The American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead started writing at around the same time about masculine and feminine personalities, and how culture rather than biology might be influencing which ones people had. Studying Samoan communities in 1949, she wrote, ‘The Samoan boy is not over pressured into displays of manhood, and the girl who is ambitious and managing has plenty of outlets in the bustling, organised life of the women’s groups.’ The Mundugumor tribe of Papua New Guinea, she also noticed, created women with more of a typically male temperament.
