Margaret Mead

(1901 - 1978)

Margaret Mead was born into a family of social scientists in Philadelphia and studied at Columbia University. When she was twenty-four, she went to American Samoa to conduct fieldwork; the next year she got a job at the American Museum of Natural History, studying child-rearing practices and gender roles in the South Pacific. Her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, appeared in 1928. She went on to publish twenty-two books of cultural anthropology and cultural criticism, including Male and Female (1949) and A Rap on Race (1971), which she cowrote with James Baldwin.