Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/279

 field from spending money to standards of dress and behaviour. Because of the essentially pecuniary nature of our society, the relationship of limitation in terms of allowance to limitation of behaviour are more far reaching than in earlier times. Parental disapproval of extreme styles of clothing would formerly have expressed itself in a mother’s making her daughter's dresses high in the neck and long in the sleeve. Now it expresses itself in control through money. If Mary doesn’t stop purchasing chiffon stockings, Mary shall have no money to buy stockings. Similarly, a taste for cigarettes and liquor can only be gratified through money; going to the movies, buying books and magazines of which her parents disapprove, are all dependent upon a girl’s having the money, as well as upon her eluding more direct forms of control. And the importance of a supply of money in gratifying all of a girl’s desires for clothes and for amusement makes money the easiest channel through which to exert parental authority. So easy is it, that the threat of cutting off an allowance, taking away the money for the one movie a week or the coveted hat, has taken the place of the whippings and bread-and-water exiles which were favourite disciplinary methods in the last century. The parents come to rely upon this method of control. The daughters come to see all censoring of their behaviour, moral, religious or social, the ethical code and the slightest sumptuary provisions in terms of an economic threat. And then at sixteen or