Margaret Mead: An American Oracle

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Most scientists may seem to the general public to be a rather colorless lot. Scientific breakthroughs revolutionize our lives, but the scientists themselves rarely become figures who are easily recognized by the public. Few scientists have the flare of a Richard Feynman who captured national attention during the Challenger investigations or the audacity of a Carl Sagan to hold forth on his own television series. Fewer still, of these "public" scientists are women. Yet one woman stands out as a quintessential scientist in the public eye: Margaret Mead. From her publication of Coming of Age in Samoa when she was 27 years old, Margaret Mead oriented her career in anthropology not only to advance her position in that field but to become what Dr. Yans-McLaughlin has called a "public oracle" for science. Rather than addressing questions of interests to a narrow academic specialty, Margaret Mead always examined question which were of interest to the general public. In that first book, she addressed issues of sex and gender, growing up, the generation gap, and change in the modern world. Dr. Yans-McLaughlin argues that Mead (1901-1978) devoted her entire career to situate her research in a way that appealed to the broadest of popular interest. How she did this throughout her career and its affect on her own scientific research, on the discipline of anthropology, and on the practice of science in general in the United States will be the center of this research. This project engages and promises to contribute to scholarly literature in the history of anthropology, the history of social sciences, the study of gender in science and the history of women in the scientific professions.