Margaret Mead collection

Margaret Mead was born on December 16, 1901, in Philadelphia to parents Edward Sherwood Mead and Emily Fogg Mead. She attended DePauw for her freshman year of undergraduate education from 1919-1920 then transferred to Barnard College in New York to complete her bachelor's degree. Margaret earned her master’s degree from Columbia University in 1924 and numerous Ph.Ds from Columbia in 1929.

Mead was a cultural anthropologist and worked as Assistant Curator of Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History in 1926. During her time there, she embarked on two dozen trips to the South Pacific to study Indigenous cultures. In her first study, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) she observed the ease with which Samoan children moved into the adult world of sexuality and work. She compared this to the contrasting experiences of children in the United States, which put restraints on sexual behavior and separated children from the productive world. Mead went on to describe the ways that social convention, not biology, dictates how people behave in her 1935 book Sex and Temperament. In 1949, Mead expanded on these ideas in her book Male and Female. This book centered around her stance on how motherhood shapes male and female roles in all societies. She explained her stance on nature vs nurture while stressing the importance of resisting traditional gender stereotypes. Throughout her life, Mead had three husbands all ending with divorce. With her third husband, British anthropologist Gregory Bateson, she had a daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, who would later become an anthropologist too. Margaret died from pancreatic cancer on November 15, 1978.

Sources:

“Margaret Mead: Human Nature and the Power of Culture”, Library of Congress, Accessed December 2, 2024.

“Margaret Mead.” History.com. Accessed December 2, 2024.

This biographical note was created by Kyah Rodkey and Aleah Aldrich as part of the HIST278: Women's History from 1890-Present course during the fall 2024 semester. It was revised by Professor Sarah Rowley and the Coordinator of Archives and Special Collections Bethany Fiechter.