1. Birth and early family life:Mead was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (USA) in a family of intellectuals. Mead's father, Edward Sherwood Mead, is an economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School; Mead's mother, Emily (Fogg) Mead is a sociologist.
2. Education :Mead studied philosophy and obtained a BA from Barnard College in New York in 1923. Later, she earned a Master's degree (1924) and a PhD (1929) from Columbia University, by Professor Franz Boas and Dr. Ruth Benedict. The anthropology, for her, is a new way to bring about an understanding of human behavior in the future.
3. Life
3.1. Career
3.1.1. Mead studied philosophy and obtained a BA from Barnard College in New York in 1923. She later earned a Master's degree (1924) and a Ph.D. (1929) from Columbia University. the teaching of Professor Franz Boas and Dr. Ruth Benedict. The anthropology, for her, is a new way to bring about an understanding of human behavior in the future.
3.1.2. In 1925, she made her first field trip to Ta'u Island in the Polynesia Islands (South Pacific), to learn about Samoa, focusing on teenage girls. From research, she wrote the book Coming of Age in Samoa, becoming the best-selling and translated in many languages around the world.
3.1.3. In 1926, she worked as assistant secretary at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1929, she went to Manus Island in New Guinea to study young people and how they shaped society. The book Growing Up in New Guinea is published. Mead became the first anthropologist to use a multicultural perspective to view human development (human history).
3.1.4. In 1938, she went to study in Papua, New Guinea. She found new ways of demonstrating the connection between parenting and adult culture, and the way in which the symbols were intertwined.
3.1.5. When World War II broke out, research was cut in the South Pacific, Mead and Ruth Benedict became volunteer anthropologists in the Institute for Intercultural Studies. By 1953, Mead returned to Manus Island and wrote the New Lives for Old study, exploring the dramatic changes made in dealing with the wider world, which showed a new basis for Her insistence on the possibility of selection in possible future.
3.1.6. Between 1968 and 1970, she became professor of anthropology at Fordham University in central Lincoln, establishing anthropology. She focuses on issues of child rearing, personification and culture.
3.1.7. In addition to his anthropological contributions, she contributed to the study of gender and sexuality in the works of: Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), Male and Female (1949), People and Place 1959)
3.1.8. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter announced that he had given Mead the Presidential Medal of Freedom and sent it to her daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson. Margaret Mead is considered the symbol of America.
3.2. Research Works
3.2.1. Individual research works
3.2.1.1. Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) ISBN 0-688-05033-
3.2.1.2. Growing Up In New Guinea (1930)
3.2.1.3. Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)
3.2.1.4. And Keep Your Dry Powder: An Anthropologist Looks At America (1942)
3.2.1.5. New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation in Manus, 1928-1953 (1956)
3.2.1.6. People and Places (1959; a book for young readers)
3.2.1.7. Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964)
3.2.1.8. Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years (1972; autobiography) ISBN 0-317-60065-6
3.2.1.9. Male and Female (1949) ISBN 0-688-14676-7
3.2.1.10. Culture and Commitment (1970)
3.2.1.11. The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe (1932)
3.2.2. Joint Research Projects
3.2.2.1. Cultural Patterns and Technical Change, editor (1953)
3.2.2.2. Primitive Heritage: An Anthropological Anthology, edited with Nicholas Calas (1953)
3.2.2.3. An Anthropologist at Work, editor (1959, reprinted 1966; volume of Ruth Benedict's writings)
3.2.2.4. The Study of Culture at A Distance, edited with Rhoda Metraux, 1953
3.2.2.5. Themes in French Culture, with Rhoda Metraux, 1954
3.2.2.6. The Wagon and the Star: A Study of the American Community Initiative co-authored with Muriel Whitbeck Brown, 1966
3.2.2.7. A Rap on Race, with James Baldwin, 1971
3.2.2.8. A Way of Seeing, with Rhoda Metraux, 1975
3.3. Personal life
3.3.1. Before departing for Samoa, Mead had a short affair with the linguist Edward Sapir, a close friend of her instructor Ruth Benedict. But Sapir's conservative ideas about marriage and the woman's role were anathema to Mead, and as Mead left to do field work in Samoa the two separated permanently. Mead received news of Sapir's remarriage while living in Samoa, where, on a beach, she later burned their correspondence.
3.3.2. Mead was married three times
3.3.2.1. Her first husband (1923–28) was American Luther Cressman, a theology student at the time who eventually became an anthropologist. Mead dismissively characterized their union as "my student marriage" in Blackberry Winter, a sobriquet with which Cressman took vigorous issue.
3.3.2.2. Her second husband (1928–1935) was New Zealander Reo Fortune, a Cambridge graduate and fellow anthropologist.
3.3.2.3. Mead's third and longest-lasting marriage (1936–50) was to the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson, with whom she had a daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, who would also become an anthropologist.
3.3.3. Mead also had an exceptionally close relationship with Ruth Benedict, one of her instructors. In her memoir about her parents, With a Daughter's Eye, Mary Catherine Bateson implies that the relationship between Benedict and Mead was partly sexual. Mead never openly identified herself as lesbian or bisexual. In her writings she proposed that it is to be expected that an individual's sexual orientation may evolve throughout life.
3.3.4. She spent her last years in a close personal and professional collaboration with anthropologist Rhoda Metraux, with whom she lived from 1955 until her death in 1978. Letters between the two published in 2006 with the permission of Mead's daughter clearly express a romantic relationship.
3.3.5. She spent her last years in a close personal and professional collaboration with anthropologist Rhoda Metraux, with whom she lived from 1955 until her death in 1978. Letters between the two published in 2006 with the permission of Mead's daughter clearly express a romantic relationship.