Mead, Margaret (1901–1978)

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Mead, Margaret (1901–1978)

The most prominent anthropologist in the world . Born Margaret Mead on December 16, 1901, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died in New York City on November 15, 1978; daughter of Edward Sherwood Mead (an economist) and Emily Fogg Mead (a sociologist); attended DePauw University, 1919–20; Barnard College, 1920–23, A.B., 1923; M.A., Columbia, 1924; Ph.D., Columbia, 1929; married Luther Sheeleigh Cressman (an Episcopal priest; later sociologist, archeologist), on September 3, 1923 (divorced 1928); married Reo Franklin Fortune (an anthropologist), on October 8, 1928 (divorced 1935); married Gregory Bateson (an anthropologist), on March 13, 1936 (divorced 1950); children (third marriage): Mary Catherine Bateson (b. 1939, an anthropologist).

Appointed assistant curator of ethnology, American Museum of Natural History (1926), associate curator (1942), curator (1964), curator emeritus (1969); appointed adjunct professor of anthropology, Columbia (1954–78); named professor of anthropology and chair, division of social sciences, Fordham University (Lincoln Center campus, 1968–70); named visiting lecturer, department of psychiatry, school of medicine, University of Cincinnati (1957–58); was visiting lecturer, Menninger Foundation, Topeka, Kansas (1959).

Selected writings:

Inquiry into the Question of Cultural Stability in Polynesia (Columbia University Contributions to Anthropology Series, 1928); Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization (Morrow, 1928); Growing Up in New Guinea: A Comparative Study of Primitive Education (Morrow, 1930); Social Organization of Manu'a (Bernice P. Bishop Bulletin #76, Honolulu, 1930); The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe (Columbia University Press, 1932); "Kinship in the Admiralty Islands," in Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History (New York, 1934); Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (Morrow, 1935); From the South Seas: Studies of Adolescence and Sex in Primitive Societies (Morrow, 1935); (editor) Cooperation and Competition among Primitive Peoples (McGraw-Hill, 1937); And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America (Morrow, 1942); (with Gregory Bateson) Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (Special Publications of the New York Academy of Sciences #2, 1942); Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in the Changing World (Morrow, 1949); Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Problems of Soviet Character (Rand Corporation & McGraw-Hill, 1951); (with Frances Cooke Macgregor) Growth and Culture: A Photographic Study of Balinese Childhood (Putnam, 1951); The School in American Culture (Harvard University Press, 1951); (editor) Cultural Patterns and Technical Change: A Manual Prepared by the World Federation for Mental Health (UNESCO, 1953); (editor, with Heinz von Foerster and Hans Lucas Teuber) Cybernetics: Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems (Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, 1953); (editor, with Nicolas Calas) Primitive Heritage: An Anthropological Anthology (Random House, 1953); (editor, with Rhoda Métraux) The Study of Culture at a Distance (University of Chicago Press, 1953); (editor, with Rhoda Métraux) Themes in French Culture: A Preface to a Study of the French Community (Stanford University Press, 1954); (editor, with Martha Wolfenstein) Childhood in Contemporary Cultures (University of Chicago Press, 1955); New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation—Manus 1928–1953 (Morrow, 1956); (editor) An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict (Houghton Mifflin, 1959); People and Places (World, 1959); (editor, with Ruth L. Bunzel) The Golden Age of American Anthropology (Braziller, 1950); (with Gregory Bateson) Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (New York Academy of Sciences, 1962); Continuities in Cultural Evolution (Yale University Press, 1964); Anthropology, A Human Science: Selected Papers, 1939–1960 (Van Nostrand, 1964); Anthropologists and What They Do (Watts, 1965); (with Ken Heyman) Family (Macmillan, 1965); (editor, with Frances B. Kaplan) American Women: The Report of the President's Commission on the Status of Women and Other Publications of the Commission (Scribner, 1965); (with Muriel Brown) The Wagon and the Star: A Study of American Community Initiative (Rand McNally, 1966); (with Paul Byers) The Small Conference: A Innovation in Communication (Mouton, 1968); (editor, with Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ethel Tobach, and Robert E. Light) Science and the Concept of Race (Columbia University Press, 1968); Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap (Natural History Press & Doubleday, 1970); (with James Baldwin) A Rap on Race (Lippincott, 1971); (editor, with J. Edward Carothers, Daniel D. MacCracken, and Roger L. Shinn) To Love or to Perish: The Technological Crisis and the Churches (Friendship Press, 1972); Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years (Morrow, 1972); Twentieth Century Faith: Hope and Survival (Harper & Row, 1972); Ruth Benedict (Columbia University Press, 1974); (with Rhoda Métraux) A Way of Seeing (Morrow, 1974); World Enough: Rethinking the Future (Little, Brown, 1975); Letters from the Field 1925–1975 (Harper & Row, 1978); (with Rhoda Métraux) An Interview with Santa Claus (Walker, 1978); (with Rhoda Métraux) Aspects of the Present (Morrow, 1980).

