WORLD OF SCIENCE
Psychologist and anthropologist
DR. T. V. PADMA
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Margaret Mead shared a fundamental belief in the equality of human beings.
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Margaret Mead was born in Philadelphia in 1901. Her mother was a social scientist who worked with immigrants and was a strong advocate of women's rights — an excellent role model for Margaret, who followed in her mother's footsteps.
Margaret attended Barnard College, where she worked with Frank Boas — one of the first researchers in a new field called Cultural Anthropology. Boas and Mead shared a fundamental belief in the equality of human beings: a belief that was uncommon among social scientists at the time. Many social scientists believed that the descendants of Western Europe were superior to other races, especially dark-skinned people.
New thinking
In 1927, Mead was given the post of assistant curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. One of the first major studies that Mead conducted was on American Samoa, a U.S. possession in the South Pacific. Mead observed that, in contrast to American society, adolescence was not a difficult time for Samoans. The results of her fieldwork were published in 1928, in the book Coming of Age in Samoa. In 1929, Mead obtained her Ph. D. from Columbia University.
Mead's work centred on the role of women and female behaviour. Until then, research had focused on men.
In 1928, Mead made another field trip to study the Manus people of the Admiralty Islands, with her second husband, an anthropologist called Reo Fortune.
Upon their return, they worked to publish their research separately and together. In her book, Sex and Temperament, Mead argued (based on her research) that traits linked to gender are based on nurture (cultural influences) not nature (biological differences).
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