San Antonio College Library

A biography of Margaret Mead as seen through her work.

A memoir by their daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson recounting their separate paths.

The autobiography of a pioneer, this is Margaret Mead's story of her life as a woman and as an anthropologist. An enduring cultural icon, she came to represent the new woman, successfully combining motherhood with career, and scholarship with concern for its role in the lives of ordinary people.

This book is a revealing biography of two eminent twentieth century American women. Close friends for much of their lives, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead met at Barnard College in 1922, when Mead was a student, Benedict a teacher. They became sexual partners (though both married), and pioneered in the then male-dominated discipline of anthropology. They championed racial and sexual equality and cultural relativity despite the generally racist, xenophobic,...

Although her fieldwork has been criticized, Margaret Mead was one of the foremost fieldworkers of her day. In the United States, Bali, and New Guinea, she examined child development, sex, and temperament to see what role society plays in making people what they are. She emphasized that humans arrange their social worlds in many different ways, and that qualitative judgments cannot be made between them.

As anthropologists, public intellectuals, and feminists, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead played remarkable roles in twentieth-century life and thought--and far beyond the academy. Their work helped to popularize anthropology while introducing such terms as culture and racism into common parlance. At the same time, they contributed to wider debates about environmentalism, sexuality, the women's movement, and American foreign policy. In this collection,...

"At the end of the 19th century, everyone knew that people were defined by their race and sex and were fated by birth and biology to be more or less intelligent, able, nurturing, or warlike. But one rogue researcher looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Franz Boas was the very image of a mad scientist: a wild-haired immigrant with a thick German accent. By the 1920s he was also the foundational thinker and public face of a new school...