On August 31, 1925, at the lush port of Pago Pago, Samoa, a somewhat fragile-looking woman, age 23, embarked from a steamer. She was just over five feet tall, weighed under 100 pounds, and had never been west of the Mississippi. As the U.S. Pacific fleet was in port, she saw battleships filling the harbor. "Airplanes scream overhead," she wrote home; "the band of some ship is constantly playing ragtime." Her baggage: a typewriter, a change of clothes, and a small metal strongbox to hold her papers and notes. Her occupation: anthropologist.

For six weeks, Margaret Mead lived in a ramshackle hotel that was the setting for W. Somerset Maugham's short story "Rain." As she began her research, the study of adolescence among the Polynesians, she was held suspect by other whites, experienced a hurricane, and contacted a case of pinkeye that afflicted her years afterwards. When a visiting chief from British Samoa sought her favors, she convinced him that she lacked his rank and was therefore unworthy of him. Yet Mead persevered, soon moving to the island of Ta'u, where—except for the family of a naval pharmacist—she was the only white person. She believed she was part of what she called a "giant rescue operation," the study of primitive cultures before they perished. Remaining there nine months, in some ways she lived the life of a Samoan woman, eating dried fish and helping care for their ailing children. In the process, she interviewed 68 Samoan females between the ages of 8 and 20, though most of her data came from 25 who trooped daily into the medical station office. During this time, she picked up elements of the language from a nurse.

Five years afterwards, the results of the young anthropologist's research were published. Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) by Margaret Mead was a bestseller, launching its author into worldwide fame. The book portrayed Samoa as a veritable Eden, due in large extent to the lack of sexual inhibitions among its youth. At the end of her first chapter, "A Day in Samoa," she wrote of young couples who would dance in the moonlight, then "detach themselves and wander away among the trees. Sometimes sleep will not descend upon the village until long past midnight; then at least there is only the mellow thunder of the reef and the whisper of lovers, as the village rests until dawn." Asserting that the Samoan maidens sought to acquire as many lovers as possible before settling down to family life, she found both sexes possessing no notion of "romantic love as it occurs in our civilization, inextirpably bound up with ideas of monogamy, exclusiveness, jealousy and undeviating fidelity."

Philosopher Bertrand Russell, sexologist Havelock Ellis, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, and critic H.L. Mencken all praised her work. The public was enamored as well. Here was a society marked by overwhelming ease and casualness, in which conflict was minimal, family ties were loose, and guilt did not exist. Rather than the nuclear family, "a larger family community, in which there are several adult men and women, seems to insure the child against the development of the crippling attitudes which have been labeled Oedipus complexes, Electra complexes, and so on." In the words of Mead biographer Jane Howard , Mead had portrayed "a romantic paradise of a place where no one ever had acne or blushed from embarrassment or squirmed from frustration." If only, many readers extrapolated, Americans would abandon their notions of

fidelity, competition, and the tight nuclear family in favor of the more casual Samoan life, problems caused by shame and neurosis would not exist. By the 1940s, people were quipping:

Margaret Mead, Margaret Mead,
Helps to Fill our country's need,
Thinks our culture is much lower
Than the one in Samoa.

