47 Facts About Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and the 1970s.

Margaret Mead was a communicator of anthropology in modern American and Western culture and was often controversial as an academic.

Margaret Mead, the first of five children, was born in Philadelphia but raised in nearby Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

Margaret Mead's father, Edward Sherwood 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.

That was a traumatic event for Margaret Mead, who had named the girl, and thoughts of her lost sister permeated her daydreams for many years.

Margaret Mead's family moved frequently and so her early education was directed by her grandmother until, at age 11, she was enrolled by her family at Buckingham Friends School in Lahaska, Pennsylvania.

Margaret Mead's family owned the Longland farm from 1912 to 1926.

Margaret Mead studied one year, 1919, at DePauw University, then transferred to Barnard College.

Margaret Mead earned her bachelor's degree from Barnard in 1923, began studying with professors Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict at Columbia University, and earned her master's degree in 1924.

Margaret Mead received news of Sapir's remarriage while she was living in Samoa.

Margaret Mead dismissively characterized her union with her first husband as "my student marriage" in her 1972 autobiography Blackberry Winter, a sobriquet with which Cressman took vigorous issue.

Margaret Mead's pediatrician was Benjamin Spock, whose subsequent writings on child rearing incorporated some of Margaret Mead's own practices and beliefs acquired from her ethnological field observations which she shared with him; in particular, breastfeeding on the baby's demand, rather than by a schedule.

Margaret Mead readily acknowledged that Gregory Bateson was the husband she loved the most.

Margaret Mead was devastated when he left her and remained his loving friend ever afterward.

Margaret Mead kept his photograph by her bedside wherever she traveled, including beside her hospital deathbed.

Margaret Mead had an exceptionally-close relationship with Ruth Benedict, one of her instructors.

Margaret Mead spent her last years in a close personal and professional collaboration with the anthropologist Rhoda Metraux with whom she lived from 1955 until her death in 1978.

Margaret Mead had two sisters and a brother, Elizabeth, Priscilla, and Richard.

Margaret Mead was curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History from 1946 to 1969.

Margaret Mead was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1948, the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1975, and the American Philosophical Society in 1977.

Margaret Mead taught at The New School and Columbia University, where she was an adjunct professor from 1954 to 1978 and 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.

Margaret Mead served as president of the Society for Applied Anthropology in 1950 and of the American Anthropological Association in 1960.

Margaret Mead held various positions in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, notably president in 1975 and chair of the executive committee of the board of directors in 1976.

Margaret Mead was a recognizable figure in academia and usually wore a distinctive cape and carried a walking stick.

Margaret Mead was a key participant in the Macy conferences on cybernetics and an editor of their proceedings.

Margaret 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.

Margaret Mead is credited with the pluralization of the term "semiotics".

In 1976, Margaret Mead was a key participant at UN Habitat I, the first UN forum on human settlements.

Margaret Mead died of pancreatic cancer on November 15,1978, and is buried at Trinity Episcopal Church Cemetery, Buckingham, Pennsylvania.

Margaret Mead explicitly sought to contrast adolescence in Samoa with that in America, which she characterized as difficult, constrained, and awkward.

Margaret Mead's findings suggested that the community ignores both boys and girls until they are about 15 or 16.

Margaret Mead found that marriage is regarded as a social and economic arrangement in which wealth, rank, and job skills of the husband and wife are taken into consideration.

Freeman argued instead that Samoan culture prized female chastity and virginity and that Margaret Mead had been misled by her female Samoan informants.

Margaret Mead was careful to shield the identity of all her subjects for confidentiality, but Freeman found and interviewed one of her original participants, and Freeman reported that she admitted to having willfully misled Margaret Mead.

Margaret Mead said that she and her friends were having fun with Mead and telling her stories.

In 1996, the author Martin Orans examined Margaret Mead's notes preserved at the Library of Congress and credits her for leaving all of her recorded data available to the general public.

Orans points out that Freeman's basic criticisms, that Margaret Mead was duped by ceremonial virgin Fa'apua'a Fa'amu, who later swore to Freeman that she had played a joke on Margaret Mead, were equivocal for several reasons.

Margaret Mead felt the methodologies involved in the experimental psychology research supporting arguments of racial superiority in intelligence were substantially flawed.

In "The Methodology of Racial Testing: Its Significance for Sociology," Margaret Mead proposes that there are three problems with testing for racial differences in intelligence.

Margaret Mead considers whether that information is relevant when interpreting IQ scores.

Margaret Mead amply describes her stay there in her autobiography, and it is mentioned in her 1984 biography by Jane Howard.

Margaret Mead has been credited with persuading the American Jewish Committee to sponsor a project to study European Jewish villages, shtetls, in which a team of researchers would conduct mass interviews with Jewish immigrants living in New York City.

Margaret Mead worked for the RAND Corporation, a US Air Force military-funded private research organization, from 1948 to 1950 to study Russian culture and attitudes toward authority.

In 1976, Margaret Mead was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Margaret Mead was both a student of civilization and an exemplar of it.

The Margaret Mead Award is awarded in her honor jointly by the Society for Applied Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association, for significant works in communicating anthropology to the general public.