PRESENTER
Love and marriage, horse and carriage. Many people are giving a new meaning to the words of that old romantic song. They see that kind of marriage as well and truly belonging to the days of the horse and carriage, and that it has no relevance to the world at present and certainly not to the world of the future. That's what we'll be talking about tonight. Margaret Mead is one of the legendary figures of our time. For 50 years she's been studying how we human beings behave towards each other in very different societies, in very different places, and, comparatively speaking at least, in very different times. Dr Mead is not only the most popular anthropologist that's ever been, she's one of the most popular people if the American press is any guide. Time has called her, 'mother to the world'. Newsweek has written, 'She has told us more than anyone about the basic nature of man.' And not to be outdone, the current edition of the Australian Magazine Cleo refers to Dr Mead as, 'Everybody's grandmother.' I think that Dr Mead would have mixed feelings about at least two of those descriptions.
She shakes her head
PRESENTER
No? You'd accept them all? Good. Margaret Mead made her name as an anthropologist in 1928, with the publication of her book Coming Of Age In Samoa. Since then, she's written dozens of books, including, of special interest to Australians, Growing Up In New Guinea - a country which she's lived in or visited a number of times during a period spreading over 40 years. At present, Dr Mead is Curator Emeritus of Ethnology in the American Museum of Natural History, New York. She's also Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, also in New York. Margaret Mead is visiting Australia this time under the sponsorship of the New South Wales Housing Commission. She's here to deliver the keynote address on Building for People at the Building Science Forum which begins in Sydney tomorrow. Well, Dr Mead, we've suggested that the traditional concept of marriage is under challenge, particularly the old 'Love and marriage, horse and carriage' style. And many people feel that it's being challenged more now than ever before. Do you see this as a temporary reassessment of the institute of marriage, or will people in the future be likely to live in a very different kind of marriage institution - it'll be a watershed?
DR MARGARET MEAD
No, I see it as a temporary reassessment. I think we've stripped the family down too far and we've put too much of a burden on young parents, leaving them all alone with their children, separated from community and grandparents and friends. And this kind of marriage - the nuclear family all alone in a box somewhere - is unstable, very hard on everybody in it - parents and children - and it's this marriage that people are rebelling against. Now, there is also the point that women today are going to be asked to contribute to the whole of society. They're not asked to have enough children to keep them busy all their lives. They're going to be asked to be individuals as well as parents, and that means that we have to give them a chance to be individuals as well as parents. It means that men also are going to be individuals. Most men, most of their lives, have only been parents in the past.
PRESENTER
Dr Mead, just to get back to the words of the song, I don't want to spend a lot of time on it, but it seems to me that that does symbolise, that old pop song, a fairly common view - the love and marriage, horse and carriage, you can't have one without the other type marriage. Is that gone?
DR MARGARET MEAD
Most of the world never had love in marriage anyway. You know, there's some people... If you ask a girl who she'd like to have near her in an emergency she'll mention her husband at 11th. This whole notion of love in marriage is quite a recent notion. Never was practised much by the aristocracy, never practised much by the poor and is rather a new invention. It went out in the 1950s in the United States, where people were so much interested in marriage they didn't have time to worry about love. I think it'll be more important again today, because if women are going to be people it's going to take a lot more love to tolerate them than if they're just wives.
PRESENTER
Alvin Toffler for one, speaks of serial marriages, that it'll become the norm for people to have a series of marriages, I suppose, during their lifetime.
DR MARGARET MEAD
Well, that's because of longevity. It always was the norm for people who lived a long time. Darby and Joan, who celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, were terribly, terribly rare, you know. And most men who live to be 80 had several wives, and most women who lived to be 80 had several husbands - they buried them serially. Now instead of burying them serially, they divorce them serially.
PRESENTER
Yes, but they have... I think what Toffler's got in mind is not so much that - that people would have a series of marriages long before 80, they may even have had a series before 40.
DR MARGARET MEAD
That's right. But nevertheless it's very much affected by the longevity factor. For instance, suppose you've had two children, and you've brought them up and everything, and, you now sit down, all the children have left, and you've got 35 more years to sit across the table from him or her. You know, you may think it over. Because this was a common enterprise and you enjoyed bringing up the children, but you never thought about anything else. You suddenly discover you've nothing to say. Now, if you had nothing to say and you were going to die in a year, you could bear it, but 35 years is a long time.
PRESENTER
Dr Mead, one last point at this stage - in your writings you speak of the desirability of having two forms of marriage - one which would involve children or parenthood and the other which would not. Do you see it as being necessary, therefore, that the state, or the community or however we put it, would make it rather difficult to enter into the parental form of marriage?
DR MARGARET MEAD
I think they should make it much more difficult than any marriage that is simply designed for permitted companionship. Whether it's students who aren't ready for marriage, or middle-aged people who don't want any more children who are making a second marriage, or old ladies of 80 marrying old gentlemen of 82, we still have them all married the same way. So, I'd like to see marriages without children with less sanction than they have now, and certainly dissolvable without all the kind of divorce proceedings, you know, that go with property and provision for the children. And I'd like to see parental marriages entered in much more slowly and carefully and responsibly. I'd like to see the break-up of a parental marriage taken much harder, and I'd like to have us recognise that although it's possible to dissolve a marriage, it is not possible to dissolve co-parenthood - that once two people have had a child together, they are irrevocably related to each other, just as a brother and sister are irrevocably brother and sister because they had the same parent.