From that point, Mead built upon her celebrity status until at last she became a national oracle, pronouncing on all topics from Soviet child-rearing to Anglican liturgy. In a lifetime of 77 years, she wrote close to 30 books, edited a dozen more, contributed hundreds of articles, helped lead major professional associations, and was one of the most sought-after lecturers in the nation. Always she conveyed a tone of boundless optimism. To Margaret Mead, all problems were solvable, all guilt a waste of time. Brilliant, naive, enchanting, obstreperous, demanding, forgiving, Margaret Mead encompassed a universe.

Mead was born on December 16, 1901, the eldest of five children, in Philadelphia. Her father Edward Sherwood Mead was a professor of economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on corporate finance. Her mother Emily Fogg Mead was a suffragist, reformer, and sociologist whose doctorate focused on Italian immigrant families. Yet Mead always found Martha Ramsay Mead , her maternal grandmother, the most decisive influence on her life. A former high school principal, Martha tutored Margaret through adolescence, once assigning her the task, at age eight, of observing the speech patterns of her younger sisters.

Mead's parents raised their children in various towns in New Jersey and Bucks County, Pennsylvania, from which her father commuted to work. As Edward was helping to establish extension branches of the university through the state, the family moved frequently. Hammonton, Holicong, Doylestown, Buckingham, Landsdowne—all were temporarily her home. By the time she was 11, Margaret had lived in 60 houses and eaten food prepared by 107 cooks. "In a sense," she said, "we were like a family of refugees, always at odds with and well in advance of the local customs." Little wonder Margaret grew up bright, precocious, restless, and, above all, impatient.

Graduating from Doylestown High School, in 1919 she enrolled in DePauw University, in Greencastle, Indiana. Here the precocious Mead, incredibly sophisticated in some ways and quite awkward in others, was a social outcast. After her freshman year, she transferred to Barnard College, from which she graduated in 1923. In the urban, highly sophisticated environment of New York City, Mead thrived. Already impressing her peers by her intelligence and maturity, she was remembered by a classmate as appearing "so much older than the rest of us." After Barnard, she attended Columbia University, from which she received her M.A. in psychology.

At Columbia, two anthropologists changed the course of Mead's life. First was Franz Boaz, who already possessed an international reputation and whose paternalism led students to call him "Papa Franz." Very much the iconoclast, Boaz stressed the autonomy of culture and language at a time when race was seen as the ultimate determinant. The so-called "savage," he said, was certainly not mentally inferior to the Westerner. The second influence, Ruth Benedict , was Boaz's earliest disciple as well as his doctoral student and teaching assistant. Mead quickly absorbed Benedict's contagious enthusiasm over cultural relativity while becoming, as she later said, "the child Ruth never had."

In September 1923, Mead married Luther Sheeleigh Cressman, a graduate student in sociology who had just received his divinity degree at New York's General Theological Seminary. The couple had been secretly engaged from the time she was 16. Within two years, however, they drifted apart. Mead had a brief affair with Edward Sapir, a noted anthropologist and linguist who implored her to divorce Cressman and marry him.

By 1925, Mead had obtained a National Research Council fellowship, received an appointment at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu, and traveled to Samoa. In seeking to prove Boaz's contention that adolescent behavior was more cultural than biological, she asked: "Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to civilization? Under different circumstances does adolescence present a different picture?" In part, Boaz recommended Polynesia to her because she would not need many languages, in part because a steamer arrived every three weeks.

