Margret Mead and Virginia Woolf

Mead’s book Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies became a major cornerstone of the feminist movement, because it claimed that females are dominant in the Tchambuli, or Chambri Lake region of the Sepik basin of Papua New Guinea The lack of male dominance may have been the resulted in the Australian administration's outlawing of warfare. According to contemporary research, males are dominant throughout Melanesia, although some believe that female witches have special powers. Others have argued that there is still much cultural variation throughout Melanesia, and especially in the large island of New Guinea. Anthropologists often overlook the significance of networks of political influence among females. The formal male-dominated institutions typical of some areas of high population density were not, for example, present in the same way in Oksapmin, West Sepik Province, a more sparsely populated area. Cultural patterns there were different from, say, Mt. Hagen. They were closer to those described by Mead. Mead stated that the Arapesh people, also in the Sepik, were pacifists, although she noted that they do on occasion engage in warfare. Her observations about the sharing of garden plots amongst the Arapesh, the egalitarian emphasis in child rearing, and her documentation of predominantly peaceful relations among relatives are very different.

Virginia Woolf's peculiarities as a fiction writer have tended to obscure her central strength: Woolf is arguably the major lyrical novelist in the English language. Her novels are highly experimental: a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted—and sometimes almost dissolved—in the characters receptive consciousness. Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory and visual impressions. The intensity of Virginia Woolf's poetic vision elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal settings—often wartime environments—of most of her novels. For example, Mrs Dalloway (1925) centres on the efforts of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society woman, to organise a party, even as her life is paralleled with that of Septimus Warren Smith, a working-class veteran who has returned from the First World War bearing deep psychological scars. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKwQ8kBMuJw