Margaret Mead

Her mother moved the family to Hammonton, New Jersey, and spent a decade there doing dissertation fieldwork on Italian immigrants, so Mead grew up inside somebody else's ethnography. Her father taught finance at the Wharton School. Her grandmother ran her early schooling because the family kept moving. A sister named Katharine, whom Margaret had named herself, died at nine months, and the loss stayed in her daydreams for years. She spent a year at DePauw in 1919 and transferred to Barnard, where Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict pulled her into anthropology. She married Luther Cressman in 1923, took a master's in 1924, and sailed for American Samoa in 1925 at 23.

She spent nine months among the girls and women of Ta'u and came back with a claim: that the storms of American adolescence were a local custom rather than a biological law. Coming of Age in Samoa appeared in 1928 and was for decades the most widely read book in the discipline. Manus followed, then Arapesh, Biwat and Chambri villages in New Guinea, which produced Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies in 1935 and its claim that temperament is assigned by culture, not sex. In Bali with Gregory Bateson she shot one of the earliest film archives in the field and effectively invented visual anthropology. She was curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History from 1946 to 1969, wrote for Vogue and Mademoiselle as well as journals, and was known by her cape and forked stick.

She published on sexual freedom for 50 years and disclosed almost nothing of her own. Three marriages, all open by agreement, all ended in divorce. She had been Ruth Benedict's lover since about 1924 and shared a Washington house with her during the war, and she spent her last decades with Rhoda Metraux. A friend's summary, which her biographer wrote down, was that she fell in love with women's souls and men's bodies. The public work ran in other directions too. She joined the Committee for National Morale in 1940 and published strategies for producing morale propaganda, wrote a manual on using cultural knowledge in undercover operations, and did contract work on Russian attitudes toward authority for the RAND Corporation from 1948 to 1950. In 1948 she defended sending Iban headhunters into the Malayan Emergency.

Pancreatic cancer killed her in New York on November 15, 1978. Two months later Jimmy Carter announced a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom, and Andrew Young handed it to her daughter at the museum where she had worked for 23 years. Then the argument started. Derek Freeman's Margaret Mead and Samoa came out in 1983, and the American Anthropological Association voted the book poorly written, unscientific, irresponsible and misleading at a session to which he was not invited. In 1999 he added that two of her informants had confessed to lying as a joke. Martin Orans, reading her notebooks at the Library of Congress, found she had reached her conclusions before meeting either woman. The public damage stuck anyway.

Margaret Mead's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Coming of Age in Samoa book
  Nine months on Ta'u, and an argument about nature and nurture 1928
• Growing Up in New Guinea book
  From the Manus fieldwork with Reo Fortune 1930
• Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies book
  Arapesh, Biwat and Chambri, and the case that temperament is cultural 1935
• Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis book
  With Gregory Bateson — the founding text of visual anthropology 1942
• A Rap on Race book
  A recorded conversation with James Baldwin, published whole 1971
• Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years book
  Her autobiography, which called her first marriage a student marriage 1972

• 1919 aged ~18 Spends a year at DePauw, then transfers to Barnard
• 1923 aged ~22 Marries Luther Cressman, the first of three husbands All three marriages were open by agreement, and all three ended in divorce.
• 1925 aged ~24 Sails for American Samoa at 23 She burned her correspondence with Edward Sapir on a beach there.
• 1928 aged ~27 Publishes Coming of Age in Samoa
• 1936 aged ~35 Goes to Bali with Gregory Bateson and starts filming Three years of stills and motion picture produced the first large ethnographic film archive.
• 1946 aged ~45 Becomes curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History
• 1975 aged ~74 Serves as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
• November 15, 1978 aged 76 Dies of pancreatic cancer in New York
• 1983 aged ~82 Derek Freeman publishes his attack on the Samoa fieldwork The American Anthropological Association voted the book unscientific and misleading the same year.

• Franz Boas 1858–1942
  Founded American academic anthropology and argued against racial determinism from Columbia University. studied under
• Ruth Benedict 1887–1948
  Advanced culture-and-personality anthropology through Patterns of Culture and wartime studies of Japan. lover and collaborator
• James Baldwin 1924–1987
  Essayist and novelist whose searing explorations of race, sexuality, and identity remain profoundly relevant. co-authored A Rap on Race with
• Zora Neale Hurston 1891–1960
  Novelist and folklorist whose work preserved Black Southern speech and culture and became central to the American canon. fellow student of Boas
• Jimmy Carter 1924–2024
  39th president who emphasized human rights, brokered the Camp David Accords, and built a major post-presidential humanitarian legacy. awarded her the Medal of Freedom