Mead, Margaret

Mead, Margaret (1901–1978), anthropologist and social reformer.Margaret Mead was born in Philadelphia to Emily Fogg, a sociologist, and Edward Sherwood Mead, an economist. She graduated from Barnard College and in 1929 received a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University, where she was trained by Franz Boas, a pioneer in cultural anthropology. Initially specializing in children and women, Mead later extended her interests to psychological and applied anthropology, gender and cultural change, human settlements, and diet and nutrition. Her Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization (1928) established her reputation as a field researcher and writer. With hindsight, later critics would note that in this and later works, such as Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), she neglected the biological determinants of human behavior. In Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (1983), anthropologist Derek Freeman criticized her research methodology and suggested that her idyllic picture of polymorphous, guilt‐free sexual activity among adolescent Samoans was intended primarily as a critique of Western sexual repressiveness. Still, these and other works by Mead remain acknowledged classics. As a fieldworker, she encouraged the use of photography, film, and tape recorders.

Mead believed that science could and should promote human betterment. Appalled by America's atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, she sought to ameliorate social problems through anthropological understanding. During the 1950s and 1960s she became a media celebrity, projecting the image of a wise, advice‐giving grandmother commenting on a wide range of issues. She testified at congressional hearings and spoke in public forums on U.S. foreign policy, family and child‐rearing issues, drug laws, and nuclear‐power regulation; participated in international and United Nations conferences concerning population control, food supply, and health; and served as president of the Scientists' Institute for Public Information (1972), the World Federation of Mental Health (1956–1957), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1975). A prolific writer, Mead published some thirty‐five books and hundreds of articles, both scholarly and popular.
See also Courtship and Dating; Family; Life Stages; Marriage and Divorce; Sex Education; Sexual Morality and Sex Reform; Social Science.

Bibliography

Margaret Mead , Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years, 1972.
Mary Catherine Bateson , With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, 1982.

Virginia Yans