Always remember that you are absolutely unique, just like everyone else - Margaret Mead

The last 20 years have· seen an enormous growth of institutions devoted to anthropological enterprises, membership within the discipline, and students, text ­books, and paraphernalia. From a tiny scholarly group that could easily be fitted into a couple of buses, and most of whom knew each other, we have grown into a group of tremendous, anonymous milling crowds, meeting at large hotels where there are so many sessions that people do well to find those of their colleagues who are interested in the same specialty. Today we look something like the other social science disciplines, suffering some of the same malaise, and becoming cynical about slave markets and worried when grants and jobs seem to be declining.

Because of their age — long training in human relations — for that is what feminine intuition really is — women have a special contribution to make to any group enterprise, and I feel it is up to them to contribute the kinds of awareness that few men... have incorporated through their education.

The institution of marriage in all societies is a pattern within which the strains put by civilization on males and females alike must be resolved, a pattern within which men must learn, in return for a variety of elaborate rewards, new forms in which sexual spontaneity is still possible, and women must learn to discipline their receptivity to a thousand other considerations.