Margaret Mead: Sex And Temperament In Three Primitive Society

Born in Philadelphia, Margaret Mead is a popular writer, cultural, and visual anthropologist. Mead was the first of “five children born to Edward Sherwood Mead and Emily Fogg Mead, social scientists who had met while attending the University of Chicago” (Mead and Bateson 2009). Indeed, Mead was determined to strive for excellence and make a change in the world opinion, “by encouraging traditional cultures to adopt Western ways in the name of progress” (Library of Congress 1800). In addition, Mead was married three times; her first husband was American, her second husband was from New Zealand and her third and longest-lasting marriage (1936-1950) was to British anthropologist Gregory Bateson, with whom she had a daughter. In her memoir, Margaret

also alludes to having an intimate relationship with her teacher and friend, Ruth Benedict” (Mead and Bateson 2009). Mead finished her undergraduate at “Barnard [in] psychology [and then, went unto earn a doctorate at Columbia [University], studying with Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict” (Mead and Bateson 2009). Upon graduating from Columbia University, Mead decided to do her fieldwork in American Samoa.
Furthermore, Mead’s fieldwork focused on the development of adolescents.

Mead’s first major work was “‘Coming of Age in Samoa.’ This became a best seller and brought Mead prominence for the first time. Following her first work was the second from her South Seas voyage. This was titled ‘Growing Up in New Guinea.’ ‘Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies’ completed the trilogy on these native cultures” (Flaherty 2002, 1). Not only do these work play a significant role in Mead’s life, but they hardly represent all of what she has done. Franz Boas was a role model and the supervisor of Margaret Mead. Mead had hoped to find a “society […] to support the ideology of Franz Boas, her supervisor. Together they declared that her evidence established that human nature starts as a tabula rasa – a clean slate which is shaped entirely by culture, not biological inheritance” (Mead and Bateson 2009, 2). Therefore, Margaret Mead played a crucial role “in making this cultural determinism the prevailing ideology in American anthropology and social sciences” (Library of Congress

1800).
Indeed, throughout her career as an anthropology, Mead has earned many honorary awards including, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Mead was also a professor at Columbia University, New York University, Emory University, Yale University, The New School for Social Research, University of Cincinnati, and The Menninger Clinic. In 1965, she founded the urban anthropology department at New York University. In addition, Mead founded the anthropology department at Fordham University in 1968. Mead was also the President of the American Anthropological Association, Anthropological Film Institute, Scientists Institute for Public Information, Society for Applied Anthropology. Mead was the first person to be elected president by membership in 1974, for the American Association for Advancement of Science.
In the end, Mead was a successful anthropologist, who’s studies took her far.

In 1926, Mead began a career at the American Museum of natural History in New York, as an assistant curator. In 1942, she was advanced to associate curator and a full fledge curator in 1961. In 1969, “she was awarded curator emeritus. Her time at the museum culminated with a display of her own work in 1971” (Flaherty 2002, 3). The fact remains that Mead will not be forgotten and she has continued to be a role-model to many prospective and current anthropologist and scholars in the social science field. One od Mead’s most popular research includes a “propose that masculine and feminine characteristics reflected cultural conditioning (or socialization) not fundamental biological differences” (Flaherty 2002, 3). Hence, in the year 1933, Mead discovered that “human nature is malleable” at a camp in Kenakatem (Flaherty 2002). This thought occurred due to Mead witnessing three cultures, the Arapesh, Mundugumor and the Tchambuli. Mead realized that “each culture displayed different gender role qualities. In one culture both the women and men were cooperative, in the second they were both ruthless and aggressive, and in the Thambuli culture the women were dominant and the men more submissive” (Flaherty 2002, 4). As a result, Mead decided to publish an article entitle, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, in 1935 and explored the “subject more deeply in the next decade with Male and Female

(1949)” (Library of Congress 1800).