Mead had left Cressman with the comforting words that she would never leave him—unless, that is, she found somebody else. The "somebody else" was Reo Franklin Fortune, a 24-year-old New Zealander heading for graduate studies at Cambridge. Mead and Fortune met on board the Chitral en route to Europe after Mead's stay in Samoa. A reunion of Margaret and husband Luther in Marseilles, with Reo then joining them in Paris, led to awkwardness all around, but Mead soon found solace in her work. Once back in New York, she became assistant curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History, beginning an association that lasted until her death.

In October 1928, having divorced Cressman, Mead married Fortune in Auckland, New Zealand. The couple immediately went to the central island of the Great Admiralty archipelago, Manus, settling in a village called Peri. Here they sought to study the minds of primitive children. In some ways, life was a bit bizarre, with Mead becoming an arbiter in apparently age-old village feuds. "You write down every single transaction and we won't need to quarrel any more," the inhabitants told her. Mead and Fortune constructed a house with several exits so that mothers-in-law could depart as sons-in-law entered. During her stay, Mead fractured her foot and suffered from insomnia. The product of her research, Growing Up in New Guinea: A Comparative Study of Primitive Education (1930), caused less stir than the Samoa work but was well received. In this book, she argued that the gap between the "civilized" mind and the "primitive" one had been greatly exaggerated; human nature was essentially malleable.

Once fieldwork was accomplished, the couple settled in New York, where Mead found her book on Samoan adolescence catapulting her to fame. In the summer of 1930, they went to Nebraska, there to study the Omaha Indians, whom—to protect their identity—Mead called the "Antlers." Noting the degree to which Omaha culture had shrunk markedly from a richer past, Mead and Fortune felt devastated.

A year later, they were in New Guinea, where their carriers unceremoniously dropped them off at a village called Alitoa. Yet, being left stranded proved to be a blessing in disguise, for they found the inhabitants there ideal subjects of study. Certainly there was variety. Mead found one group, mountain people whom she and Fortune named the Arapesh, almost totally pacifist. By contrast, another tribe, the Mundugumor, was so violent that "small children of eleven and twelve had all taken part in cannibal feasts." People committed suicide by surrendering to neighbors who would eat their flesh. By the end of 1932, Mead's marriage was in trouble. She found Fortune "a crank"; Fortune reciprocated by referring to her as a "psychopathological case."

On Christmas Day 1932, Mead's life was again transformed. At a party at Ambunti, she met British ethnologist Gregory Bateson, of St. John's College, Cambridge, who was in New Guinea researching the Iatmul people of the Sepic River area. Soon Mead and Bateson were falling in love. For the rest of their time in the field, the trio constituted a mélange à trois. As Bateson later said, "All three of us together were pretty psychotic." Mead once reminisced, "It was the closest I've ever come to madness." Indeed, their relationship reminded Mead of the lake-dwelling Tchambuli, a group they were studying. At one point, life was physically precarious as well. While staying with the Washkuk tribe, the three anthropologists expected a raid from a hostile group. Fortune had to protect the trio by brandishing a revolver as all took turns sleeping on the floor.

When the New Guinea project ended, all three returned to their respective homelands—Bateson to Britain, Fortune to New Zealand, and Mead to Manhattan. In October 1933, The New York Times greeted Mead's return with the headline: NEW GUINEA SONGS ARE SOLD FOR A PIG. It continued, "Woman Explorer, Back, Says Old Times Bring High Prices Among the Aborigines—THEY KILL GIRL BABIES—But Spare Enough to Do All Their Work—'Sweetest' of People, Even So." She was quoted as saying: "The women shave their heads and bear burdens, while the men decorate their long hair with peacock feathers and strut around like lords." Mead added to the exotic aura about her when her Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935) was published. She told of how the Mundugumor took "frank, sadistic enjoyment of other people's discomfiture" and of how their conversations on sex had the character of "playing ball with hand grenades." Soon Mead was teaching at Columbia's extension division and was frequently on the lecture circuit.

