Margaret Mead

Dr Margaret Mead
Born	1901
Died	1978
Occupation	anthropologist
Society Membership membership guest fellow ordinary fellow elected_AI 1943.10.05 1957.05.02

Notes

House Notes

1943.10.05 nominated and elected as guest fellow during her stay in England
1944.01.25 The following nominations were placed before the Council – Prof. Sevket Aziz Kansu (Turkey), Prof. M.J. Herskovits (USA), Dr A.V. Kidder (USA), Dr Margaret Mead (USA)
1957.04.04 nominated as ordinary fellow

Notes From Elsewhere

Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and 1970s.[1] She earned her bachelor's degree at Barnard College in New York City and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University. Mead served as President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975.[2]

Mead was a communicator of anthropology in modern American and Western culture and was often controversial as an academic.[3] Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution.[4] She was a proponent of broadening sexual conventions within a context of traditional Western religious life.

Margaret Mead, the first of five children, was born in Philadelphia, but raised in nearby Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Her father, Edward Sherwood Mead, was a professor of finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and her mother, Emily (née Fogg) Mead,[5] was a sociologist who studied Italian immigrants.[6] Her sister Katharine (1906–1907) died at the age of nine months. This was a traumatic event for Mead, who had named the girl, and thoughts of her lost sister permeated her daydreams for many years.[7] Her family moved frequently, so her early education was directed by her grandmother until, at age 11, she was enrolled by her family at Buckingham Friends School in Lahaska, Pennsylvania.[8] Her family owned the Longland farm from 1912 to 1926.[9] Born into a family of various religious outlooks, she searched for a form of religion that gave an expression of the faith that she had been formally acquainted with, Christianity.[10] In doing so, she found the rituals of the Episcopal Church to fit the expression of religion she was seeking.[10] Mead studied one year, 1919, at DePauw University, then transferred to Barnard College where she found anthropology mired in "the stupid underbrush of nineteenth century arguments."[11]

Mead earned her bachelor's degree from Barnard in 1923, then began studying with professor Franz Boas and Dr. Ruth Benedict at Columbia University, earning her master's degree in 1924.[12] Mead set out in 1925 to do fieldwork in Samoa.[13] In 1926, she joined the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, as assistant curator.[14] She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1929.[15]

Before departing for Samoa, Mead had a short affair with the linguist Edward Sapir, a close friend of her instructor Ruth Benedict. But Sapir's conservative ideas about marriage and the woman's role were anathema to Mead, and as Mead left to do field work in Samoa the two separated permanently. Mead received news of Sapir's remarriage while living in Samoa, where, on a beach, she later burned their correspondence.[16]

Mead was married three times. After a six-year engagement,[17] she married her first husband (1923–28) American Luther Cressman, a theology student at the time who eventually became an anthropologist. Between 1925 and 1926 she was in Samoa returning wherefrom on the boat she met Reo Fortune, a New Zealander headed to Cambridge, England, to study psychology.[18] They were married in 1928, after Mead's divorce from Cressman, Mead dismissively characterizing her union with her first husband as "my student marriage" in her 1972 autobiography Blackberry Winter, a sobriquet with which Cressman took vigorous issue. Mead's third and longest-lasting marriage (1936–50) was to the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson, with whom she had a daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, who would also become an anthropologist.

Mead's pediatrician was Benjamin Spock,[1] whose subsequent writings on child rearing incorporated some of Mead's own practices and beliefs acquired from her ethnological field observations which she shared with him; in particular, breastfeeding on the baby's demand rather than a schedule.[19] She readily acknowledged that Gregory Bateson was the husband she loved the most. She was devastated when he left her, and she remained his loving friend ever after, keeping his photograph by her bedside wherever she traveled, including beside her hospital deathbed.[7]:428

Mead also had an exceptionally close relationship with Ruth Benedict, one of her instructors. In her memoir about her parents, With a Daughter's Eye, Mary Catherine Bateson implies that the relationship between Benedict and Mead was partly sexual.[20]:117–118 Mead never openly identified herself as lesbian or bisexual. In her writings she proposed that it is to be expected that an individual's sexual orientation may evolve throughout life.[20]

She spent her last years in a close personal and professional collaboration with anthropologist Rhoda Metraux, with whom she lived from 1955 until her death in 1978. Letters between the two published in 2006 with the permission of Mead's daughter[21] clearly express a romantic relationship.[22]

Mead had two sisters and a brother, Elizabeth, Priscilla, and Richard. Elizabeth Mead (1909–1983), an artist and teacher, married cartoonist William Steig, and Priscilla Mead (1911–1959) married author Leo Rosten.[23] Mead's brother, Richard, was a professor. Mead was also the aunt of Jeremy Steig

Publications

External Publications

Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)[75]
Growing Up In New Guinea (1930)[76]
The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe (1932)[77]
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)[48]
And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America (1942)
Male and Female (1949)[78]
New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation in Manus, 1928–1953 (1956)
People and Places (1959; a book for young readers)
Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964)
Culture and Commitment (1970)
The Mountain Arapesh: Stream of events in Alitoa (1971)
Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years (1972; autobiography)[79]
As editor or coauthor