An Analysis of Blackberry Winter, chapter 9 – the first seven paragraphs

Ashley Cohen

Chapter nine of Margaret Mead’s autobiography, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years, chronicles Mead’s social and academic experiences during her three years at Barnard College.  For my document, I will focus on the first seven paragraphs of this chapter.  Throughout the rest of Blackberry Winter, Mead’s narrative is lucid and easy to follow; she writes with a candid, intimate tone of earnest clarity that reflects a desire to faithfully transmit to the reader an understanding of her early years.  In contrast, this excerpt is almost cryptic, characterized by vague details and unexplained allusions.  It as if Mead does not want the reader to know something that she nonetheless cannot completely hide; or perhaps she does want the reader to understand something that she feels she cannot openly express.  This topic that can be neither expounded upon nor hidden is lesbianism amongst Barnard women.

            Mead does not spin a tale of lesbianism at Barnard.  But while Mead relates a series of seemingly unrelated incidents in her college years, the knowing reader may tap into an undercurrent of Mead’s narrative and weave the scattered threads of cryptic hints together into an alternative narrative of homosexuality.  The enigmatic hub of this alternative narrative is “the Coop,” an “abolished” off-campus housing group from whose “ethos” Mead’s clique “developed [their] own ideas of unity.”  These references remain unexpanded upon — Mead never tells explains why the Coop was “abolished” or the exact nature of their “ethos.”  But varied clues do speak to both of these mysteries.  For example, the fact that transient members of Mead’s group “were expelled for spending the night in Greenwich Village.” The Village was an infamous homosexual hotbed of the time, and if Barnard students were expelled for overnight visits there, the Coop could have been disbanded for similar waywardness.  That students attracted to the sexual deviance of the Village scene would also be drawn to Mead’s group suggests that their “tolerance for diversity,” also inherited from the Coop, extended into the area of sexual behavior. 

Mead later forges a direct link between the Coop and lesbianism when she says that she and her friends “learned about homosexuality” from “covert stories that drifted down [...] through the Coop group.”  That these stories were “covert” reinforces that homosexuality had to be hidden at Barnard, but the fact that they nonetheless “drifted down” to Mead’s group suggests that it was also a favored topic for gossiping.  Mead’s ambivalence about homosexuality emerges when she allays any doubts the reader may have developed about her clique’s sexual orientation by telling of her friend’s reaction to accusations of homosexuality made against faculty members: “[W]e worried and thought over affectionate episodes in our past relationships with girls and wondered whether they had been incipient examples.”  Mead acknowledges the existence of questionably homosexual episodes, but simultaneously reinforces their innocent nature.  By emphasizing these “episodes” as events that were “worried” over, Mead also subtly suggests that if lesbianism had existed amongst her friends, it would have been a cause of alarm.  

 Mead’s main emphasis throughout the document is the sense of community and “unity” that existed amongst her Barnard friends.  At Barnard, “friendships were founded that endured a lifetime of change.”  If Mead emphasizes friendship over the more thrilling subject of homosexuality, perhaps it is because the former was the more powerful force in her life.  Mead openly admits that there were homosexuals at Barnard among the faculty; her silence concerning possible lesbian relationships amongst her clique may be a wise acknowledgment that it would be easier to appear to remain silent on the issue than to explain the complexity of lesbianism at a women’s college in the twenties.  In a recently Victorian society, homo-social intercourse may have easily slipped into homosexual encounters.  Additionally, the new feminists who were receiving college educations at this time often subscribed to an ethic of sexual freedom that may have included or tolerated lesbianism as an emancipation from a male-prescribed sexuality.