Margaret Mead, a prominent anthropologist and author, helped lay the groundwork for the 1960s sexual revolution in the United States by studying indigenous peoples in Samoa and New Guinea.
Mead was an advocate for women’s rights and the environment. She was a longtime curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975.
One of her landmark works, “Coming of Age in Samoa,” produced early in her career, chronicled what she observed as the more relaxed views on sexual relations on the Pacific islands compared with American culture.
She observed on Samoa that non-monogamous and homosexual relations were more accepted than in the United States and Europe and that Samoans were less judgmental overall, observations that would be later used to argue that sexual mores in the West were overly restrictive and culturally arbitrary.
Mead argued after studying Samoan and other indigenous cultures in the Pacific that gender-associated traits were less driven by nature than by societal reinforcement, paving the way for second-wave feminists in the 1960s and ’70s.
“No skill, no special aptitude, no vividness of imagination or precision of thinking would go unrecognized because the child who possessed it was of one sex rather than the other,” she wrote in “Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies” in 1935, a study of three tribes on New Guinea.
— Alexander Bolton
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