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5 Young Margaret Mead
- University of Wisconsin Press
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73 5 Young Margaret Mead H ’ and his connections to Samoa and Mead, we now turn to Mead’s life and her connections to Samoa. How did her career begin? What led her to study adolescence in Samoa and to write the book that made her famous?1 Mead was born in Pennsylvania in 1901, the eldest of four surviving children . Her mother was a highly educated sociologist and feminist. Her father taught at the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania. Mead’s family was unusual in its commitment to education, especially for women. Both her mother and grandmother were professionals. Mead loved the world of books, poetry, and ideas. While in high school she met Luther Cressman, who was four years older and would soon study to become a minister. They fell in love and became engaged when Mead was sixteen and a senior. She did not tell her parents about the engagement until some time later. At this point in her life, young Margaret Mead believed that she could live happily as a minister’s wife and be the mother of several children. Their engagement would last nearly six years, though, and during this period both Mead and Cressman would undergo major changes in their life goals. Mead spent her first year of college at DePauw University in Indiana, a school that her father had attended. DePauw was a small liberal arts school, and Mead’s experience there was mostly painful. She did not fit into the sorority system that dominated the lives of most young women, and although she attended sorority rush parties, she did not receive a bid to pledge.2 Her engagement to Cressman lessened the sting, but she nonetheless felt like an outsider, an outcast. Her taste in clothes was different from most of the other young women that she knew. Her intelligence, so highly valued by her family, was now a liability; the young men in her classes resented her for it. After class Mead would read avidly about the literary and artistic scene in New York City, where Cressman was now living and studying. She became acutely aware of the constraints of small-town life. At DePauw she said she felt like “an exile.”3 74 Mead and Coming of Age in Samoa For her sophomore year Mead transferred to Barnard, a women’s college in New York City where sororities had been abolished in 1913. Here she flourished , becoming involved with a new group of friends and a new set of experiences . If post–World War I America had one city that exemplified the Roaring Twenties, New York was it. Art, poetry, literature, music, and alcohol (even though it was Prohibition) were everywhere, and there was great interest in politics and psychoanalysis. Bohemian and avant-garde, New York was the cultural epicenter of cosmopolitan America. The city seemed made for Mead. Margaret Mead’s graduation portrait in the 1923 Barnard yearbook, The Mortarboard. Courtesy of the Barnard College Archives. [44.200.39.110] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:19 GMT) In some ways Mead’s experience at Barnard in the early 1920s was similar to Freeman’s college experience in the 1930s in New Zealand. College was a liberating experience for each of them. Mead and Freeman considered themselves radicals, although Freeman was more politically active than Mead. Both were interested in writing: both had considered careers in writing, both worked on school publications, and both wrote poetry. Both were interested in debate. Both took psychology courses and were strongly influenced by them. Mead and Freeman were very much engaged with the wider world of great ideas. They were both assertive and had a flare for the dramatic. But while Mead’s memoirs of college discuss her personal relationships and her views on sex, these subjects are absent from Freeman’s. He married at thirty-two, and was committed to monogamy. Sex and the City Mead was also committed to monogamy, as her long and chaste engagement to Luther Cressman attested. But in New York and other major metropolitan areas, a “singles culture” was emerging in which young women, working or getting an education, lived apart from their parents. These independent living arrangements provided opportunities for relationships with men that were frowned on in many other parts of the country. In the 1920s most single women still lived at home until marriage and were chaperoned as men came courting.4 Until the early twentieth century...