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LETTER 01

AN INSTRUMENT OF JOY

Margaret Mead to Elizabeth Mead

11 January 1926

Margaret Mead was widely regarded as the leading anthropologist in the western world for many years, thanks largely to Coming of Age in Samoa, a ground-breaking and controversial book she wrote after a research trip in 1925. In the book, she sought to shine a light on the previously alien lives and relaxed sexual attitudes of adolescent Samoan girls. Although since contested, Mead’s findings were a revelation at the time and in fact have been credited with influencing the sexual revolution of the 1960s. In 1926, a year after setting foot on the Samoan island of Ta‘ū, Mead learnt of a sexual awakening much closer to home: that of her younger sister, Elizabeth. This letter of advice was her response.

THE LETTER

Elizabeth dear, I’ve a good mind to punish you by writing back in pencil. You’re a wretch to write in pencil on pink paper just when you’re writing something very important that you particularly want me to read. Don’t do it again.

I am glad you told me about the moonlight party, dear. It’s the sort of thing that had to happen sometime and it might have been a great deal worse. As it was, it was a nice boy whom you like, and nothing that need worry you. There are two things I’d like to have you remember—or in fact several. The thrills you get from touching the body of another person are just as good and legitimate thrills as those you get at the opera. Only the ones which [you] get at the opera are all mixed up with your ideas of beauty and music and Life—and so they seem to you good and holy things. In the same way the best can only be had from the joys which life offers to our sense of touch (for sex is mostly a matter of the sense of touch) when we associate those joys with love and respect and understanding.

All the real tragedies of sex come from disassociation—either of the old maid who sternly refuses to think about sex at all until finally she can think about nothing else—and goes crazy—or of the man who goes from one wanton’s arms to another seeking only the immediate sensation of the moment and never linking it up with other parts of his life. It is by the way in which sex— and under this I include warm demonstrative friendships with both sexes as well as love affairs proper with men—is linked with all the other parts of our lives, with our appreciation of music and our tenderness for little children, and most of all with our love for someone and the additional nearness to them which expression of love gives us, that sex itself is given meaning.

You must realize that your body has been given you as an instrument of joy—and tho you should choose most rigorously whose touch may make that instrument thrill and sing a thousand beautiful songs—you must never think it wrong of it to sing. For your body was made to sing to another’s touch and the flesh itself is not wise to choose. It is the spirit within the body which must be stern and say—“No, you can not play on this my precious instrument. True it would sing for you. Your fingers are very clever at playing on such instruments—but I do not love you, nor respect you—and I will not have my body singing a tune which my soul cannot sing also.” If you remember this, you will never be filled with disgust of any sort. Any touch may set the delicate chords humming—but it is your right to choose who shall really play a tune— and be very very sure of your choices first. To have given a kiss where only a handshake was justified by the love behind it—that is likely to leave a bad taste in your mouth.

And for the other part—about being boy crazy. Try to think of boys as people, some nice, some indifferent—not as a class. You are[n’t] girl crazy are you? Then why should you be boy crazy? If a boy is [an] interesting person, why, like him. If he isn’t, don’t. Think of him as an individual first and as a boy second. What kind of a person he is is a great deal more important than that he belongs to the other sex—after all so do some hundred million other individuals.

I am very proud of the way you are able to think thru the problems which life brings you— and of the way you meet them. And I consider it a great privilege to have you tell me about them. I’m so glad you are happy dear.

Very lovingly,

Margaret