Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead (born December 16, 1901, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died November 15, 1978, New York, New York) was an American anthropologist whose great fame owed as much to the force of her personality and her outspokenness as it did to the quality of her scientific work.

Early life and education

Margaret Mead was the first of five children born to Edward Sherwood Mead, a professor of economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Emily Fogg, a former schoolteacher and sociology graduate student. Mead and her siblings were largely homeschooled by their paternal grandmother, who lived with the family. The Meads moved frequently to accommodate the parents’ academic careers.

Mead entered DePauw University in 1919 and transferred to Barnard College a year later. She graduated from Barnard in 1923 and then entered graduate school at Columbia University. She studied with and was greatly influenced by Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology, and Ruth Benedict, Boaz’s student-turned-colleague. Mead received an M.A. in 1924 and a Ph.D. in 1929.

Work and impact

While still a graduate student, Mead began working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. During her time there she successively served as assistant curator (1926–42), associate curator (1942–64), curator of ethnology (1964–69), and curator emerita (1969–78). She taught at a number of colleges and universities, including Vassar College (1939–40, 1940–41), New York University (1940, 1965–67), Wellesley College (1944), and Columbia University (1947–51, 1952–53, 1954–78), among others. She also served as president of the Society for Applied Anthropology (1949), the American Anthropological Association (1960), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1975).

As an anthropologist, Mead is best known for her studies of the nonliterate peoples of Oceania, especially with regard to various aspects of psychology and culture, including the cultural conditioning of sexual behavior, natural character, and culture change. In her public work, she was most notable for her forays into such far-ranging topics as women’s rights, child rearing, sexual morality, nuclear proliferation, race relations, drug addiction, population control, environmental pollution, and world hunger.

Mead conducted her first of many field seasons in Oceania in 1925. While there she gathered material for the first of her 23 books, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), a perennial best seller and a characteristic example of her reliance on qualitative rather than quantitative methods. The book clearly indicates her belief in cultural determinism, the theory that human behavior is determined by culture rather than biology. This position led to some of the harshest critiques of her work, most notably those of New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman, who cast doubt on the accuracy of her observations and interpretations in a volume published several years after Mead’s death. Based on the findings of his own fieldwork, Freeman thought Mead had discounted the impact of biological variables and that she was too willing to believe informants whose accounts confirmed her preconceptions.

Mead’s other works include Growing Up in New Guinea (1930); Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935); Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (1942, with then husband Gregory Bateson); Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964); A Rap on Race (1971, with James Baldwin); Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World (1949 ); Anthropology: A Human Science (1964); Culture and Commitment (1970); Ruth Benedict (1974), a biography of that anthropologist; and Blackberry Winter (1972), an autobiography of her own early years. Letters from the Field (1977) is a selection of Mead’s correspondence written during the Samoa expedition.

Mead was dedicated to public outreach during her career. She wrote monthly articles for the women’s magazine Redbook, as well as articles for other popular outlets such as Parents and The Nation. Mead also gave a number of public lectures and made television appearances, adding to her prominence among the general population. Many of her lectures and writing dealt with child development, one of the major topics of her field research, and with cultural differences. She also used her anthropological observation skills to comment on American politics and society.

In 1979 Mead was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor, for her academic and public work.

Personal life

Mead’s romantic entanglements were largely with other influential anthropologists. She married three times in her life. Her first husband, Luther Cressman (married 1923–28) was an Episcopal priest–turned-archaeologist. Her second and third husbands, Reo Fortune (married 1928–35) and Gregory Bateson (married 1936–1950), respectively, were both anthropologists with whom Mead conducted field work. Mead also maintained a close relationship, which some biographers have suggested was romantic, with her former teacher and fellow anthropologist Ruth Benedict until the latter’s death in 1948. Mead and Bateson had one daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, who also became an anthropologist.