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Acceptance of the
MARGARET MEAD AWARD
by
Mary Lindsay Elmendorf
from the
American Anthropological Association
and the
Society for Applied Anthropology
Lexington, Kentucky
March 12, 1982
I am happy, truly happy, to receive this award and
to know that you all feel that my work has helped make
anthropological data and principles meaningful to a broader
concerned public.
I am also honored, but I feel strongly that this
honor should be shared with my supportive family, especially
my late husband, John Elmendorf, who during our 43 years of
marriage, tolerated my rebelliousness and shared my hopes
and dreams and the nuturing of our two children, Lindsay
and Susie, who have encouraged me to continue my active
life.
I am also amused to be receiving the Margaret Mead
award for a younger scholar, a month before my 65th birthday!
There are two primary reasons for this. First, because
of Margaret Mead who gave me a needed extra incentive to go
back in my fifties and finish my Ph.D by her insistence on
the special contributions that can be made by post-
menopausal women. As anthropologists we are all aware of
the non-polluting characteristics of older women in
traditional societies but are less aware of their potential
in our society.
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The second reason was to complete unfinished business.
Like many young women, wives especially, my graduate
studies were interrupted. Growing up, as I did, in the
rural south during the depression even completing my under-
graduate studies at Chapel Hill was difficult. When my
father sadly told me he could'nt afford to send me back for
my senior year, he said he could only educate one of us
children, and it would have to be my younger brother,
because he felt I'd get married and didn't need the educa-
tion as much, I was shocked. I can still remember saying,
"I must go back. I won't promise not to get married, but
I will promise to use my education." My consciousness was
raised. And back at Chapel Hill, where as one of 200 women
admitted only if we had a B or better average in a subject
area not offered in the women's college, among 2,000 men,
I suddenly realized we were living in a segregated, but not
equal world. We complained and I suddenly found myself on
the student executive board.
And so I finished the University at 20 with a B.A.
in Psychology and graduate credits in Public Administration,
and Social Work. After nearly a decade of hard work in
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various agencies, public and private, in the rural south,
the slums of New England and two years as director of
the AFSC refugee program in Europe as a quaker volunteer
during and after World War II, I returned to Chapel Hill
to re-enter graduate school in the new department of
Anthropology. After 2 years and 2 babies we went to
Mexico for 18 months and stayed 11 years. But the years
were full of learning, and as Chief of the Mexican CARE
Mission, the first woman director, I worked closely with
Aquirre Beltran and Villa Rojas, and others at the National
Indian Institute and the Ministries of Health, Education
and Agriculture in their innovative programs. It was
in Mexico in the 50's that I became acutely aware of the
power of women as agents of change as I worked with Mexican
professional women, and saw the various pilot programs where
young women trained as promotores, mejoradores, etc. were
able to successfully reach villagers both the women and
the men. And it was after this that I decided that more
needed to be known about this phenonomena.
After coming back to the states in the early 60's
I prepared a research proposal on the "Role of Women as
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Agents of Change" -- Women in Development as we say now --
but the time was not right. Thanks to encouragement from
my Mexican colleagues, Aguirre Beltran, Villa Rojas, Staven
Hagen and others, I continued my interest in Mexican
women. George Foster, who will receive the Malinowski
award tonight, urged me to go ahead with my research and
introduced me to Beverely Chinas who was studying Tehunantepec
women. And finally, I reentered graduate school and com-
pleted my degree in 1972 under Dorothy Lee, and Alfonso
Villa Rojas, writing on Maya women and change. This work,
which was published in Spanish and English within two
years, led to various research and consultant assignments
for the Mexican government, the World Bank, USAID and other
agencies analyzing the socio-cultural aspects of development
projects, with emphasis on the roles of women and community
participation in meeting basic needs. For me these basic
needs. have fallen into three categories -- Water, Energy,
and Population. In all of these issues I have worked closely
with engineers, planners, demographers, and others always
urging better communication with village people in order to
understand their perceived needs and solve mutual problems.
