By Szonja Szabó
During the course Academic Discourse in the first year of Cultural Anthropology at Leiden University (2024-2025), we read a text by Nancy C. Lutkehaus (1996) on Margaret Mead. She defends Mead’s style as an écriture féminine (“feminine writing”) condemned by its contemporaries for its “feminine style.” In my final essay for the course, I decided to delve into the phrase of “feminine writing” by analysing the structures it builds, hides, and utilises, based on my personal experience that gendered terms have heavy implications that are taken for granted and weaponised. This blog post is a shortened version of that essay.
“Femininity” as a Category
Margaret Mead’s treatment by male anthropologists and sociologists exemplifies how a charge of “feminine” writing is disparaging in academia. In Western thought, “feminine” is a lesser category, with reason and rationality considered “male attributes” (Savigny 2017, 645). Women were relegated to the realm of subjectivity, considered to hold less analytical potential. Calling a scholarly work “feminine” is an accusation that it lacks the requisite objectivity of academia. The marginalisation of women in academia since its earliest days has led to the development of “masculinist” norms (ibid., 644). The feminine was construed as one of the “others” scientists have to understand (ibid.).
The Use of “Feminine” Against Mead
These associations enabled people to weaponize the term “feminine,” as in Lutkehaus’ examples of book reviews by contemporary (male) scholars of Mead. A. C. Haddon “insinuat[ed] that Mead’s work was ‘little more than the observations of a lady novelist’” (Lutkehaus 1996, 188), while E. E. Evans-Pritchard used “feminine” negatively when describing Mead’s writing as “rustling-of-the-wind-in-the-palm-trees” anthropology (ibid.). Peter M. Worsley distinguished between “serious science” and the “fanciful,” “feminine” style of Mead (ibid., 193).Strategically characterising her work as feminine, these scholars created a lower level of anthropological writing for Mead. Disparaging femininity for its supposed attributes has been naturalised within Western academia, so it is possible to construct misogynistic attacks as “neutral” critiques.
Why Was Mead’s Writing Called “Feminine?”
Although Mead worked in a colonial paradigm which considered “the West” the norm, she used non-Western practices to look critically at Western ones, instead of exploiting them as exotic counterexamples to reinforce norms. She approached her research subjects with a cultural relativism that defied colonial hierarchies (Lutkehaus 1996, 192-193), although it maintained essentialising boundaries between “different cultures.” Her idea of who could investigate Western norms was radical. She utilised new media, such as television, to stimulate public discussion of Western norms (ibid., 188), and regularly wrote in women’s magazines, opening up the discussion of family and childrearing norms to audiences who were otherwise expected to listen silently to male experts (ibid., 186).
This widening of anthropology’s audience threatened the hegemony of the colonial voice by exposing the parochiality of its universals. It threatens colonial power itself, which rests on claims of an objective, bird’s-eye understanding of the world. Gloria Wekker juxtaposes her own ethnographic approach to a pursuit of “value-free, objective knowledge, which ‘requires a notion of the self as a fortress that must be defended against polluting influences from its social surroundings’ (Harding 99: 58)” (2009, 4). This latter voice, developed through centuries of entanglement with colonial power, is an enduring norm. Voices that challenge its hegemony, such as Wekker’s “acknowledgment of the erotic subjectivity of the ethnographer” (ibid.) or aspects of Mead’s work, continue to be met with disapproval.
This is where the structures disparaging femininity became useful: the hegemonic voice used gendered hierarchies to elevate itself as a paragon. Mead was attacked for writing “science fiction,” drawing on the opposition of masculine–objective and feminine–subjective/fictive (Lutkehaus 1996, 194). Worsley’s charge that Mead “pander[ed]” to her audience’s “more prurient interests” amounts to an accusation of the “prostitutit[ion] of her scientific principles” (ibid., 194-195), telling people what they like to hear instead of educating them based on the “objective truth.”
Conclusion
Lutkehaus suggests that many of the belittled “feminine” qualities of Mead’s writing have become cornerstones of ethnography (1996, 195), transforming the “ethnographic voice.” As important as it is to recognise the inventions of female scholars, this argumentation risks normalising the boundaries that limit them, upholding the false promise that one voice could represent everyone.
It was interesting to learn that Mead’s work was discredited by scholars for its “femininity,” which implicitly supported the hegemonic voices of male authors. Through this example, I understood that describing a writing style or text as “feminine” is a complicated choice. We have to be aware that this term contains many implications and omissions; it might insert writing into gendered hierarchies. We should avoid normalising patriarchal structures by accepting their vocabulary.
References
Lutkehaus, Nancy C. 1996. “Margaret Mead and the ‘Rustling-of-the-Wind-in-the-Palm-Trees School’ of Ethnographic Writing.” In: Women Writing Culture, edited by Ruth Behar and Deborah A. Gordon, 186–206. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Savigny, Heather. 2017. “Cultural Sexism is Ordinary: Writing and Re‐Writing Women in Academia.” In: Gender, Work & Organization, 24 (6): 643–655.
Wekker, Gloria. 2009. The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora. New York: Columbia University Press.
Szonjá Szabó is first year student in the Bachelor’s of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies at Leiden University