Margaret Mead

Anthropologist

• Born: December 16, 1901
• Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Died: November 15, 1978
• Place of death: New York, New York

American anthropologist

Mead, through her best-selling books, her public lecturing, and her column in Redbook magazine, popularized anthropology in the United States. She also provided American women with a role model, encouraging them to pursue professions while simultaneously championing their roles as mothers.

Areas of achievement Anthropology, women’s rights

Early Life

Margaret Mead credited her parents, Emily Fogg Mead and Edward Sherwood Mead, and her paternal grandmother, Martha Ramsay Mead, as her primary childhood influences. They were all educators; her mother was a teacher and sociologist who was pursuing graduate work when Margaret was born, her father was a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and her grandmother, who was primarily responsible for teaching Margaret, was a retired school principal. As a child, Margaret received only sporadic formal education, attending two years of kindergarten, one year of half days in fourth grade, and six years at a variety of high schools during which she was given supplemental instruction by her grandmother. Her inherent love of ritual found expression in religion when, at the age of eleven, Mead joined the Episcopalian church. She sustained her faith throughout her life.

Mead’s mother and grandmother were her principal role models. Both were able women who had married and borne children but also had attended college and pursued careers. From them she learned to enjoy reading and to observe and record the world around her.

Mead anticipated finding a rich intellectual and social life in college. Instead, she suffered isolation during her freshman year at DePauw University in the Midwest, where she experienced the trauma of exclusion by college sororities. She was also profoundly affected by her discovery that “bright girls could do better than bright boys” but “would suffer for it.” She departed after one year, convinced that coeducation disadvantaged women, and subsequently entered Barnard College, where she found intellectual stimulation in the company of several intelligent young women. Her ordeal shaped her preference for her life’s work: She decided “not to compete with men in male fields, but instead to concentrate on the kinds of work that are better done by women.” In anthropology, Mead found such a niche investigating families and child-rearing practices.

Initially, Mead studied psychology, but in her senior year she was influenced by the Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas and his graduate student Ruth Benedict, who inspired her by the urgency with which they pursued their work. Boas, the founder of modern American anthropology, recognized that cultures rapidly were being corrupted by world contact and was busily orchestrating the ethnographic description of as many cultures as possible with the limited number of field-workers available to him. Both Boas and Benedict were responsible for convincing Mead that she could make a contribution in anthropology.

Life’s Work

Margaret Mead first traveled to the field in 1925, when Boas dispatched her to American Samoa, where she was to observe adolescence as an aid in determining whether it was universally a time of stress. The science of anthropology was in its infancy when Mead departed for Samoa. Methods for gathering and deciphering information were yet to be defined, and Mead invented techniques while in the field. She lived with adolescent girls in a Samoan village, becoming the first American to use the participant observer method developed by the British anthropologist Stanislaw Malinowski.

On returning to the United States, Mead earned her Ph.D. and simultaneously achieved fame by publishing Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). In her work, she described a culture that was free of the Sturm und Drang of American adolescence and in which girls as well as boys were taught to value and cherish their sexuality.

Between 1925 and 1939, Mead zealously performed field work, observing seven Pacific cultures as well as the American Omaha Indians. After her initial trip to Samoa, she never again worked alone, choosing instead to collaborate with others, thereby making possible a more thorough analysis of cultures. She focused on women and children who were inaccessible to her male colleagues. Throughout her career, she was concerned with character formation and the influence of cultural and biological determinants of behavior.

During three months of intensive discussion among Mead, her husband and collaborator Reo Fortune, and British anthropologist Gregory Bateson, with whom they lived in New Guinea, Mead developed her theories of character formation. In Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), she formalized her inferences regarding the process by which cultures established behavioral norms for men and women. She also provided explanations for deviance. Mead observed among the Iatmul, Arapesh, and Mundugumor peoples widely diverging behavioral patterns for men and women that she determined were culturally defined rather than biologically mandated. Traits that were considered feminine in one culture the nurturing of children, for example could as easily be considered masculine in another. In 1949, Mead explored more fully the interactive nature of cultural and biological determinants of gender in In Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World.

In 1935, Mead and Fortune divorced, and Mead married Bateson, with whom she also collaborated. In two exceptionally productive years during which the pair worked in Bali, Mead pursued her work on character formation while Bateson continued his theorizing regarding the nature of human nonverbal communications. Together, they pioneered the use of photographs and films as tools for anthropological research. Their use of photography was a major innovation in anthropological methodology. Whereas previously anthropologists had taken still photographs for the purpose of illustrating their books, Mead and Bateson used film as a technique for studying nonverbal behavior. They shot an unprecedented 22,000 feet of film and 25,000 still photographs and edited and released several films, including Balinese Character and Trance and Dance in Bali.

During World War II, Mead, along with other social scientists throughout the United States, contributed her expertise to the war effort through work in government intelligence agencies. Some efforts were destructive in nature. Bateson, for example, at the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner to the CIA, developed methods of psychological warfare and ways of using propaganda to unnerve the Japanese. For her part, Mead lectured in England for the Office of War Information in 1943, attempting to facilitate relations between American troops and wartime Britons. She also served as the executive secretary of the Committee on Food Habits and in 1942 joined the National Research Council. Her principal contribution, however, occurred in the development of national character studies that provided techniques for analyzing the cultural characteristics of nations that could not be directly studied, such as Japan and Germany. Techniques for studying “culture at a distance” in which numerous sources, including movies, fiction, and interviews with immigrants, were employed to determine the nature of complex cultures in which the war inhibited fieldwork but which were strategically significant. In her 1942 book And Keep Your Powder Dry, Mead utilized her skills to analyze American society. At war’s end, Mead continued to work as a Cold War intellectual at Columbia University’s Research in Contemporary Cultures (RCC), which was funded by the Office of Navy Research. Initially the director of research, Mead replaced Benedict as director of the council after Benedict’s sudden death.