Her's was the most complex life imaginable.
—Jane Howard

In 1935, Mead divorced Fortune and, in March 1936, married Bateson. After the wedding in Singapore, the couple worked for two years in Bali. Here they pioneered in using photography as a research tool, taking some 28,000 stills in the process. While living on the Sepik River, they built a house without walls so that nothing around them would take place unobserved. Mead was less than enamored with their research subjects, at one time writing psychologist John Dollard:

Not an ounce of free intelligence or free libido in the whole culture. The whole culture is arranged like a sling, and most of the time the people swing into it, their knees barely gripping, working alone, without either punch or kick. … Anything new or strangeleads to total panic.

Without trances, she said, the Balinese would lead dreary lives. After further research with a New Guinea tribe, the Iatmul, the couple returned to New York City.

In December 1939, the 38-year-old Mead gave birth to Mary Catherine Bateson , her first and only child. Few births ever received so much attention. The event, writes Mead biographer Jane Howard, bore the air of a Nativity project. The delivery was delayed until a friend who was filming the event could rush to her car for flash-bulbs. The prominent pediatrician Benjamin Spock was on hand, as he later put it, "to certify the baby's normalcy."

If Mead's life had been somewhat unsettled to this point, the war years were close to anarchy. World War II separated Mead and Bateson much of the time. "Cathy" was left with close friends in New York, who supplied the role of extended family. Mead's greatest wartime activity was with the National Research Council's Committee on Food Habits, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council. This work frequently took her to Washington. From this body evolved the Committee on Living Habits, the National and World Federations of Mental Health, and, after the war, the United Nations Economic, Social, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

In the summer of 1943, the Office of War Information sent Mead to England. Her task: to study the budding relationships between young British women and newly arrived American GIs. In 1944, Mead and Ruth Benedict launched the Institute for International Studies, financed by the Office of Naval Research. The aim of the body was nothing if not cosmic: to "develop a series of systematic undertakings of the great contemporary cultures so that the values of each may be orchestrated in a world built new," in short an examination of national character. How does national character, the task force asked, determine the behavior of enemies, allies, and the Americans themselves? The project involved some 120 social scientists, representing 16 nationalities and 14 disciplines.

In October 1950, Mead and Bateson divorced. Bateson later said of Mead:

It was almost a principle of pure energy. I couldn't keep up, and she couldn't stop. She was like a tugboat. She could sit down and write three thousand words by eleven o'-clock in the morning, and spend the rest of the day working at the museum.

For decades, Mead held down posts at the Museum of Natural History while continuing to teach at Columbia and Fordham. From her tower office in the museum, she supervised 15 assistants. Frequently, she held visiting academic and consulting posts. When, in 1968, she taught a course at Yale, 600 students signed up, the largest enrollment in the university's history. Until the end of her life, she was a globetrotter par excellence. Never known for possessing a diminutive ego, she once responded to a Toronto clerk who told her a plane was full: "But I'm Margaret Mead!"

In 1953, Mead returned to Peri, there to see what changes the war had made. She was accompanied by budding anthropologists Theodore Schwartz and Lenona Shargo . "It is all rather like a family gathering," she said, "with cousins one hasn't seen for twenty-five years." Believing that the local Manus tribe had made a 4,000-year leap, she entitled her study New Lives for Old (1956).

All this time Mead remained a prolific writer, one who at times could produce a book in less than a month. And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America (1942) examined American character in light of seven "primitive" cultures she had studied. Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (1942), written with Bateson, was an ethnographic analysis of 700 thematically arranged photographs. Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in the Changing World (1949) advanced her theory that sexual differences resulted from social conditioning, primarily maternal influence. Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap (1970) examined how rapid cultural change influences the transferal of information from one generation to the next. One of Mead's most provocative works was her autobiographical Blackberry Winter (1972). Though offering much insight into her early years, it downplayed a number of sensitive matters, including her stormy marriages.

