DR. MARGARET MEAD

Press, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 26398, 17 April 1951, Page 2

DR. MARGARET MEAD

NOTED AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

POSSIBLE VISIT TO NEW ZEALAND

Dr. Margaret Mead, American anthropologist and authority on the sex life of the primitive peoples of the Pacific, will visit Australia in July on a lecture tour. It is probable that she will also pay a brief visit to New Zealand.

Dr. Mead has spent half the years since her graduation in 1925 living in various mud huts and caves scattered across the Pacific, all of which were uncomfortable and some of which were dangerous. In a corner of New York’s Museum of Natural History, where she is asistant curator, Dr. Mead outlined her plans for the tour, which will cover all Australian States and which may lead to a full-scale American expedition to Central Australia in 1952. Dr. Mead will lecture to educators and the public on the problems of human relationship, especially lectures the married state. Between lectures she will make a quick trip to Australia’s Northern Territory. Dr. Mead, who is 49 years old, has been married three times to three anthropologists. The modern system of courtshio and marriage is unrealistic, she claims. ‘‘During courtship we expect the girl to remain aloof, then immediately after marriage expect her to turn into a warm, yielding feminine person. This is too contradictory to be successful,” said Dr. Mead in a recent interview. Dr. Mead believes any woman can find a husband unless she is deaf, dumb and blind. Many women cannot marry the man of their dreams, but she safys, “how many men marry women who are infinitely beautiful, infinitely intelligent, and have the right kind of relatives? “While more and more men are now ready to marry any girl they can get women afe creating crises in their lives by wanting husbands to be superior to them” Women’s changing economic status has created further social confusion, she says. *<’ “Wonien 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 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. “Every step a man takes forward in his career makes him more desired as a husband; every step a woman takes forward In her career makes her less desired as a wife, said Dr. Mead.