Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead was raised near Doylestown, Pennsylvania by her university professor father and social-activist mother. She studied at DePauw University and graduated from Barnard College in 1923. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1929. 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, eventually serving as curator of ethnology from 1946 to 1969. During World War II Mead served as executive secretary of the National Research Council's Committee on Food Habits. In addition, she taught at Columbia University as adjunct professor starting in 1954. Following the example of her instructor Ruth Benedict, Mead concentrated her studies on problems of child rearing, personality, and culture. (Source: The Columbia Encyclopedia, Fifth Edition, 1993.) She 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.
Although considered a pioneering anthropologist by some, there has been academic disagreement with certain findings in her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), based on research she conducted as a graduate student, and with her published works based on time with the Sepik and on Manus Island. In some instances, literate people from the cultures she described have challenged certain of her observations.
Margaret Mead was married three times; first to Luther Cressman (a theological student during his marriage to Mead; later an anthropologist himself), and then to two fellow anthropologists, Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson, with whom she had a daughter, also an anthropologist, Mary Catherine Bateson. Her granddaughter, Sevanne Margaret Kassarjian, is a stage and television actress who works professionally under the name Sevanne Martin. Mead readily acknowledged that she had been devastated when Bateson left her and that she remained in love with him to her life's end, keeping his photograph by her bedside wherever she traveled.
Mead also had an exceptionally close relationship with Ruth Benedict. Mead's daughter Catherine, in her memoir of her parents With a Daughter's Eye, implies that the relationship between Benedict and Mead may have contained an erotic element (see also Lapsley 1999). While Margaret Mead never identified herself as lesbian, the details of her relationship with Benedict have led others to identify her thus; in her writings she proposed that it is to be expected that individuals' sexual orientation may change throughout their lives