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Margaret Mead (1901-1978) |
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Margaret Mead (1901-1978) |
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| Biography |
| 1901 - December 16th, Margaret Mead was born. She
was the first child of Edward Sherwood Mead and
Emily Fogg Mead and was endearingly referred to as “Punk” by her father. She was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. |
| 1902 - The Mead family moved to Hammonton, New Jersey
so Emily could conduct fieldwork for her
dissertation involving the Italians living in the area. |
| 1915 - Graduated from Buckingham Friends School.
Between the ages of five and seventeen, Mead had
spent two years in kindergarten, one year in fourth grade, and six years in high school. Grandma taught at home in between these periods. |
| 1918 - The Mead family moved to New Hope, Pennsylvania. |
| 1919 - After attending Doylestown High School and the
New Hope School for Girls in Pennsylvania, Mead
enrolled at DePauw University at Greencastle, Indiana. |
| 1920 - Margaret Mead transferred to Barnard College,
Columbia University. It is here that she found the
student life that matched her dreams. Here she became acquainted with Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. |
| 1923 - She married Luther Sheeleigh Cressman and received her B.A. from Barnard. |
| 1924 - Received her M.A. in psychology from Columbia University. |
| 1925-1926 - Mead had finished her Doctoral thesis based on her fieldwork in the Samoan Islands. |
| 1925 - Mead obtained a National Research Council Fellowship
and an appointment as Associate at the
Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii. |
| 1926 - Appointed Assistant Curator of Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History. |
| 1928 - Coming of Age in Samoa is published.
Mead and Luther decided to break their marriage because
both had found other lovers while they were separated due to their studies. Mead remarried to Reo F. Fortune. |
| 1928-1929 - Mead and Reo went to study the Manus tribe
of the Admiralty Islands in the West Pacific made
possible by a Social Science Research Fellowship under the supervision of Radcliffe-Brown. |
| 1929 - Reo and Mead returned home just in time for the
Great Depression. Mead received her Ph.D. from
Columbia University in anthropology. |
| 1930 - Mead conducted fieldwork in Omaha, Nebraska on
American Indian women. Growing Up in New
Guinea published. |
| 1931-1933 - Fieldwork with Reo in New Guinea where they
studied the Arapesh, Mundugumor, and the
Tchambuli which was financed by the Voss Research Fund of the American Museum of Natural History. This fieldwork gave Mead new insight into the nature of sex roles in culture and into the ways in which innate differences of temperament and culture are related. While studying the Tchambuli Mead and Reo met Gregory Bateson who became part of their study team. This complicated things because Gregory and Margaret fell in love. |
| 1933 - Upon return from the field, Margaret, Gregory, and Reo each went their separate ways. |
| 1935 - Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies was published. Mead remarries Gregory Bateson. |
| 1936-1939 - Field work in Bali and New Guinea with Gregory. |
| 1939 - Margaret Mead had a baby girl, Mary Catherine
Bateson. This was a special occasion since Mead
was told she could never have children. However the British Army had called Gregory back to his country to fight in the war and thus he was not there for the birth of his child. Mead also began 2 years as a visiting lecturer at Vassar College. During the war she wrote pamphlets and interpreted American GI’s to the British. |
| 1942-1945 - Mead served as Executive Secretary of the
Committee on Food Habits, National Research
Council. |
| 1942 - She was awarded a gold medal by the Society for Women Geographers. |
| 1946 - Mead was appointed Associate Curator of Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History. |
| 1947-1951 - Margaret Mead was visiting lecturer at Teacher’s
College. She also served as consultant on
mental health as a member of the Committee on Research of the Mental Health Division of the National Advisory Mental Health Council of the United States Public Health Service and as a member of the Interim Governing Board of the International Mental Health Congress. |
| 1949 - She was appointed President of the Society of Applied Anthropology. Male and Female published. |
| 1951 - Mead served as Vice President of the American
Association of Science and of the American Council of
Learned Sciences. |
| 1954 - Mead became adjunct professor of anthropology at Columbia University. |
| 1964-1969 - Mead was appointed Curator of the American Museum of Natural History. |
| 1978 - Margaret Mead dies on November 15th. |
| Other Achievements: |
| Secretary of the Institute for Intercultural Studies
Member of the American Anthropological Society Member of the American Ethnological Society Member of the New York Academy of Sciences Member of the Academy of Arts and Science Member of the American Association of American Women Fellow of the American Society for Orthopsychiatry Curator Emeritus of the American Museum of Natural History Director of Research in Contemporary Culture at Barnard College Head of the social science department and full professor in the liberal arts college at Fordham University |
| Commentary: |
| Margaret Mead wrote 44 books and more than 1,000 articles
translated into virtually all languages. She was
the first anthropologist to study child rearing practices and she is most famous for her fieldwork conducted in Samoa and on sex and temperament in New Guinea. In addition to her long list of credentials she also did a regular column in Redbook Magazine, lectured quite frequently, and interviewed on radio and television (The Tonight Show). Mead was a deeply committed activist and she often testified on social issues before the United States Congress and other government agencies. Margaret Mead wanted people to understand that culture, rather than biology and race, determines variations in human behavior and personality. “I have spent most of my life studying the lives
of other peoples - faraway peoples - so that Americans might
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| Websites |
| http://www.gwu.edu/~asc/biographies/Mead/
http://www.greatwomen.org/mead.htm http://www.amnh.org/Exhibition/Expedition/Treasures/Margaret_Mead/mead.html |
| Glossary |
| Berdache - A man who has voluntarily given up the struggle
to conform to the masculine role and who wore
female attire and followed the occupations of a woman. Ethnology - The study of ethnicity. Ethnography - A written documentation of a group of people. Usually requires participant observation. Anthropology - The holistic and comparative study of mankind. |
| Bibliography |
| di Leonardo, Micaela. Exotics at Home.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Garbarino, Merwyn S. Sociocultural Theory in Anthropology. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, Inc., 1977. Mead, Margaret. Blackberry Winter. New York: Kodansha International, 1972. Mead, Margaret. Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1963. |
 
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