American cultural anthropologist who made six South Sea sojourns to study cultural conditioning. Mead gained prominence at the age of 27 with the publication of the surprise bestseller, “Coming of Age in Samoa,” 1928. She became a popular young rising social scientist. In 1926, she was named assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and remained with the institution until her retirement in 1964. She wrote 24 books and co-authored or edited 18 more books. In the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, Mead was interviewed by journalists giving her opinions on modern life such as feminism, child-rearing, retirement, and sexuality.
After her death in 1978, some anthropologists tried to dismiss her original works, but she remains the most celebrated anthropologist in the 20th century.
Margaret’s father, Professor Edward Sherwood Mead taught business at the University of Pennsylvania and her mother, Emily Fogg Mead, was a suffragette. At the age of ten, the child handed out tracts for women’s rights for her mom. The second of five children, she was educated at progressive schools in Philadelphia. Her parents agnosticism drove Margaret to convert to the Episcopalian church at the age of ten. The girl was encouraged to read and be artistically creative. She desired to attend college but her dad refused. After a financial setback, he wanted his daughter to be married and follow a traditional upbringing. Her mother reasoned with her father to send the young girl to his alma mater, DePauw University.
DePauw was a social disaster for Margaret. Arriving at the college with a style of dress as unconventional as her outlook, she was shunned by the girls at DePauw. Unaware of the typical fashion and social traditions of an American sorority girl of her generation, Margaret was ostracized by her peers who refused to be seen in her company. She transferred to Barnard College in New York her sophomore year, planning to major in psychology. When she fell under the spell of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, she switched her major to anthropology, graduating in 1923. While studying with Ruth Benedict, she developed a close and long-lasting lesbian relationship with her.
In 1925, Mead boarded a ship to Samoa to study the cultural and biological effects of Samoan adolescents. Her book, “Coming of Age in Samoa” was the first of her volumes on human behavior that she studied while living with primitive people. In 1929, she earned her PhD in Franz Boas’ program at Columbia University and the following year, she researched native American Indians. She made many trips to New Guinea to study the tribes between the years of 1931 and 1935. Along with her books, she wrote numerous scientific papers, journals and magazine articles.
Mead was an eager messenger of liberal social reform. She believed personality characteristics were shaped by cultural conditioning rather than heredity. As a social critic and scholar, she expressed the need of tolerance and flexibility for human diversity. In her later years, she turned her observations from the South Pacific to contemporary American society. She worried about the cultural isolation occurring in the modern U.S. cities and towns.
Her first marriage was in 1923 before she left to Samoa. Her husband, Luthor Cressman, was a student of theology in New York. Her career stood in the way of their marriage and it ended in divorce. While in Samoa, she fell in love with New Zealand anthropologist, Reo Franklin Fortune and they married. Not feeling he was her intellectual equal, Mead divorced her second husband. She married her third husband, British anthropologist Gregory Bateson in 1936. While married to her first husband, she suffered many miscarriages. In 1926, a doctor wrongly told her she could not conceive a child. At the age of 38, Mead was thrilled to give birth to a daughter Mary Catherine Bateson on 8 December 1939. She divorced her third husband in 1950. She considered that she had made three good marriages, each giving a period of growth and producing good work. She also continued a long-term lesbian relationship with her former teacher, Ruth Benedict, later telling her daughter that throughout her life she maintained concurrent erotic and emotional relationships with both male and female partners.
Mead died on 3 October 1978 at 9:20 A.M. EST at New York Hospital of cancer at the age of 76.
She wrote of children and the future, “Children have to have a good sense of the past, and the deeper the better. Have them read the children’s books their parents and grandparents read, so they get an idea of how time has changed. If they have an idea of change, it isn’t hard to project forward.” Her hands-on practices of child-raising, such as feeding on the baby’s schedule, were revolutionary for the time. She also had many ideas about nature and the notion that culture was as much responsible as biology for influencing human behavior.
Link to Wikipedia biography