Margaret Mead (1901-1978) was born in Philadelphia and raised in Doylestown. She was a pioneer in the field of anthropology whose study of primitive cultures gave Americans an insight into their own culture. In 1925, at the age of 24, she ventured to the remote Samoan island of Tau to study adolescent girls. She found that their relatively permissive society allowed them to maneuver adolescence with ease unlike American girls of that period who were encumbered by Victorian notions of behavior.
The result was her first book, “Coming of Age in Samoa,” a classic of cultural anthropology. At the time of its publication, the work was considered scandalous; it has never gone out of print.
In an attempt to determine whether human behavior is innate or ordained by society, Mead went on to study societies as diverse as those of the Soviet Union and the American Indians. Mead was an assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History, taught at Columbia University, and wrote a monthly column in Redbook magazine.
She was considered an expert on human nature, nutrition, family life, and education, published 39 books and lectured all over the country, encouraging women to have careers as well as children. By the time she died, in 1978, she had helped to guide American women to a larger role in the world.
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