Introduction

The startling coming-of-age story of famed anthropologist Margaret Mead whose radical ideas challenged the social and sexual norms of her time.

The story begins in 1923, when twenty-two year old Margaret Mead is living in New York City, engaged to her childhood sweetheart and on the verge of graduating from college. Seemingly a conventional young lady, she marries, but shocks friends when she decides to keep her maiden name. After starting graduate school at Columbia University, she does the unthinkable: she first enters into a forbidden relationship with a female colleague, then gets caught up in an all-consuming and secret affair with a brilliant older man. As her sexual awakening continues, she discovers it is possible to be in love with more than one person at the same time.

While Margaret’s personal explorations are just beginning, her interest in distant cultures propels her into the new field of anthropology. Ignoring the constraints put on women, she travels alone to a tiny speck of land in the South Pacific called Samoa to study the sexual behavior of adolescent girls. Returning home on an ocean liner nine months later, a chance encounter changes the course of her life forever.

Now, drawing on letters, diaries, and memoirs, Deborah Beatriz Blum reconstructs these five transformative years of Margaret Mead’s life, before she became famous, revealing the story that she hid from the world – during her lifetime and beyond.

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Excerpt

from Chapter 9: A Cottage on Cape Cod

* * *

Margaret stood at the glass, looking out. The sea stretched out gray and flat, projecting a lassitude that was not comforting. She opened the windows to let in the smell of the ocean. In the distance she could see Luther walking across the rocks down onto the beach. Gulls flew low over his head, squawking their shrill cries. She turned away from the window, and began to unpack her belongings, putting a pile of books on the kitchen table. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

1. What do you know about Margaret Mead; why did she make history?

2. What do you think about Mead as a passionate young woman discovering her own sexuality; how you think it effected what she chose to study?

3. Why do you think Margaret Mead kept the personal details of her life secret? What was she hiding?

4. What drew the author to write about Mead? How did she uncover Mead's secrets?

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