Margaret Mead Biography and List of Works

American anthropologist who wrote academic and popular books. Mead was a celebrity as well as an intellectual and scholar. She was particularly known for her views on educational and social issues. However, some doubts have arisen about her famous COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA (1928), but otherwise Mead is respected as a major scientist in anthropology. Her other books include MALE AND FEMALE (1949), AN ANTHROPOLIGIST AT WORK (1959, a study of her colleague Ruth Benedict, A RAP ON RACE (1971) with James Baldwin, and memoirs BLACKBERRY WINTER (1972).

"As the traveller who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own."
(from Coming of Age in Samoa, 1928)

Margaret Mead was born in Philadelphia into a Quaker family. The family tradition was strong in the social sciences. Her father, Edward Sherwood Mead, was a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and her mother, Emily (Fogg) Mead, a sociologist. In 1919 she entered DePauw University but transferred after a year to Barnard College, where she took a course in anthropology with Professor Franz Boas (1858-1942) and his assistant, Dr. Ruth Benedict.

According to Margaret Caffey's biography about Ruth Benedict, Mead became Benedict's intimate friend. Her first marriage with Luther Cressman, a minister and archaeologist, ended in 1928. In the same year she married Dr. Reo Fortune, with whom she published GROWING UP IN NEW GUINEA (1930). It compared observations of Pacific Island life with contemporary American educational system.

Mead received her Ph.D. in 1929 from Columbia University. She carried out a number of field studies in the Pacific. Her first field trip Mead made in 1925-26 to the island of Tau, in Samoa, where she studied the development of adolescent girls in that society, and published the results in Coming of Age in Samoa. In the study she investigated the then fashionable topic of adolescence, and demonstrated that the transition of Samoan young girls into adult women went apparently without emotional crises. The result was contrasted with that of American girls. Mead suggested, that Americans could learn things from the Samoans about raising children. In 1983 an Australian researcher Derek Freeman claimed in his book Margaret Mead and Samoa, that she had ignored biological factors in favour of a theory of cultural determination of sex roles.

On her other expeditions Mead made field studies in the Admiralty Islands, New Guinea, and Bali. From 1926 Mead held a position at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and remained a member of the staff for the rest of her career, retiring as a curator emeritus of ethnology in 1969. She was a visiting lecturer at Vassar College (1939-41), a lecturer at Columbia University (1947-51) and from 1954 to 1978 she was an adjunct professor of anthropology at Columbia. From 1969 to 1971 Mead was a professor of anthropology and a chairman of the Division of Social Sciences at Fordham University. She also held a number of visiting professorships.

In 1936 Mead went with her third husband, the English anthropologist Gregory Bateson, to Bali to do field work. BALINESE CHARACTER appeared in 1942 and GROWTH AND CULTURE, written with the collaboration of Frances Cooke Macgregor, in 1951. During World War II Mead served as an executive secretary of the committee on food habits of the National Research Council. She wrote pamphlets for the Office of War Information. After the war Mead published MALE AND FEMALE: A STUDY OF THE SEXES IN A CHANGING WORLD (1949), which made use of her observations of people in the South Pacific and the East Indies. THEMES IN FRENCH CULTURE (1954) was an attempt to apply anthropological methodology to the study of Western society. It was written with Rhoda Budendey Métraux, a younger colleague with whom Mead shared a house in Greenwich Village for many years.

With her publications, lectures on women's rights, child rearing and education and other social issues Mead became something of a guru. One of her central themes in speeches and writings was that while cultural factors are fundamental determinants of behaviour, they are themselves open to influence and capable of improvement. Mead's memoirs, BLACKBERRY WINTER, appeared in 1972. She died in New York on November 15, 1978.

"We know of no culture that has said, articulately, that there is no difference between men and women except in the way they contribute to the creation of the next generation."
(from Male and Female, 1948)

For further reading: Adolescent Storm and Stress by J.E. Cote (1994); Margaret Mead by Edra Ziesk (1990); Margaret Mead by Phyllis Grosskurth (1989); Ruth Benedict: Stranger in This Land by M.M. Caffey (1989); Margaret Mead: A Life by Jane Howard (1985); Margaret Mead, a Life by J. Howard (1984); Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth by D. Freeman (1983) - Note: Mead's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, became an anthropologist. Valuable first-hand information of Margaret Mead is to be found in her work With a Daughter's Eye: Letters From the Field, 1925-1975 (1984) - Among Mead's several awards is Unesco's Kalinga Prize. Its other receivers include Björn Kurtén, George Gamow, Fred Hoyle, Julian Huxley, Konrad Lorenz, and Bertrand Russell.

COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA, (1928)