INTERTWINED LIVES: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle. By Lois W. Banner. Knopf. 540 pp. $30

At age 80, I confess to a long life before the advent of women’s studies, gender studies, and lesbian and gay studies. I thought I knew a lot about sexuality from my work as an anthropologist, and I considered myself a feminist. But I hadn’t closely followed the morphing of feminist theory and the women’s movement into academic fields. This remarkable book has exposed me to new aspects of scholarly study and, more important, to new perceptions of anthropologists Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) and Margaret Mead (1901–78).

Benedict and Mead, preeminent American women of the 20th century, were also, as it happens, women who changed my life. Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (1946) inspired me to become an anthropologist. Mead’s first question to me in 1951, when I began a 27-year association with her, was "What do you think of Ruth Benedict’s book on Japan?"

I knew a bit about their close relationship, and learned more when Mead brought me into what remained of their circle. Intellectually, the two women complemented each other. Benedict had done work in philosophy and Mead in psychology; they shared an interest in literature. Benedict, the older of the two, began as Mead’s mentor. In time, they mentored each other.

What I did not know was who slept with whom during what stages of professional development and across what gender boundaries. Banner’s masterpiece of historical reconstruction challenges those who believe in fixed categories of sexual orientation—Benedict had one husband and Mead three—as well as those who adhere to old-fashioned notions of privacy. Except as case studies for a latter-day Havelock Ellis, does any of this matter? I think so. The libido should never be excluded from intellectual history. Life is a seamless web.

A professor of history and gender studies at the University of Southern California, Banner weaves a narrative of backstage and bedroom interactions from newly available letters and unpublished drafts of the two women’s autobiographical writings, including poems. Mead always advised anthropologists and psychiatrists to use themselves as data sources for understanding human behavior. Now, the Benedict papers at Vassar College and the Mead collection at the Library of Congress offer up the women’s private lives with no misgivings about feeding the voyeurs.

Banner provides insights into the intellectual history of the United States and anthropology’s place in that story. By focusing on the interplay of Benedict, Mead, their husbands, friends, lovers, and protégés, she takes readers well beyond the two women’s published work and shows the genesis of their thoughts on human plasticity, diversity, potential, configurations, and patterns, all pearls on a string of shared ideas. While going in and out of the closets of these great minds, the biographer also deftly links their ideas to the shifting Zeitgeist: the "free love" movement, the Depression, and especially the introduction of anthropology into public-policy discourse during and after World War II. As major thinkers who were also close to each other, the Mead-Benedict dyad and the circle around it can now be added to the Pre-Raphaelites, the Bloomsbury Group, and the American pragmatists chronicled in Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club (2001).

Current events give particular relevance to Banner’s last chapter, which recounts how Benedict and Mead—with funding from the U.S. Navy—organized an interdisciplinary study of contemporary cultures at Columbia University in 1947. The two women raised important questions about national character, the sort of questions that ought to be asked today about those parts of the globe resisting American hegemony.

—Wilton S. Dillon