Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist, author, speaker, and one of the best-known public interpreters of anthropology in the mid-twentieth century. She appeared often in mass media and brought field research into public conversation at a time when questions about adolescence, sexuality, gender, family, and culture were being argued far beyond universities. Anthropologist Paul Shankman later called her “anthropology’s most significant public voice during the twentieth century.”

Mead was born in Philadelphia and raised in nearby Doylestown, Pennsylvania, the first of five children. Her father, Edward Sherwood Mead, taught finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and her mother, Emily Fogg Mead, was a sociologist who studied Italian immigrants. Because the family moved often, Mead’s early education was directed by her grandmother. She spent one year at DePauw University in 1919, then transferred to Barnard College, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in 1923. At Columbia University she studied with Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, earned her master’s degree in 1924, and completed her Ph.D. in 1929.

Her first major fieldwork began in Samoa in 1925, and the book that came from it, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), made her nationally visible. The study described the lives of Samoan girls and women on Taʻū in the Manu'a Archipelago of American Samoa, with attention to childrearing, education, household structure, sex relations, dance, personality, conflict, and aging. Mead used the work to compare adolescence in Samoa with adolescence in America, which she characterized as difficult, constrained, and awkward. She questioned whether adolescent turmoil was a biological inevitability or a cultural pattern shaped by particular societies.

Mead continued to build a wide body of ethnographic work. She conducted fieldwork with the Omaha people, in Manus in Papua New Guinea, in Bali, and in Samoa, returning to some sites later for longitudinal studies. Her book Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935) examined gender roles and personality based on fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. During World War II, she turned part of her attention to American culture, writing Keep Your Powder Dry in the hope of supporting mobilization. In the 1950s she coordinated two comparative studies on modern cultures while focusing her own work on Russia.

Mead’s methods helped shape how later audiences understood anthropology. Her primary research method was participant observation, living in communities for extended periods of time. She often studied childhood, adolescence, sexuality, and kinship, and she wrote ethnographies that placed women and men, girls and boys alongside one another. In Bali in the 1930s, working with Gregory Bateson, she used still and motion photography extensively, creating one of the earliest film archives of anthropological research. That work helped make her a founding figure in visual anthropology, as well as public anthropology. She served as curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History from 1946 to 1969 and as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975.

Mead’s work was widely discussed in the press from the 1920s to the 1960s, and she co-authored a monthly column in Redbook with her partner Rhoda Métraux. Her reports on attitudes toward sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution, while her association with cultural relativism brought sharp criticism from conservatives. Her South Pacific and Melanesian ethnography also drew vigorous academic debate. For a quotes website, Mead remains compelling because she wrote and spoke as someone trying to make culture visible: how people learn, grow, form families, and imagine what is normal.