Mead never, except peripherally, entered the male bastion of academe, choosing instead to work for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. There she was appointed assistant curator of ethnology in 1926, promoted to associate curator in 1942, and promoted to curator in 1964. She retired from the museum in 1969 as curator emeritus.

In the last twenty-five years of her life, Mead focused extensively on teaching, becoming an adjunct professor at Columbia in 1954. She also served in a variety of visiting professorships. Among other positions she held were the presidencies of the World Federation of Mental Health (1956-1957), the American Anthropological Association (1960), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1975). She received several honorary degrees and was awarded posthumously the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In 1962, Mead was invited to contribute a monthly column to Redbook magazine, and through it she developed a vast popular readership. She wrote to women about social problems, the future of the family, and child-rearing practices. In return, she used the letters she received from her readers as a source of information regarding the concerns of American women.

Significance

For American women, one of Mead’s most salient achievements was her reevaluation of gender roles while she simultaneously championed tradition and ritual. She wrote about the future of the American family, condemning the isolation imposed on women in modern suburbia and mourning the loss of the community of extended families. Mead envisioned a world in which women’s and men’s unique skills and contributions would be valued equally. Women would have options for contributions outside the traditional domestic sphere, but maternal and domestic roles also would be valued.

Mead’s numerous contributions to the field of anthropology included her fieldwork in seven Oceanic cultures, her innovations in the use of film, and the development of national character studies. Mead also was instrumental in popularizing anthropology through her best-selling books, which were written for a public as well as for a scholarly audience, and through her column in Redbook. She provided insights and advice to women in her roles as anthropologist and mother.

To her lengthy list of achievements may also be added that of role model for American women. She was a successful and famous professional in an era in which the professions were virtually closed to women.

Further Reading

Banner, Lois W. Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle. New York: Knopf, 2003. Based on newly acquired letters and other archival materials, Banner examines Mead and Benedict’s intimate relationship within the context of their families, friends, husbands, and others in their social circle.

Bateson, Mary Catherine. With a Daughter’s Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. New York: William Morrow, 1984. Anthropologist Bateson provides her own intimate recollections of her parents’ lives. Illustrated.

Cassidy, Robert. Margaret Mead: A Voice for the Century. New York: Universe Books, 1982. Because of its brevity (156 pages) and lack of obvious footnotes (there are synopses for all chapters at the end) this book may seem appealing. It should, however, be viewed with caution, because it is uncritical and often simplistic. It does provide a useful chapter on Mead’s views about and contributions to feminism.

Foerstel, Lenora, and Angela Gilliam, eds. Confronting the Margaret Mead Legacy: Scholarship, Empire, and the South Pacific. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. This is a compilation of ten articles critiquing Mead’s anthropological achievements. Foerstel and Gilliam’s “Margaret Mead’s Contradictory Legacy” is particularly useful in its discussion of her entire career, including her long service in American intelligence agencies.

Holmes, Lowell D. Quest for the Real Samoa: The Mead/Freeman Controversy and Beyond. South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin & Garvey, 1987. In 1954, anthropologist Holmes traveled to Samoa to re-create the conditions and reexamine the conclusions of Mead’s Samoan research. He challenged Derek Freeman, whose scathing and well-publicized critique of Mead, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (1983), engendered fierce debate regarding the value of her work. While Holmes’s conclusions differ in several details from Mead’s, he finds that the validity of her research is “remarkably high” but that it was prone to such exaggerations as are commonly found in the work of novice field-workers.

Howard, Jane. Margaret Mead: A Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984. Although Howard uses numerous interviews with people who knew Mead, she is uncritical in her sources. Mead’s former husbands are quoted extensively along with colleagues, friends, and critics. The author’s frequently florid language and her inclusion of gratuitous observations are disconcerting. Contains an extensive bibliography.

Mead, Margaret. An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959. Because their professional lives were intertwined, Mead’s collection of Benedict’s papers, in which she includes five biographical essays, provides invaluable biographical data on Mead’s own career, including, notably, her training with Franz Boas and her World War II intelligence work.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years. New York: Pocket Books, 1972. In many ways the most useful work on Mead’s life, this book contains three parts detailing her early personal life, professional work, and experiences as a mother and grandmother. Illustrated with photographs.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. To Cherish the Life of the World: Selected Letters of Margaret Mead. Edited by Margaret M. Caffrey and Patricia Francis. New York: Basic Books, 2006. Collection of Mead’s letters to family members, husbands, lovers, and colleagues, providing insights into her life, work, and ideas.

Metraux, Rhoda. “Margaret Mead: A Biographical Sketch.” American Anthropologist 82 (June, 1980): 262-269. Metraux, Mead’s friend and collaborator from the American Museum of Natural History, provides a concise but detailed biography of Mead that organizes her contributions into four distinct periods.