Margaret Mead is remembered as one of the most important, though controversial, anthropologists of the twentieth century. She became famous through her classic work Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), in which she described the life and sexual practices of teenagers on two Samoan islands in the South Pacific. Her books were widely read and helped promote the sexual revolution that shook the Western world in the 1960s.

Born and raised in Pennsylvania, Mead went to college at DePauw University in Indiana and Barnard College of Columbia University in New York. In 1923, she took courses with Professor Franz Boas at Columbia, and in 1925 conducted fieldwork in Samoa. When she returned, she joined the American Museum of Natural History in New York as assistant curator and received her PhD in 1929. She later taught at Fordham University and at the University of Rhode Island and became known for advocating increased sexual freedom for adolescents.

From her pediatrician, Benjamin Spock, Mead adopted many ideas on child rearing such as breast feeding by demand rather than by schedule. She made pronouncements on homemaking, feminism, civil rights, and race relations, was elected to many prestigious learned societies, had many executive and honorary positions, and served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975. A popular public speaker, she became a mentor to many young anthropologists and sociologists. She died of pancreatic cancer at age seventy-seven in 1978.

Margaret Mead had a tempestuous personal life. After what she called a “student marriage” with a linguist, she married a New Zealand scholar, then finally a British anthropologist, all ending in divorce. She was twenty-three years old when she started her fellowship with Professor Franz Boas, originally an immigrant from Germany and regarded as the “father of American anthropology.” He was famous for his views on “cultural relativism,” which stated that cultures develop on their own terms and cannot be classified as being superior or inferior to one another.

Young and inexperienced, Mead may have been overeager to impress her mentor by supporting his views. When she returned from Samoa, she wrote Coming of Age in Samoa, which became a best seller and eventually a classic. Her information was based on interviews with several young Samoan women who led her to conclude that on their two islands adolescents led a pleasant life of free lovemaking, easy and casual, unencumbered by emotional conflict and turmoil. Love affairs she described as usually being of short duration, with both boy and girl often carrying several affairs at the same time. Mead attributed their overall idyllic life to this liberal sexual upbringing, so unlike that of their supposedly unhappy counterparts in America and the Western world.

Mead described in her book other aspects of the life of Samoan adolescence as being equally free of stress. For a boy, “no other sharp trials confront the youth. He is left to work out his own salvation slowly, without undue pressure. His choice of a profession is in his own hands, and professionally he is subjected to no atmosphere of harsh and unfriendly criticism. When he has studied carpentry long enough so that he feels capable of building a house himself, some relative will give him his first commission. If he completes the house satisfactorily, he receives the final payments in a stately ceremony”—but if he has bungled his job, his defeat will be glossed over, and the others will go to his assistance. Wars were uncommon and of little consequence; no religious adherence was demanded; education and the selection of tutors was left to the young people themselves; other freedoms were left in the young people’s hands; and many other aspects of their life are described in detail in her book.  

Five years after her death, Mead’s conclusions were challenged by Derek Freeman, a New Zealand anthropologist who claimed that Mead’s conclusions were fundamentally flawed, arguing that Samoan society was far more complex, hierarchical, and conservative than she had portrayed. He thought that she had been misled by her informants, who told her what she wanted to hear, and maintained that had overly relied on a small sample of young Samoan women who provided her with exaggerated or misleading information about their sexual freedom. He argued that Mead’s nine months of fieldwork were not long enough for her to fully understand Samoan culture, especially given the language barrier and cultural complexities. He also suggested that her young Samoan guides may have regarded the interviews as a joke, leading her to believe that Samoan adolescents had more relaxed sexual norms than their Western counterparts. Freeman also claimed that Samoan culture did emphasize female virginity and that it had higher rates of juvenile delinquency and sexual violence than she had suggested.

The Mead/Freeman controversy, a long-standing debate in the field of anthropology, underscores the complexity of cultural research. Both scholars were influenced by the setting of their investigations, leading to their respective findings and biases. Mead described life on a peripheral island that had not yet been colonialized, whereas Freeman worked in an urban slum where drug abuse, unemployment, and violence were common. Writing in 1973, Mead emphasized that what she had written initially applied to their readers’ grandparents and great-grandparents when they were young. She also emphasized that scientific anthropology differs from experimental sciences in that conditions change continuously, and it is impossible to set up definitive experiments. As the passage of time has erased many of the differences in their areas of study, both Mead and Freeman may have been correct in their findings and interpretations. Their work opened many new avenues of inquiry in anthropology and sociology that new generations of investigators will have the opportunity to explore.

Further reading

1. William Carey. “Margaret Mead.” Science 202, no. 4372 (December 8, 1978).
2. Richard Feinberg. “Margaret Mead and Samoa: Coming of Age in Fact and Fiction.” American Anthropologist. New Series, 90, no. 3 (Sep. 1988): 656-63.
3. Louise M. Newman. “Coming of Age, but Not in Samoa: Reflections on Margaret Mead’s Legacy for Western Feminism.” American Quarterly 48, no. 2 (June 1996): 233-72.
4. Margaret Mead. “The Role of the Individual in Samoan Culture.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 58 (Jul. – Dec. 1928): 481-95.
5. Nancy Scheper-Hughes. “The Margaret Mead Controversy: Culture, Biology and Anthropological Inquiry.” Human Organization 43, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 85-93.
6. Paul Shankman. “The ‘Fateful Hoaxing’ of Margaret Mead: A Cautionary Tale.” Current Anthropology 54, no. 1 (February 2013): 51-70.
7. Anthony Hazard. “Artime anthropology, nationalism, and ‘race’ in Margaret Mead’s And Keep Your Powder Dry.” Journal of Anthropological Research 70, no. 3, (Fall 2014): 365-83.