Frank+A.+Beach+and+Clellan+Ford

Ben Henderson

Frank A. Beach and Clellan Ford Introduction The subject of this brief article is actually two: a duo of anthropologists named Frank Beach and Clellan Ford. Beach and Ford are well known for co-authoring the book Patterns of Sexual Behavior in 1951 (Mead, 1952). This article will deal with Beach’s and Ford’s biographical information, an overview of the contents of the book, and finally, its reception and impact in the field.

Frank A. Beach Frank Beach was born on April 13th, 1911, in Emporia, Kansas to his mother, bertha, and his father, also named Frank Ambrose Beach, who worked as the head of the Music Department at an institution called the Kansas State Teachers College in Emporia (Dewsbury, 2010). Originally, Beach went to school to become an English teacher, studying at Kansas State Teachers College and eventually receiving his Bachelor’s degree in 1932. However, Beach’s grades were not always excellent, and after his freshman marks were sub-par, his parents decided that it would be best for him continue his studies at Antioch College for a year. This change of place infused him with a new motivation, and he returned to Kansas State Teachers College and finished his coursework. The following years of Beach’s life saw much change of both occupation and location. He graduated in the midst of the Great Depression and was understandably not able to find a teaching job. He returned to Kansas State Teaching College to pursue a Masters in Psychology. Achieving this, he then went to the University of Chicago and studied psychology further as part of graduate work. At this point, he walked away from academic life and taught English at a public high school for a year, but his time at Chicago had shown him his life’s work (Dewsbury, 2010). He returned to the University of Chicago as a fellow, and continued to research psychology, specifically the effect of brain lesions in rats. Eventually, Beach’s path led him to Yale University, where he worked in the Department of Psychology and began to contribute to various scientific journals. It was during his time at Yale that Beach first came to have an interest in human sexual behavior, and joined forces with Clellan Ford to write the book, Patterns of Sexual Behavior. After a year long stint at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California, Beach accepted a position at the University of California, Berkeley. He held this post until his retirement in 1978, but continued to pursue research until his death in 1988 (Dewsbury, 2010).

Clellan Ford Clellan Ford was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on July 27, 1909. Ford received a doctorate in chemistry and a doctorate in sociology from Yale University in 1931 and 1935, respectively. Later in 1935, he traveled to the Fiji Islands to conduct research in ethnographics. A few years later, in 1940, Ford ventured out to British Columbia to conduct further work with the Kwakiutl Indians. He was eventually appointed the Assistant Professor of anthropology at Yale University and became involved in comparative human behavior organization called the Cross Cultural Survey. The onset of World War II temporarily disrupted his academic career, as Ford went to work for the United States Naval Reserve to compile government handbooks on Japanese holdings in the Pacific theater. He also served in an intermediary capacity between the Marine Corp and military government. He went back to work at Yale in 1946, where he continued his anthropological research as well as expanding the Cross Cultural Survey to include 24 institutions besides the six founding universities. One of the crowing achievements of his academic career was the co-authoring of Patterns of Sexual Behavior with Frank Beach, in 1951. Ford died on November 4th, 1972, in New Haven, Connecticut (Murdock,1974).

Patterns of Sexual Behavior As previously mentioned, Ford and Beach wrote and published Patterns of Sexual Behavior during their joint time at Harvard, and the work was published in 1951 (Murdock, 1974). The book was almost immediately hailed as a classic and foundational text in the field of anthropological and behavioral science, and was eventually translated into Danish, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Swedish (Murdock, 1974). In order to write the book, Ford and Beach gathered information on other cultures sexual practices from the Cross Cultural Survey that Ford had been involved with, surveys and questionnaires of the American public, and a wide berth of observation and research of other species, with a focus on other primate species (Klineberg, 1952). The book, obviously, centered on patterns of sexual behavior in different human cultures, and generally only deals with those areas of human life that have a direct bearing on sexual behavior. Parenting is left out of the study, and pregnancy and juvenile development are only mentioned in the context of sexual behavior (Mead, 1952). Some might think it odd or even misguided for researchers to look to other animal species to glean information about human sexual behavior, but Beach himself and other scholars had already established that contrasting between humans and other species could be useful (Beach, 1949). It was the conclusions drawn by the authors that made the book the sensation, in academic circles, that it was. Among the many conclusions about patterns of human sexual behavior were that: “coitus is the form of sex behavior which is overwhelmingly preferred by all societies; that self stimulation, sex play during childhood and homosexuality all occur among the primates and in various human societies in forms that suggest they are to be regarded as natural expressions of fundamental bisexual potentialities rather than as perversions or as simply substitutions for coitus.” (Mead, 1952, p.76). The concept that behaviors such homosexuality and masturbation were not sexually deviant but were rather natural and even expected behaviors was groundbreaking for the time, and may not be widely understood or accepted up to the present day.

Reception and Impact Patterns of Sexual Behavior was widely received as the definitive and foundational work for the field, and has affected researchers in human sexuality ever since. There were and remain to be criticisms of Ford and Beach’s work. Klineberg (1952) points out that the sexual information that Ford and Beach gathered from the Cross Cultural Survey was incomplete and in some cases nonexistent for the societies Ford and Beach included in the study. Klineberg (1952) also complains that the book does not seem to be structured well, with the succession of chapters apparently following a random ordering. Another common criticism was that Ford and Beach were too small-minded in their definition of sexual behavior, only considering “coitus and other forms of obtaining immediate sexual satisfaction” (Mead, 1952, p.76). But despite the critics, the book was recognized as a pioneering masterpiece and as a firm example of the achievements possible when different scientific disciplines cooperate well (Klineberg, 1952).

References Beach, F.A. (1949). The snark was a boojum. The American Psychologist, 115-124. Dewsbury, D.A. (n.d.). Frank ambrose beach. Retrieved from http://www.nap.edu/ readingroom.php?book=biomems&page=fbeach.html Klineberg, O. (1952). Pattern of sexual behavior. The American Journal of Psychology, 65(2), 324-326. Mead, M. (1952). Patterns of sexual behavior. American Anthropologist, 54, 75-76. Murdock, G.P. (1974). Clellan stearns ford. American Anthropologist, 76, 83-85.