Science Quote by Margaret Mead

Mead frames sisterhood as a relationship forged in the petri dish of scarcity: attention, approval, resources, identity. Calling it "probably the most competitive" isn’t a cheap provocation; it’s an anthropologist’s wager that siblings closest in age and social expectation are forced into constant comparison. Sisters are often tasked with performing the same scripts at the same time - femininity, achievement, caretaking - which turns family into a zero-sum stage. Competition here is less about malice than about measurement: Who is prettier, smarter, more liked, more "responsible", more free?

The pivot - "but once the sisters are grown" - is doing heavy cultural work. Mead suggests that adulthood dilutes the family’s internal economy. When parents stop acting as the central distributor of status, sisters can renegotiate their roles. The rivalry that once maintained hierarchy can be repurposed into alliance, because the outside world supplies new pressures and shared adversaries: marriage norms, workplace inequities, caretaking burdens, the emotional labor of keeping kinship afloat. What was once a contest becomes a coalition.

Context matters: Mead spent her career arguing that behavior we treat as "natural" is often social patterning. This line quietly rebukes biological determinism. It implies that sisterly conflict is not destiny; it’s a situational response to how families and societies rank girls and women. The "strongest relationship" isn’t sentimental payoff. It’s the pragmatic outcome of two people who know each other’s origin story - and, once freed from the family scoreboard, can finally choose each other.