she was gone. A tree grows in New Guinea, planted there by locals in her memory. Still with us there is unspeakable violence against women and girls abroad and at home.
Emails and women: the secret is still in the closet
Margaret Mead left thirty-seven years ago. Yet at this month’s General Assembly, Hillary Clinton addressed violence against women, which she did as First Lady twenty years ago. What story does the American press focus on? The specter of illiterate women living in squalor, peeking out from under a veil or burqa while being forced to marry at 8 and circumcised at puberty? America’s dirty little secret of terrified women holed up in inner city shelters due to abusive relationships? Or the personal email of a politician? We’ve had enough of winter. It’s time to harvest the berries.
“Blackberry Winter, the time when frost falls on the blackberry blossoms; without this frost, the berries do not set. It is the harbinger of a rich harvest.” From Blackberry Winter, My Early Years, an autobiography by Margaret Mead.