Margaret Mead (Women’s Issues (Ready Reference series))

Author Profile

The daughter of peripatetic social scientists, Margaret Mead chose anthropology as her discipline and came under the influence of Ruth Benedict, her teacher at Barnard College. Mead’s groundbreaking book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) concludes with a chapter comparing her field studies to the education of American girls. A prolific writer, Mead published such influential studies as Growing Up in New Guinea (1930), Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), Male and Female (1949), and People and Places (1959), anthropology for children. Her autobiography, Blackberry Winter, was published in 1972.

Bibliography

Bateson, Mary Catherine. With a Daughter’s Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. Bateson looks back on her childhood and her anthropologist parents Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. This portrait sheds light on Mead’s achievements and stands alone as an important contribution for scholars of her work.

Cassidy, Robert. Margaret Mead: A Voice of the Century. New York: Universe Books, 1992. Provides an understanding of the scope of Mead’s influence in the field of anthropology and elsewhere.

Cote, James E. Adolescent Storm and Stress: An Evaluation of the Mead-Freeman Controversy. New York: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1994. A detailed account of the Mead-Freeman controversy.

Foerstel, Lenora, and Angela Gilliam, eds. Confronting the Margaret Mead Legacy: Scholarship, Empire, and the South Pacific. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. This is a compilation of ten articles critiquing Mead’s anthropological achievements. Foerstel and Gilliam’s “Margaret Mead’s Contradictory Legacy” is particularly useful in its discussion of her entire career, including her long service in American intelligence agencies.

Freeman, Derek. Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. An interesting aspect of Mead’s life is the controversies she generated. This work was written by her harshest critic.

Holmes, Lowell Don. Quest for the Real Samoa: The Mead/Freeman Controversy and Beyond. Smith Hadley, Mass.: Bergin Garvey, 1987. A general discussion and analysis of the Mead-Freeman controversy.

Howard, Jane. Margaret Mead: A Life. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1990. A clear and comprehensive picture of Mead’s life.