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 culturesand psychological development. Mead was also an activist for women’s rights and against nuclear proliferation.
Born in Philadelphia, Mead graduated from Barnard College and Columbia University. Her wide-ranging fieldwork focused on child-rearing, personality, and culture, and was principally carried out among the peoples of 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.
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.
Many of Mead’s anecdotal conclusions have been questioned. Yet her 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.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Margaret Mead
It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Goodness, Evil
Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Children
From a hundred cultures, [there is] one culture which does what no culture has ever done before—gives a place to every human gift.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Give
If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Purpose, Achievement
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
I’ve been married three times—and each time I married the right person.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Marriage
We won’t have a society if we destroy the environment.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Wildlife
It’s easier to change a man’s religion than to change his diet.
—Margaret Mead
I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Information, Learning
The prophet who fails to present a bearable alternative and yet preaches doom is part of the trap that he postulates. Not only does he picture us caught in a tremendous man-made or God-made trap from which there is no escape, but we must also listen to him day in, day out, describe how the trap is inexorably closing. To such prophecies the human race, as presently bred and educated and situated, is incapable of listening. So some dance and some immolate themselves as human torches; some take drugs and some artists spill their creativity in sets of randomly placed dots on a white ground.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Prophecy
Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn’t burn up any fossil fuel, doesn’t pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Prayer
The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist—this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul—a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Cities, City Life
A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Cities, City Life
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 & Women, Men, Women
Much of the ill-tempered railing against women that has characterized the popular writing of the last two years is a half-hearted attempt to find a way back to a more balanced relationship between our biological selves and the world we have built. So women are scolded both for being mothers and for not being mothers, for wanting to eat their cake and have it too, and for not wanting to eat their cake and have it too.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Sex
It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Hell
People in America, of course, live in all sorts of fashions, because they are foreigners, or unlucky, or depraved, or without ambition; people live like that, but Americans live in white detached houses with green shutters. Rigidly, blindly, the dream takes precedence.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: America
We are now at a point where we must educate our children in what no one knew yesterday, and prepare our schools for what no one knows yet.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Education
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: Humanity, Relationships, Humankind
Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump; you have to get it right the first time.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Life and Living
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
No matter how many communes anybody invents, the family always creeps back.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Family
When human beings have been fascinated by the contemplation of their own hearts, the more intricate biological pattern of the female has become a model for the artist, the mystic, and the saint. When mankind turns instead to what can be done, altered, built, invented, in the outer world, all natural properties of men, animals, or metals become handicaps to be altered rather than clues to be followed.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Man, Mankind, Body
I was wise enough to never grow up while fooling most people into believing I had.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Aging
For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Media
Each home has been reduced to the bare essentials—to barer essentials than most primitive people would consider possible. Only one woman’s hands to feed the baby, answer the telephone, turn off the gas under the pot that is boiling over, soothe the older child who has broken a toy, and open both doors at once. She is a nutritionist, a child psychologist, an engineer, a production manager, an expert buyer, all in one. Her husband sees her as free to plan her own time, and envies her; she sees him as having regular hours and envies him.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Housework
Everyone needs to have access both to grandparents and grandchildren in order to be a full human being.
—Margaret Mead
The suffering of either sex—of the male who is unable, because of the way in which he was reared, to take the strong initiating or patriarchal role that is still demanded of him, or of the female who has been given too much freedom of movement as a child to stay placidly within the house as an adult—this suffering, this discrepancy, this sense of failure in an enjoined role, is the point of leverage for social change.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Women
Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we’ve put it in an impossible situation.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Family
Sooner or later I’m going to die, but I’m not going to retire.
—Margaret Mead
Topics: Retirement
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