Not surprisingly Mead received many tributes, including some 28 honorary degrees. She was president of seven professional organizations, including the World Federation of Mental Health (1956–57), the American Anthropological Association (1960), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1975). Always seeing her mission as one to a wider community, she could give over a hundred speeches a year and frequently appeared on talk shows. From 1961 to 1978, she wrote a column for Redbook magazine with anthropologist Rhoda Métraux , with whom she long shared a Greenwich Village flat. As she grew older, she always carried a forked stick and wore a cape.

A devout Episcopalian, Mead served in 1967 on the denomination's Subcommittee for the Revision of the Book of Common Prayer. Already an admirer of the King James translation of the Bible, she sought to preserve as much of the old liturgy as possible. During a discussion of Noah's flood, a bishop commented, "Nobody believes that in this day and age." Mead snapped back, "Bishops may not but anthropologists do." She was particularly concerned to keep the renunciation of "Satan and all his works" in the baptismal rite.

Margaret Mead was always good for a quotation, even if many would find some of her positions outlandish. Just before World War II broke out, she thought that the conflict could be avoided if Franklin Roosevelt would "have a talk" with Hitler "in terms of building Europe." Once, during the Cold War, she told a friend she was glad to be an American for "I think we can do more harm than any other country on earth at the moment"; better to be within such a society

than without. In an attempt to explain the Russian character, Mead and fellow anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer said, "We've got to pursue swaddling in every direction, including metaphors or any kind of figures of speech." Critics labeled the preoccupation "diaperology."

It seemed as if Margaret Mead had an opinion on everything. She called for trial marriage, a single world language, salaries for college students, and the legalization of drugs for addicts. In the 1970s, she argued that American colleges were 400 years out of date. When she endorsed decriminalization of marijuana, Governor Claude Kirk of Florida called her "a dirty old lady." Instead of the "isolated" nuclear family, she advocated "cluster" units, comprised of older married couples, singles, and teenagers from other households.

Some of Mead's comments concerning the relationship between the sexes could appear particularly outlandish. Americans were "appallingly poor lovers." Newlyweds should purchase divorce insurance. American men were losing their "sense of adventure" because with the advent of bottle-feeding, males could suckle babies just as well as females. An ideal society would consist of people who were homosexual in their youth, heterosexual in middle age, and homosexual again in later life. In 1969, she spoke on the evils of co-education to Radcliffe students: "Twenty-four hours a day with boys can be appalling—it's bad enough to have to eat breakfast every day with your husband."

On some matters, however, she appeared conservative. Abortion, she said, was "an incredibly brutal, lazy, cruel way of handling life," "an abominable method of birth control." People who turned children over to day-care centers were better off not having any. Calling women's liberation too anti-male, she said women "cannot build on the fantasy that [they] have been held down by a conspiracy." She favored a daily period of silent prayer in the public schools. In calling for a coed draft, she opposed giving women firearms; females "are too fierce," she remarked.

Biographer Jane Howard denies that anyone knew "the whole Mead." Obviously one of the most energetic public women of her time, she was also one of the most enigmatic. As Howard notes, "She was loving, scolding, ebullient, irksome, heroic, and at times vindictive. Like most great characters, she was inconsistent."

As the 1970s waned, Mead became physically thin and quite irritable. Fortunately for her she did not live to see the devastating attack on her Samoa research by Derek Freeman, a New Zealand-born professor at the Australian National University. She also did not have to confront accusations that she had reinforced colonialism and romanticized the Pacific Islands by portraying the inhabitants in terms of savagery, cannibalism, and wanton sexuality.

On November 15, 1978, in New York Hospital, Margaret Mead died of pancreatic cancer. Time magazine's obituary bore the headline: "grandmother to the global village." When she told the nurse she was dying, the nurse gently replied, "Yes. We all will, someday." "But," said Mead, "this is different."