Margaret Mead: a life

Margaret Mead was one of the twentieth century's great adventurers, one of its most accomplished women, certainly its most renowned anthropologist. Born in 1901, Mead went to the South Seas as a 23-year-old, part of a "giant rescue operation." as she termed it, to study primitive cultures before they perished. Just out of Barnard College and Columbia University, she was eager to find a "people" of her own. Her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, described adolescent sexuality and guilt-free love. It shocked her readers and made her famous, associating her name forever with sex and free dom. With her daring journeys, provocative ideas and unbounded energy, she built on that celebrity until she achieved the status of myth throughout the English-speaking world.
Outrageous and extravagant, Mead in every sense of the word was big. Problems were there to be solved; guilt was a waste of time. She spoke of prehistory as if it had taken place the day before yesterday, and of Doomsday as if it might arrive tomorrow. She was a woman of many contradictions who could be brilliant or naive, enchanting or obstreperous, demanding or for giving. At times she was in too much of a hurry. and some of the ideas she embraced were silly or unfinished, but she could be remarkably in sightful and was far ahead of her time in the connections she drew. All her life she clung to the humane views she had learned from her family and from her loved teachers Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict.