Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the '60s and '70s as a popularizer of the insights of anthropology into modern American and western life but also a respected, if controversial, academic anthropologist.Her reports as to the purportedly healthy attitude towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures amply informed the '60s "sexual revolution" and it was only at the end of her life and career that her propositions were – albeit controversially – challenged by a maverick fellow anthropologist and literate members of societies she had long before studied and reported on. Mead was a champion of broadened sexual mores within a context of traditional western religious life.Excerpted from Wikipedia.
Anthropologist whose research focused on inhabitants of islands in the South Pacific Ocean.
Pictured on one of fifteen 32 US commemorative postage stamps in the "Celebrate the Century" series, issued 28 May 1998, celebrating the 1920s.
She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1979.
Mead served as president of the Society for Applied Anthropology, the World Federation of Mental Health, and the American Anthropological Association.
Famous for her work "Coming of Age in Samoa" in 1928.
Mead was the first ever elected president by membership in 1974 for the American Association for Advancement of Science.
Inducted into the National Womens Hall of Fame in 1976.
My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of,school.
The Samoans laugh at stories of romantic love, scoff at fidelity to a,long-absent wife or mistress, believe explicitly that one love will,quickly cure another.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.
Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful.
I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce.
Young people are moving away from feeling guilty about sleeping with somebody to feeling guilty if they are *not* sleeping with someone.
One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal an get away with it.
It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.
The young, free to act on their initiative, can lead their elders in the direction of the unknown. . . The children, the young, must ask the questions that we would never think to ask, but enough trust must be re-established so that the elders will be permitted to work with them on the answers.
I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.
I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to his or her fellow human beings.
You just have to learn not to care about the dust mites under the beds.
We make our own criminals and their crimes are congruent with the national culture we all share. It has been said that a people get the kind of political leadership they deserve. I think they also get the kinds of crime and criminals they themselves bring into being.
Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.
In almost any society I think the quality of the non-conformists is like to be just as good as and no better than that of the conformists.
There is no hierarchy of values by which one culture has the right to insist on all its own values and deny those of another.
Each suburban housewife spends her time presiding over a power plant sufficient to have staffed the palace of a Roman emperor with a hundred slaves.
I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.
I learned the value of hard work by working hard.
Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.
Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.
As long as any adult thinks that he, like the parents and teachers of old, can become introspective, invoking his own youth to understand the youth before him, he is lost.
Sister is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.
It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.
Many societies have educated their male children on the simple device of teaching them not to be women.
Women want mediocre men, and men are working to be as mediocre as possible.
Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders.
For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.
I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her or his fellow human beings.
Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents. .
