Lois W. Banner

A uniquely revealing biography of two eminent twentieth century American women. Close friends for much of their lives, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead met at Barnard College in 1922, when Mead was a student, Benedict a teacher. They became sexual partners (though both married), and pioneered in the then male-dominated discipline of anthropology. They championed racial and sexual equality and cultural relativity despite the generally racist, xenophobic, and homophobic tenor of their era. Mead’s best-selling Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), and Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934), Race (1940), and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), were landmark studies that ensured the lasting prominence and influence of their authors in the field of anthropology and beyond. With unprecedented access to the complete archives of the two women—including hundreds of letters opened to scholars in 2001—Lois Banner examines the impact of their difficult childhoods and the relationship between them in the context of their circle of family, friends, husbands, lovers, and colleagues, as well as the calamitous events of their time. She shows how Benedict inadvertently exposed Mead to charges of professional incompetence, discloses the serious errors New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman made in his famed attack on Mead’s research on Samoa, and reveals what happened in New Guinea when Mead and colleagues engaged in a ritual aimed at overturning all gender and sexual boundaries.

Attending high school in 1950s suburban Los Angeles, Lois Wendland (now Lois Banner) and Fran Huneke (now Noura Durkee) had been best friends, with their minds on books and boys. But while Banner became an academic feminist, Fran converted to Islam and moved to Egypt. Forty years later, Banner sought out her lost friend, hoping to understand why they had taken such different paths in life. Banner charts the trajectories of their diverging lives. Her search for clues to the origins of their opposing choices takes her to Los Angeles, Alaska, New York, New Mexico, and to Alexandria, Egypt, where Fran re-creates the key moments of her life. As Banner finished her Ph.D. in history at Columbia University and became swept up in the beginnings of academic feminism, Fran embarked on her own journey, joining the Lama Foundation, a spiritual community in New Mexico, and eventually converting to Islam. Ultimately, however, it is in childhood that Banner finds the roots of their differences. She uncovers the importance of female role models, showing how the death of her own mother, and the tremendous strength and influence of Fran's, sowed the seeds of their disparate lives.

xi, 422 p., p. of plates : 25 cm

This book examines the broad themes that have shaped women's experiences in the United States from 1890 to the present day, as well as how a wide variety of women have both created and responded to shifting, often controversial cultural, political, and social roles. - Publisher.

"Drawing on memoirs, etiquette books, contemporary novels, and popular histories of the musical and theatrical stage, Lois W. Banner chronicles how women looked (and how they felt about how they looked) and how they wanted to look ... Here are the changing vogues ... American clothes as a revelation of sexual attitudes ... the shifting models of American beauty ... illustrated with 16 pages of photographs."--Jacket.