Margaret Mead (1901–78) was an American anthropologist and social psychologist. Mead established the field of culture and personality research and was a leading influence on the concept of culture into education, medicine, and public policy. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the Pacific, Indonesia, and Melanesia, she wrote numerous studies of primitive cultures.
Born in Philadelphia, Mead graduated from Barnard College and Columbia University. Mead’s wide-ranging fieldwork focused on child rearing, personality, and culture, and was principally carried out among the peoples of the Oceania. She was chiefly interested in sexuality and adolescence, and helped develop the national-character approach to anthropology.
From 1926 until her death, Mead was connected with the New York Museum of Natural History and, after 1954, was an adjunct professor of anthropology at Columbia University.
For decades, Mead was anthropology’s most eloquent public intellectual. She appeared on several mass media platforms (including a monthly column in the magazine Redbook) to offer anthropologically conversant standpoints on the pressing public affairs of her era.
Mead’s many works helped to promote anthropology’s identity in the public sphere. They include Coming of Age in Samoa (1928,) Growing Up in New Guinea (1930,) and her autobiographical Blackberry Winter (1972.)
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One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Relationships, Humanity
You just have to learn not to care about the dust-mice under the beds.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Perfection
It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Evil, Goodness
Women should be permitted to volunteer for non-combat service, they should not be accepted, voluntarily or through the draft, as combat soldiers. We know of no comparable ways of training women and girls, and we have no real way of knowing whether the kinds of training that teach men both courage and restraint would be adaptable to women or effective in a crisis. But the evidence of history and comparative studies of other species suggest that women as a fighting body might be far less amenable to the rules that prevent warfare from becoming a massacre and, with the use of modern weapons, that protect the survival of all humanity. This is what I meant by saying that women in combat might be too fierce.
—Margaret Mead
The liberals have not softened their view of actuality to make themselves live closer to the dream, but instead sharpen their perceptions and fight to make the dream actuality or give up the battle in despair.
—Margaret Mead
If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Age, Aging
Coming to terms with the rhythms of women’s lives means coming to terms with life itself, accepting the imperatives of the body rather than the imperatives of an artificial, man-made, perhaps transcendentally beautiful civilization. Emphasis on the male work-rhythm is an emphasis on infinite possibilities; emphasis on the female rhythms is an emphasis on a defined pattern, on limitation.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Men, Men & Women, Women
Everyone needs to have access both to grandparents and grandchildren in order to be a full human being.
—Margaret Mead
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: People, Kindness, Change, Courage, Growth, Action, Doubt, Zen
Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Manners, Humanity, Behavior
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