S&F Online - Margaret Mead

Mead as Public Intellectual
by Nancy Lutkehaus

I'm going to take us back in time and look at beginnings. What made Margaret Mead become, or establish herself, as the public intellectual we've been talking about today? I've been interested, as part of the book, Looking at Margaret Mead & the Media, in looking at four recurring media representations of Mead. First, Mead as a new woman - an idea popular at the turn of the century and into the 1920s, with its more contemporary variation of Mead as a feminist - a representation both disputed among feminists and also promoted. Second, Mead as an anthropologist, which, though it seems an obvious one, is actually multi-faceted and problematic, as Micaela di Leonardo has shown us. Third, Mead as a scientist. At the Epcott Center in Orlando, Florida, for a while at least, there were five images of scientists up on the walls, and Margaret Mead was one of the five. She was the only woman. Fourth, the representation I'll talk about today - Mead as a public intellectual.

I've been looking at the particular historical, political and economic circumstances in the United States that gave rise to these different images of Mead in the popular imagination, and the different meanings that have been associated with them at different times. Far from being passive in the creation of these images, Mead herself helped to shape them. An investigation of these images, I think, helps us understand why there is no single anthropologist who is the Margaret Mead of today, as well as understand the spirit or legacy that Mead has bequeathed anthropology. So the points I'm going to be making - some in more detail than others - are that Mead's fame began at a very early age, and that her fame allowed her to gradually establish herself as a public voice, a commentator on American society and a translator of trends and events in other parts of the world to America. Her rise as a public figure had as much to do with being in the right place at the right time as it did with her particular skills and insights. It's these two aspects that I'll be talking about. Mead, as we've heard, was a mediator between the world of academia and the public, and, again, it has been commented on that this role often earned her ostracism within her profession while it garnered renown and respect among a larger portion of the American public. It was that contradiction that I experienced as I was working for her, after I had been an undergraduate at Barnard and before I started graduate school at Columbia and as I started graduate school. I held this contradiction in the back of my mind as something that revealed something about the culture of academia and the culture of public intellectuals, or media celebrities in our society.

Mead was most effective, I think, as a public intellectual through such social forums as we've seen some examples of today - her monthly articles in Redbook that have been referred to, and her numerous public lectures and speaking engagements, including the television talk shows that we saw the clips from, and radio interviews. I'd like us to think about those forums as a kind of social dialogue that Mead was carrying on with the public, that allowed her to both be teaching and disseminating her ideas, but also gathering data herself.

Mead's public role was enabled by the intellectual, emotional and practical support of various networks of people, both personal and professional. The Mead standing up there on television had lots of other people behind her who were allowing her to perform the public role that she did. Since her death, Mead has become a cultural icon. I think this is best illustrated today by the popularization of Mead's image on the internet , and her association with the quote, "never doubt that a small group of concerned citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." This has become an icon of an icon; of Mead.

So let me talk some about the origins of Mead and the historical context of the 1920s and '30s. In his book, Margaret Mead: A Voice for the Century, Robert Cassidy states that Mead "attained the status of a public intellectual in 1939." I presume he chose this date because, in part, it marks the outbreak of World War II, and, at that time, anthropologists began to suspend their field work expeditions and turn their attention toward the war effort. Mead, under the auspices of the National Research Council's Committee on Food Habits, went to Washington and collected data that resulted in the first book she wrote about American culture, And Keep Your Powder Dry.

That said, I think it's important to recognize that the groundwork for Mead's role as a public figure had been laid at least 14 years earlier, with her first trip to Samoa in 1925. For, unlike most anthropologists, at least in my experience, Margaret Mead was a media figure from the very beginning of her career, at the ripe young age of 23, as a result of this first field work. To a great degree, Mead's ascendancy as a public figure, as I mentioned before, was a result of timing, some good luck and self-promotion. I'm going to talk about some of these structural factors, as opposed to the personal factors that poised Mead for the particular role she assumed.

