Word: bateson
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...spring of 1961 now say they later realized that they had not had all of the opportunities as the male undergraduates, most of them took their status at Radcliffe for granted. "I didn't feel like a second-class citizen, but I think I was," says Mary Catherine Bateson '61. Virginia Rogers Patterson '61, who lives in Philadelphia and has raised five children, agrees: "We were used to being second string...
...Bateson. Other anthropologists brought data home from the field; she returned with new husbands as well...
...could be exacting with colleagues, she was scarcely less demanding of her friends. People she had not seen for a while were subjected to "marathons of conversation, often exhausting." From Samoa to Greenwich Village, it seemed, she was everybody's mother-an irony not lost on Mary Catherine Bateson, now an anthropologist herself, who judged Mead to be "less than fully nurturant" when it came to her own daughter. Bateson expresses bittersweet amusement at her mother's boast that when Baby Cathy was six weeks old, "we let the nurse go and took care of her ourselves...
Howard's biography is shrewd and intelligent and supplies all the details about Margaret Mead, down to her recipe for salad dressing. Bateson's memoir is more an act of poetic intuition. Yet she is blunter than Howard about her mother's affairs with lovers of both sexes, and more specific about the earth mother's need to be mothered herself...
...that makes her look like the last of the 19th century optimists, so be it. But with what enthusiasm, with what generosity she invited the human race to share her faith! This may be what Gregory Bateson meant when he predicted that in the years ahead people will recognize Margaret Mead's contribution as being enormous-without being able to say quite why. -By Melvin Maddocks...