Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently a featured author and speaker in the mass media throughout the 1960s and 1970s. She earned her bachelor degree at Barnard College in New York City, and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University.She was both a popularizer of the insights of anthropology into modern American and Western culture and a respected, often controversial, academic anthropologist. Her reports about the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures shaped the 1960s sexual revolution. Mead was a proponent of broadening sexual mores within a context of traditional western religious life.An Anglican Christian, she played a considerable part in the drafting of the 1979 American Episcopal Book of Common Prayer.
Columbia University, DePauw University, Barnard College
Nationality
American
Spouse
Gregory Bateson
Children
Mary C. Bateson
Parents
Emily Fogg Mead, Edward Sherwood Mead
Siblings
Elizabeth Mead, Priscilla Mead, Katharine Mead, Richard Mead
Awards
Kalinga Prize
Nominations
National Book Award for Biography
Movies
Trance and Dance in Bali
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Quote
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The Samoans laugh at stories of romantic love, scoff at fidelity to a long-absent wife or mistress, believe explicitly that one love will quickly cure another.
2
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it's the only thing that ever has.
3
My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school.
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Fact
1
Inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1976.
2
Mead was the first ever elected president by membership in 1974 for the American Association for Advancement of Science.
3
Famous for her work "Coming of Age in Samoa" in 1928.
4
Mead served as president of the Society for Applied Anthropology, the World Federation of Mental Health, and the American Anthropological Association.
5
She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1979.
6
Pictured on one of fifteen 32¢ US commemorative postage stamps in the "Celebrate the Century" series, issued 28 May 1998, celebrating the 1920s.
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Anthropologist whose research focused on inhabitants of islands in the South Pacific Ocean.
$700,000