~Margaret Mead and her works~

Margaret Mead was born December 16,1901, and died November 15, 1978. She was an American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the 1960s and 1970s. She was both a popularizer of the insights of anthropology into modern American and Western culture, and also a respected, even controversial, academic anthropologist. Her reports about the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures amply informed the 160s sexual revolution. Mead was a champion of broadened sexual morals within a context of traditional western religious life. Mead was the first of five children, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but was raised in Doylestown. Her father, Edward Mead, was a professor of finance, at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and her mother, Emily Mead, was a sociologist who studied Italian immigrants. Her sister Katherine died at the age of 9 months. This was a traumatic event for Margaret, who had named this baby, and thoughts of her lost sister permanently haunted her daily lifestyle. Her family moved frequently, so her early education alternated between home-schooling and traditional schools. Born into a family of religious outlooks, she searched for a form of religion that gave an expression of the faith that she had been formally acquainted with, Christianity. In doing so, she found the rituals of the Episcopal Church to fit the expression of religion she was searching for. Mead studied one year, 1919, at DePauw University, then transfered to Barnard College where she earned her bachelor's degree in 1923. She studied with Professor Franz Boas and Dr. Ruth Benedict at Colombia University before earning her master's in 1924. Mead set out in 1925 to do fieldwork in Polynesia. In 1926, she joined the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, as assistant curator. She received her Ph.D from Colombia University in 1929. Both of Mead's surviving sister's were married to well-known men. Elizabeth Mead (1909-1983), an artist and teacher, married cartoonist William Steig, and Priscilla Mead (1911-1959) married author Leo Rosten. Mead also had a brother. Mead's observation skills came from her grandmother and mother. When Mead was a child, they would observe and record her actions in a book. Mead then realized the importance of observing and recording important findings. During World War II, Mead served as executive secretary of the National Research Council's Committee of food habitats. She served as curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History from 1946 to 1969. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1948. She taught at The New School and Columbia University, where she was an adjunct professor from 1954 to 1978. She was a professor of anthropology and chair of the Division of Social Sciences at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus from 1968 to 1970, founding their anthropology department. Following the Ruth Benedict's example, Mead focused her research on problems of child rearing, personality, and culture. She served as President of the American Anthropological Association in 1960. She held various positions in the American Associated for the Advancement of Science, notably president in 1975 and chair of the executive committee of the board of directors in 1976. Mead was featured on two record albums published by Folkways Records. The first, released in 1959, An Interview With Margaret Mead, explored the topics of morals and anthropology. In 1971, she was included in a compilation of talks by prominent women, But the Women Rose, Vol.2: Voices of Women in American History. She is credited with the pluralization of the term "semiotics." In later life, Mead was a mentor to many young anthropologists and sociologists, including Jean Houston. Mead died of pancreatic cancer on November 15, 1978. She was buried at Trinity Episcopal Church in Buckingham, Pennsylvania.