- 5.-
In population my concern has been in conception and
contraception with fertility control as a woman's right,
in contraceptive technologies as considered appropriate
and presented in appropriate -- meaningful ways to local
groups. Not just access, but understanding. For example
sin palabras -- without words, pamphlets with PIACT
(Piata de Mexico), using drawings and photographs.
In energy my interest in the fuelwood crisis -- a
far greater problem than the oil crisis -- was aroused in
1975 when my first task at the World Bank was to review
Eckholm's classic book Losing Ground. I suggested places
throughout where women, as primary users - and often
gatherers of wood - needed to be inserted in major roles.
And they were. Then in 1979 was asked to prepared a dis-
cussion paper on household energy for the National Academy
of Sciences I-nternational Workshop on Energy Survey Metho-
dologies for Developing countries, which appeared as "Human
Dimensions of Energy Needs and Resources". And from that
into social forestry and a draft of a.think piece on
"Forestry, Fuel Funds, Food and Females" just before a field
assignment to Thailand to assist in designing a national
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energy survey with engineers and local social scientists.
Household energy is a continuing interest, and working with
my new husband, John Landgraf, we are examining possibilities
of community woodlots in Thailand as a part of their rural
renewable energy program.
In water, which I always continue with sanitation,
I have spent about half my time since 1977 when I attended
the UN conference on Water at Mar del Plata where I spoke
out on the need for community participation -- and
particularly by women -- in improving domestic water. First
there was an assignment at the World Bank helping design a
research program on acceptance and diffusion of appropriate
technologies for excreta disposal. I was able to get approval
for case studies - by social scientists - of successes and
failures of intervention in sanitation in Latin America.
The analysis of these studies -- "the Sociocultural Aspects
of Excreta-Disposal" is being reprinted. I'm accused by
some of voyeurism, and I'm called the four letter word lady"
by others, but awareness of the importance of taboos and
habits in acceptance of changes in water use and excreta
disposal is growing. And this understanding has led to the
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importance of women as primary users and socializers.
Another think piece was "Women, Water and Waste" --
alliteration helps call attention to interrelatedness of
things. People laugh but they remember. "Women, Water and
Waste" was presented first to a small AID group, then pre-
sented at a Forum seminar at the Mid Decade Conference of
Women in Copenhagen, then revised for presentation to various
engineering groups including the 100th annual meeting of
the American Waterworks Association, 3000 engineers strong,
as "Women and the Decade",. By 1990 there is hope that the
more than a billion people in rural areas and urban slumes
presently without safe drinking water and even rudimentary
sanitation will have at least minimum facilities. The World
Bank estimates that 100 to 300 billion U.S. dollars is
needed. Now John Kalbermatten, the World Bank adviser on
Water and Sanitation is urging that women be involved in
planning and designing so that the sociocultural aspects
will be under stood and improvements will be used and
maintained. And AID is circulating a working paper or "The
Roles of Women as Participants in and Beneficiaries of
Improvements in Water Supply and Sanitation," for use in
overseas programs. In fact it is being translated into
French and Spanish for field use.
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Just last week a call came from WHO in Geneva to
say that these papers -- and discussion of them - have
helped get women's roles, for the first time as an agenda
item for the upcoming annual meeting of the interagency
consortium composed of UNDP, WHO, UNICEF, FAO and the
World Bank, where planning for allocations of the billions
of dollars for water Supply and sanitation will be dis-
cussed. My priority next week is to prepare an issues
paper for this meeting. And so it goes.
But for me even more important is the fact that
more and more agencies are asking for anthropological
inputs -- and for women's perspectives. More doors are
opening for anthropologists as planners, politicians; even
economists are becoming more aware of the cultural dimen-
sions of development. Reports such as the Global 2000.
Report tell us - and the newspapers daily con firm - we
must seek new ways of solving the increasing poverty and
violence. As anthropologists we have many things to offer
but we must be able to communicate our micro-level studies -
our views from the villages -- to a macrolevel or global
perspective. We must learn the languages of the other
disciplines, translate our findings, and at the same
time listen carefully to the villagers if we are to be
effective as cultural brokers.
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