Feisty Female Friday: Margaret Mead

The FFF this week is Margaret Mead.

Margaret was born into a PA family, had four other siblings, and was homeschooled by her grandmother, who lived with the family to accommodate the parents’ academic careers. Margaret received an M.A. and a Ph.D  in psychology and anthropology and as a graduate student worked at the American Museum of Natural History in NY City as a curator. She taught at Vassar, NYU, Wellesley, and Columbia University and served on many anthropology and science groups boards.

Margaret studied the role of culture in personality formation. She conducted her first of many field seasons in Oceania where she gathered material for the first of her 23 books. The first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, was a perennial best seller and changed the field of anthropology forever. The book details her belief, based on her own observations, that human behavior is determined by culture influences regarding gender roles, rather than biology. This position led to some harsh critiques of her work. Some of her other writings include Growing Up in New Guinea, Continuities in Cultural Evolution, Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World, and Letters from the Field, a collection of her  correspondence written during the Samoan expedition.

She was dedicated to sharing her research, which included the topics of child development, sex, women’s roles in society, and cultural differences, with the general population during her career. Margaret wrote monthly articles for magazines, lectured, spoke on radio broadcasts, and appeared on television. Margaret also used her anthropological observation skills to comment on the important American society topics of her time: women’s rights, child rearing, sexual morality, nuclear proliferation, race relations, population control, environmental pollution, and world hunger.

Margaret was a mentor to young anthropologists, was posthumously awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, won the Kalinga Prize, was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, founded the Institute for Intercultural Studies, and had an award named and commemorative stamp issued in her honor.

She was married to and divorced from other influential anthropologists and had one daughter who also became an anthropologist. She died in 1978 and is buried in PA.