Mead, Margaret

Mead's Life and Works

In her memoir, Blackberry Winter: My Early Years, Mead weaves a narrative combining a discussion of her life as a public figure and anthropologist with reflections on family life. Notably, Mead felt that the personal, political, and professional were closely intertwined and rejected the notion that women needed to choose between having a career and having a family. In the chapter titled “On Having a Baby,” she begins, “[m]y closest models, my mother and my grandmother, had both had children and also had used their minds and had careers in the public world.”

Nonetheless, later in the same chapter she states, “I had never cared about having any particular professional status.” But while her reflections on her research and motherhood feature an insistence that her child and family were centrally important, it is evident that Mead devoted considerable energy to integrating her family life with her career as an academic.

Many years after the publication of her first book, Margaret Mead embraced motherhood when her daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, was born on December 8, 1939. Mead's memoir therefore explores her experience of becoming a mother while continuing to pursue her well-established professional career. Instead of conceptually separating motherhood and parenthood from her work as an anthropologist, she frequently reflects on the ways that these identities are intertwined, highlighting the anthropological insights she gained from her daughter, discussing how she and her husband raised their child while managing their busy professional schedules, and acknowledging the role that other people, such as Nanny Burrows, played in her daughter's life.

However, Mead was not immune from prevailing assumptions about motherhood and women. She believed that men and women differed with regards to how rewarding they felt parenthood to be: “It was not that women have less impulse than men to be creative and productive. But through the ages having children, for women who wanted children, has been so satisfying that it has taken some special circumstance—spinsterhood, barrenness, or widowhood—to let women give their whole minds to their work.” Thus, though her life largely entailed an inextricable link between the professional and personal, Mead nonetheless suggested that mothers who wanted children had less inclination than fathers to strive to reach their professional potential because they found motherhood so satisfying. Mead's memoir is characterized by this apparent contradiction between an essentialized vision of women in connection with motherhood, and a feminist impulse to expose the social construction of sexist assumptions.

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