Male and Female.
Mead, Margaret. Male and Female. A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1949.
8vo; black cloth stamped in gold at the spine; lacking the dust jacket; touch of wear to tips and ends; near fine.
First edition. Inscribed at the front free endpaper: Elizabeth Mead Steig / on her birthday / from Margaret Mead. / June 16, 1949 / [from] / December 16, 1901.
Margaret Mead (1901-1978), anthropologist and a founder of the "Culture and Personality School of Anthropology," journeyed to the South Pacific for the first time in 1925. Three years later she published her Coming of Age in Samoa, perhaps the best-known and most controversial anthropological text of the 20th century. For the next five decades she continued to write and publish at a gallop—44 books and more than 100 articles. The first anthropologist to study child-rearing techniques, Mead made the study of family and gender roles the prime focus of her work. Male and Female, written after the immense, albeit transient, changes in women's roles during World War II, applies Mead's accumulated anthropological wisdom and observations to gender roles in American society.
Elizabeth Mead Steig (Liza), born eight years after her sister Margaret, arrived shortly following the death of another sister, Katherine. Sickly as a baby, Liza came to be regarded with great protectiveness by her family and particularly her older sister Margaret. Much of her care was delivered into Margaret's hands when Martha Mead suffered postpartum depression after the birth of her last child and daughter Priscilla. Martha, a social scientist herself, suggested to Margaret that she observe Liza and Priscilla and maintain a notebook of her observations. This, of course, was the young girl's first training as an anthropologist of human behavior. Liza became a painter and within the Mead family was typecast as 'the temperamental artist'. In 1936 she married William Steig, the author, illustrator and cartoonist, with whom she had two children. The bond between the sisters remained close throughout their lives as this brief but affectionate inscription suggests. An intimate and important association.
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