Acknowledgments
Prologue: The Sybils
Prologue: Rome, 1926
Part I: Ancestry
1 Pioneering Women and Men
Part II: Backgrounds
2 Apollo and Dionysus: Ruth Benedict’s Childhood
3 “The Young-Eyed Cherubim”: Margaret Mead’s Childhood
Part III: Searching for Self
4 “Smashing”: Female Romantic Friendships
5 “Mary Wollstonecraft”: Ruth Benedict and Early Twentieth-Century
Feminism
Part IV: From New York City to New Guinea
6 DePauw University, Barnard College, and the Making of Margaret
Mead
7 “Unicorns at Sunrise”: Anthropology, Poetry, Gender, and Ruth
Benedict
8 Free Love and Samoa
9 Bread and Wine: Creating a Friendship, 1926–1931
Part V: Intellect and Emotions
10 “Two Strings to His Bow”: Ruth Benedict and Patterns of
Culture
11 The “Squares” on the Sepik: Sex and Temperament, Part 1
12 From the Hanover Conference to the Witches of Bali: Sex and
Temperament, Part 2
13 Race, Gender, and Sexuality
Part VI: World War II and Beyond
14 Ripeness Is All
Notes
Index
Lois Banner has taught at Rutgers University, Princeton University, the University of Scranton, Hamilton College, the University of Maryland, and George Washington University. She is currently Professor of History and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California and is a past president of the American Studies Association and the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association. Her previous books include American Beauty; In Full Flower- Aging Women, Power, and Sexuality; and Finding Fran- History and Memory in the Lives of Two Women. She and her husband live in Santa Monica, California.
"Banner has intertwined not only the lives of Mead and Benedict,
but all the assumptions about women and sex in the first half of
the twentieth century. The history of anthropology has never been
so plainly set forth. An amazing, invaluable, unprecedented book--a
delight to read."
--Carolyn Heilbrun, author of Writing A Woman's Life
"A most amazing, magnificent, and very moving chronicle of Lesbian
brilliance. Lois Banner continues to break down bigoted barriers
and write real history."
--Larry Kramer, author of The Normal Heart
"Intertwined Lives is a luscious detective story in which Banner
ingenuously finds the clues and breaks the codes critical to
understanding these two giants of American intellectual life and
the bond between them. Banner has written a rich and incisive
biography of their relationship, but she has also written a book
that helps us make sense of that pivotal cultural shift as the
Victorian sexual system gives way to the modern. How did people
born into the Victorian world, but coming of age in the modern,
negotiate this transition? Here, Banner allows us to see Mead and
Benedict up close as they grapple with, even as they help shape, a
new order that holds both pleasures and terrors for hem. A canny
book and a must-read for anyone interested in the history of
sexuality and gender."
--Alice Echols, author of Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and
Times of Janis Joplin
"Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict loved anthropology, and they loved
each other. They concealed that second love during their lifetimes,
but left ample clues for a bold and sensitive biographer to
recreate the richness of their shared personal and professional
lives. Lois Banner is that biographer."
-- Susan Ware, editor of Notable American Women
"Intertwined Lives is an enticing and gorgeous adventure story
about two brilliant divas, whose intellectual travels also involved
extraordinary experiments in friendship and sexual love. Banner's
approach to these amazing women is both erudite and wonderfully
imaginative."
--Christine Stansell, author of American Moderns
"An engrossing narrative....bringing Mead and Benedict to life and
placing
then with their circle of friends in a lovely mosaic."
-- Christopher Carbone, Washington Post Book World
"A brilliant introduction to two women who stood in the vanguard of
a new America."
--Jamie Spencer, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"A major work, impressive in its depth and breadth."
-- Joan Gartland, Library Journal
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