Margaret Mead is an international icon, although after her death she was severely challenged by other anthropologists, notably the New Zealander Derek Freeman. This little essay is only about her earlier life.
Her father, an alumnus of Indiana's DePauw University, had insisted his daughter go there also, but after two years she transferred to Columbia's Barnard College in Manhattan.
Barnard in the 1920s was the setting for the most important part of Margaret Mead's undergraduate life. It was the time of the flapper (so-called because of unbuckled galoshes, and/or flapping ponytails—high-spirited young women, flirtatious, reckless for fun and thrills (ref.1, p.40).
Margaret Mead had grown up ambitious and was a self-appointed leader. "You work so hard!" a classmate once said to her, and she had replied "If you'd been brought up in my family you would too." She and four or five Barnard girls shared an apartment on W.116th St, and she could thus walk to and from college -- but always went to bed at 10 pm. According to her biographer, the late Jane Howard, most Barnard students (ref.1, p.48) of this era were pre-occupied with sex. Her friends at W.116th St were all high achievers, and they especially loved debating—was Copland greater than Beethoven, was Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet an effort to prove that all love dies? They were also caught up in the poetry of Edna St.Vincent Millay, who lived in Greenwich Village, and with Dorothy Parker, and the relatively new science of psychoanalysis.
At about 19 Margaret Mead became engaged to a divinity student, Luther Cressman—known to her parents, and by all accounts a thoroughly decent and sensitive young man, 4 years older than she and studying for the ministry. Both virgins, they married just before her graduation at the age of 22, despite her father offering her a large amount of money if she would not marry Cressman—but she wanted to marry, possibly to declare to the world, as well as to herself, that she was desirable. She also told her father that she intended to keep her own name.
She had majored in psychology, but in her senior year had been completely taken by a poet and anthropology instructor 17 years her senior, Ruth Benedict. They became lovers, which lasted for most of her life. She admitted to Ruth that she was not deeply attracted to Cressman, who, for his part developed second thoughts about his faith, and enrolled in a Master's degree at Columbia in sociology. Mead continued in graduate work at Columbia, now in anthropology, and both she and Ruth Benedict came under the spell of Franz Boas, the German-born anthropology professor at Columbia. Amongst Professor Boas' beliefs was that race, language and culture were all independent, and Mead and Benedict were attracted to many of his ideas. While taking courses with Boas she discussed a possible Ph.D. thesis, investigating ethnology -- possibly to be in Hawaii, or Polynesia in general.
(During her graduate work she had also met the like-minded anthropologist Edward Sapir, an older man whose wife had died leaving him with 3 small children, and he begged Mead to leave Cressman. The summer that she and Cressman were at her parents' home in Pennsylvania, working on their respective thesis plans, she went to New York, to discuss a possible opening at the Museum of Natural History, and enjoyed a brief affair with Sapir.)
It was finally decided that her thesis work under Boas would be in Samoa, and it would address whether the stresses and turmoil of American adolescence were inherent, or due to civilization. She was offered a fellowship of $150 /month from the National Research Council, and her father paid her fares. Cressman was not her idea of a companion for Samoa and so she traveled alone.
Her first book "Coming of Age in Samoa" was the result of her 8 months research there. She returned via the Indian Ocean, meeting and falling in love with the tall young New Zealand anthropologist, Reo Fortune. Her Samoa book was published when she was 27, to great acclaim.
After divorce from Cressman she and Reo married, and they each obtained grants to study further South Pacific societies, which would lead to her book, Growing up in New Guinea.
Finally, her 3rd marriage, to the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, produced their only child, Cathy, herself now a retired anthropologist, and Cathy published (amongst many other works) the memoir "With a Daughter's Eye" in 1984.
References:
1. "Margaret Mead: A Life" by Jane Howard; Simon and Schuster, NY, 10020, 1984.
2. "Margaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon", by Nancy C Lutkehaus; Princeton University Press, 2008.
3. "With a Daughter's Eye; a Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson", by Mary Catherine Bateson; Harper Perennial, 1994. (First published in 1984.)