Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist, author and speaker, who appeared frequently in the mass media during the 1960s and the 1970s.

Mead's first ethnographic work, ''Coming of Age in Samoa'' (1928), addressed adolescence and sexuality and catapulted her to national visibility. Her book ''Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies'' (1935), explored gender roles and personality based on fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. Mead conducted fieldwork with the Omaha people; in Manus, Papua New Guinea; and in Bali. She wrote ''Keep Your Powder Dry'', an ethnographic examination of American life, in the hopes of supporting mobilization for World War II. She coordinated two comparative studies on modern cultures in the 1950s, while focusing her own work on Russia. Her later work included returns to Papua New Guinea, Bali, and Samoa for longitudinal studies. She was curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History from 1946 to 1969. Mead served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975.

Mead was a communicator of anthropology in modern American and Western culture and was often controversial as an academic. Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution. She was a proponent of broadening sexual conventions within the context of Western cultural traditions. Provided by Wikipedia