The most important factor, I think, was that she came of age in the era of the 1920s. Some of you may have been collecting or seen the series of stamps that the U.S. Post Office has been putting out, of each decade in the twentieth century. Margaret Mead is significantly included in the series on the 1920s. So here she is, a very young Margaret Mead, in front of some Samoan [ ? ] - next to an Emily Post etiquette. We've got a flapper for the Jazz Era - jazz club, Babe Ruth and, importantly, the Nineteenth Amendment (women getting the vote). The back of the stamp for Margaret Mead reads: "Anthropologist Margaret Mead explored the effect of culture on the behavior and personalities of children and adults, as well as the differences between men and women." Again, what I think is significant is that they have identified her with this era, the 1920s - often referred to as The Roaring Twenties, as you're probably aware. The period witnessed an extraordinary economic boom, following the conclusion of the World War I and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. It was a period of rapid social change, especially among adolescents and women. These social changes engendered much anxiety among parents about their children's behavior, especially that of young women known as flappers, who bobbed their hair, shortened their skirts, smoked cigarettes, drank and ignored many of the mores for women valued by their elders. Among intellectuals, Freud's work on the unconscious and sexuality had just recently been translated from the German into English and was being avidly read and discussed. The period also marked New York City's ascendancy to a position as the nation's center of finance, culture and mass media, including the quickly developing industries of advertising and magazine publishing. In the 1920s, new mass circulation publications such as Time, The New Yorker and The New Republic all began being published in New York City. It was also an era when the gossip column was developed, by Walter Winchell. Tabloid papers were coming into more and more currency, rife with photographs, and Hollywood developed the idea of the star system and press agents, whose purpose it was to publicize movie stars. The media also publicized the exploits of all kinds of female heroines - young women who excelled at unusual occupations. For example, this was the period of Amelia Earhart and Babe Didrikson in sports.

All these factors in different ways helped set the stage and contributed to Mead's early fame. If Margaret Mead had not come to New York City, had she not left Depew University to come to Barnard, I don't think she would have become the public figure that she did. At Barnard she met classmates such as the poet, Leoni Adams, whose brilliance as a writer convinced her that she was not cut out to be a major poet/writer herself. Luckily, she met her mentors in anthropology, Ruth Benedict and Franz Boaz. She also knew Elsie Cruz Parsons, another Barnard graduate who played an important role in New York as an intellectual during the first two decades of the twentieth century. All three of these individuals were convinced of the importance of speaking out as anthropologists on issues of social importance, dealing with race, gender (which they didn't call it at that time) and cultural difference. Had Mead not known them, had she not been in New York City, she probably would not have become an anthropologist and, hence, would not have taken a position as curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History . The reputation of the Museum also added to her public visibility and stature, as the media often turned to scientists at the Museum as a source of expertise as well as interesting stories.

Added to the historical context of Mead's location in New York City was the fortuitous choice of American Samoa for her field work. Samoa was auspicious for several reasons. First, as a relatively new American possession, there was much interest among the public to know more about the island territory. So, for example, upon her return from Samoa, Mead wrote for The Nation about civil government for Samoa, and the Americanization of Samoa. Second, Samoa and the South Seas in general loomed in the American imagination as a place of exotic and erotic allure. On the heels of the success of his first film in 1922, Nanook of the North, Robert Flaherty had gone off to Samoa and, in 1926, released a second documentary called Mowana, which had been set in Samoa. It was a romantic story about two young lovers. The American public's image of the South Seas had already been shaped, earlier, not only by this film but by popular novels. There was a whole list of writers who had been writing about the South Seas, and Mead's publisher, William Morrow, took advantage of this and the association of the South Seas with the
cover of Coming of Age in Samoa.

Let me say a couple more things about the fact that Mead was actually in the news before she published Coming of Age in Samoa. She spent some time in Hawaii on her way to Samoa, and there, for example, it had been mentioned in the news that she was visiting the former governor of Hawaii, whose wife happened to have been a colleague of her mother's at Wellesley. A few days after she had been there this ad ran in the Honolulu newspaper. It's an advertisement for a shirtmaker, but it refers to Margaret Mead and the research she was going to be doing in Samoa on "flappers." There was then a hurricane in Samoa that occurred in January (Mead arrived there in August), and for a period of time there wasn't any communication between her and her parents. So in the newspapers there were headlines: "Fear Felt for Philadelphia Girl Cut Off in Samoa by the Hurricane." Here again it talked about her field work and "flappers." My understanding is that it was the press who first described this idea of Mead doing research on flappers. "No Word from Mead, Her Mother Says: 'I presume Margaret is all right, only we should like to know. There is much more threat that her scientific materials, so necessary, have been destroyed.'" (Ever the researcher herself, Mead's mother was more concerned about her materials.) And finally the headline: "Margaret Mead Unhurt." She had cabled, "Well," to her parents.

Upon her return and the publication of Coming of Age in Samoa, there was a photograph of her looking like a flapper herself, and an article talking about the ways in which her research will answer questions that parents might have about adolescents of the time. Then, finally, in an article titled "Youth Takes the Lead," she's being profiled as a young woman with an exciting profession. At the time, both Mead and her publisher, William Morrow - who made the suggestion that she write the chapters she did to the beginning and end of Coming of Age in Samoa that dealt directly with these questions about American youth - realized that this was a very winning and successful formula that Mead continued, then, with the rest of her life.

To wrap things up, I'll say that the precursor to Redbook Magazine were articles that she wrote for magazines like
Parents. These articles included one called "South Sea Hints for Bringing Up Children." I was going to go on to talk about some of the increasing forms of publicity and types of public engagement Mead was involved with, but I won't. Instead I'll leave you with just this little bit of background history about Mead.

home

about

contact