Science

Mary Catherine Bateson Dies at 81; Anthropologist on Lives of Women


Mary Catherine Bateson, a cultural anthropologist who was the author of quietly groundbreaking books on women’s lives — and who as the only child of Margaret Mead had once been one of the most famous babies in America — died on Jan. 2 in Dartmouth, N.H. She was 81.

Her husband, J. Barkev Kassarjian, confirmed the death, at a hospice facility. He did not specify the cause but said she had suffered a fall earlier that week and experienced brain damage.

Dr. Bateson’s parents, Dr. Mead and Gregory Bateson, an Englishman, were celebrated anthropologists who fell in love in New Guinea while both were studying the cultures there. (Dr. Mead was married to someone else at the time.) They treated their daughter’s arrival almost as more field work, documenting her birth on film — not a typical practice in 1939 — and continuing to record her early childhood with the intention of using the footage not just as home movies but also as educational material. (Dr. Bateson’s first memory of her father was with a Leica camera hanging from his neck.)

Benjamin Spock was her pediatrician — she was Dr. Spock’s first baby, it was often said — and his celebrated books on child care drew from lessons learned by Dr. Mead.

Still, it wasn’t her babyhood, her lineage or her scholarship — an expert on classical Arabic poetry, she was as polymathic as her mother — that brought Dr. Bateson renown; it was her 1989 book “Composing a Life,” an examination of the stop-and-start nature of women’s lives and their adaptive responses — “life as an improvisatory art,” as she wrote.

In the book, Dr. Bateson used her own history and those of four friends as examples of ambitious women at midlife. (She was 50 at the time of its publication.) All five had lived long enough to have experienced loss, the strains of motherhood, sexism, racism, career setbacks and betrayals. In Dr. Bateson’s case, she had been ousted as dean of faculty at Amherst College in Massachusetts in an apparent back-room deal orchestrated by male colleagues. It left her hurt at first; her anger would take years to blossom.

Written with wry compassion and a behavorial scientist’s sharp eye, the book became in its way an unassumimg blockbuster and a touchstone for feminists. Jane Fonda hailed it as an inspiration, as did Hillary Clinton, who as first lady invited Dr. Bateson to advise her.

“Reading ‘Composing a Life’ made me gnash my teeth and weep,” the author and Ms. magazine co-founder Jane O’Reilly wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1989. “I scribbled all over the margins, turned down every other page corner and underlined passages with such ferocity that my desk was flecked with broken-off pencil points.”

The insights in the book, Dr. Bateson wrote, “started from a disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings,” as if she were rummaging frantically in the fridge to make a meal for unexpected guests.

Mary Catherine Bateson was born on Dec. 8, 1939, in New York City. Her father was in England at the time; an avowed atheist, he sent his wife a congratulatory telegram instructing, “Do Not Christen.”

Mary Catherine was reared according to the rituals and practices her parents had observed in their fieldwork, including being breastfed on demand; her mother would consult with Dr. Spock. So committed was Dr. Mead to record-keeping that when Mary Catherine was in college and wanted to throw out her childhood artwork, her mother declared that she had no right to do so.

Mary Catherine grew up in Manhattan, mostly in the ground floor apartments of two townhouses in Greenwich Village that Dr. Mead shared in succession with friends who lived on the upper floors. As Dr. Mead was often away from home for work — or, when at home, working full-time — it was a convenient living arrangement: Mary Catherine could be looked after when necessary by a full bench of unofficial siblings and their parents, as well as an English nanny and her adolescent daughter.

Dr. Mead’s housekeeping techniques were also novel: When home, she cooked and ate dinner with her daughter but eschewed dishwashing, so as not to waste time that could be better spent with Mary Catherine or on her work. Day after day, dishes piled up in dizzying verticals “like a Chinese puzzle,” awaiting a maid who would arrive on Mondays, as Dr. Bateson recalled in an earlier book, “With a Daughter’s Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson” (1984).

The memoir is an affectionate yet sober portrait of two very complicated people. “One of the premises of the household in which I grew up,” Dr. Bateson wrote diplomatically, “was that there was no clear line between objectivity and subjectivity, that observation does not preclude involvement.”

Early in their marriage, she and Dr. Kassarjian lived in the Philippines and then Iran, following his career running Harvard-related graduate institutes in those countries. Dr. Bateson found work as an academic and an anthropologist, learning Tagalog in the Philippines and Farsi in Iran to do so. They lived in Iran for seven years, until they were forced out in the late 1970s by the revolution there, having to leave most of their possessions behind.



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