Margaret Mead

 

 

Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and the 1970s.^[1]

She earned her bachelor's degree at Barnard College of Columbia University and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia. Mead served as President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975.^[2]

Mead was a communicator of anthropology in modern American and Western culture and was often controversial as an academic.^[3] Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution.^[4] She was a proponent of broadening sexual conventions within the context of Western cultural traditions. 

In 1976, Mead was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.^[71]

On January 19, 1979, US President Jimmy Carter announced that he was awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously to Mead. UN Ambassador Andrew Young presented the award to Mead's daughter at a special program honoring her contributions that was sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, where she spent many years of her career. Wkipedia