I gotta have my orange juice.

Jesu, Juva

Exceedingly valuable

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There is an alternate approach to men’s and women’s roles today, an approach articulated in the following remarks of Margaret Mead. In the course of a discussion of the relationship between biological male-female differences and social roles, Mead asks the question, Must a society fashion distinct social roles for men and women?

We have here two different questions: Are we dealing not with a must that we dare not flout because it is rooted so deep in our biological mammalian nature that to flout it means individual and social disease? Or with a must that, although not so deeply rooted, still is so very socially convenient and so well tried that it would be uneconomical to flout it—a must which says, for example, that it is easier to get children born and bred if we stylize the behavior of the sexes very differently, teaching them to walk and dress and act in contrasting ways and to specialize in different kinds of work? But there is still the third possibility. Are not sex differences exceedingly valuable, one of the resources of our human nature that every society has used but no society has as yet begun to use to the full? (Emphasis added)

(Stephen B. Clark, Man and Woman in Christ, 445)

Written by Scott Moonen

February 3, 2019 at 4:46 pm

Posted in Quotations

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