Coming of Age in Samoa is a small book written over seventy years ago by a twenty-four-year-old woman about teenage girls in a distant place. It has stayed with us, profoundly informing many of the great debates of our century and inspiring much controversy and discussion. My mother was a girl on a ranch in Colorado when Coming of Age in Samoa was published. She read it in college in the 1930s. I read it in college in the 1960s. Now, with this new edition, my daughter may read it and maybe even my granddaughter.
I’m deeply honored to review this book. Like Mead, I have always been interested in how culture affects mental health. I too have loved to study at the intersection of psychology and anthropology, an area once called Culture and Personality. Like Mead, I have believed that good cultures make better people, and I have felt that it is our responsibility and joy to work for positive cultural change. In my speeches, I have often quoted Mead’s beautiful line, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world.”
And, of course, I share her interest in teenage girls. In Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead identified some of the pressures American girls faced in the 1920s. With Reviving Ophelia, I did very much the same thing in the 1990s. Mead criticized the pressures women faced early in the century to be virginal until marriage. She felt that in Samoa young women were free to choose their partners and experiment with their sexuality according to their own wishes. Ironically, at the end of the century, I criticized the pressures young women felt to constantly define themselves as sexual. Regardless of what American girls wanted or needed, by the time they were in high school, they were pushed to be sexually active. Mead and I believed the same thing, that in an ideal culture sexual decisions should be the result of intentional choices.
Mead’s book, with its vivid descriptions of life on a South Sea island and its critique of America’s culture for teens, was an immediate bestseller. Afterwards, Mead was never out of the public eye. Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said of his crusading wife, “Lord, please make Eleanor tired.” The same remark could have been made about Mead, who once told a staff member, “I’m exhausted—find me a lecture to deliver.” Mead wrote thirty books, over one thousand articles for popular and professional journals, and was Curator of Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History. At some point, she earned the nickname “grandmother to the world.”
With her practical shoes and walking stick, Mead seems to have spoken everywhere. I travel and do a great deal of speaking, and if I mention Margaret Mead, which I often do, I’m told, “I heard her speak. She came to our town.” However, in spite of her popular appeal and cultural significance, in fact most likely because of it, she remained an adjunct professor at Columbia University, where she taught almost until her death.
As a student of cultural anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, I read Mead. Everyone in college read Mead in the 1960s. Her writing and teaching fueled an explosion of interest in anthropology. Her idealism and interest in social action appealed to our revolutionary sensibilities. Her fascination with the meaning of change had great relevance in the era of Bob Dylan’s song “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”
Mead was the original flower child, interested in peace, justice, sexual freedom, and adventure. She worked tirelessly for social change herself and taught everywhere that we could and should build better cultures that produced happier, less aggressive, and more emotionally sturdy people. Her definition of an ideal culture was one that found a place for every human gift. No better definition of an ideal culture has ever been formulated.
When I first read Coming of Age in Samoa, I was struck by Mead’s attention to the lives of girls and women and by her interest in the daily routines of families. She was curious about girls’ talk and games, and she was interested in how they felt about their lives. At that time, I was certainly no feminist. I had never really thought about women’s issues. But as I read her book, dedicated to the girls of Taū, I found myself delighted and proud that someone believed girls were interesting and important.
From my reading of Coming of Age in Samoa, I acquired several ideas that I still find powerful today—that gender differences are not set in stone, that sexuality is culturally shaped, that adolescence need not be stressful, and that the lives of adolescent girls are worthy of attention and respect. Re-reading this book in 2000, three-quarters of a century after Mead wrote it and thirty-five years after I first read it, the things that come across the strongest are the keenness of Mead’s observational powers, the depth of her respect for the islanders, and her zest for her work. And, of course, still I’m impressed by her attention to girls.
Mead was proud of not being a dry and timid academic. In her 1961 preface she writes, “I can emphasize that this was the first piece of anthropological fieldwork that was written without the paraphernalia of scholarship designed to mystify the lay reader and confound one’s colleagues.” She wrote for ordinary readers, for whom she might be useful, and she expressed herself simply and dramatically in non-academic language. In fact, the reader whom Mead imagined as she wrote was her grandmother, an intelligent schoolteacher. She tried to make her writing helpful to her.
Mead relished strong opinions. About the Samoans, she was neither condescending nor ethnocentric. A photo of her holding hands with a woman friend in Samoa, barefoot, her hair frizzy, and her face open and happy, shows how warmly she felt towards her “subjects.”
Mead’s Samoan research drew upon several disciplines. She had some background in psychology and paid attention to family dynamies. Biology, as evidenced by appearance, innate intelligence, and temperament, played an important role in her conceptualization of development. But Mead also argued for the fluidity of human development. Culture played an enormous role in the lives of Samoan girls, and Mead was most interested in what she called “the interplay between endowment and cultural style.”
Coming of Age in Samoa influenced the nature vs. nurture debate that raged at the beginning of the century and still rages today. It has many current forms, such as the recent debates over gender and the role of biology in mental health. Right now, biological determinists are strong and growing stronger. But the tide may turn yet again. If Mead were alive, she would love to be in the thick of the current debates. She had a rich and sophisticated view of the multiple factors that shaped human beings, and we social activists could use her intelligent, compassionate arguments today.
Mead’s viewpoint in Coming of Age in Samoa on the destructive effects of isolation and intensity in nuclear families influenced our first generation of family therapists. Early advocates of sexual freedom, such as Havelock Ellis and Bertrand Russell, loved this book. And of course, Mead’s ideas about sexual experimentation were wildly popular during the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Her ideas about adolescence have permeated our culture. Thousands of books and articles have been written praising and attacking this book. Mead has been the darling and the curse of feminists, the flag bearer for proponents of social engineering, and a strong advocate for indigenous peoples, even though these same peoples have sometimes been quite critical of her work.
Why read Mead today? The Samoa that Mead wrote about no longer exists. Even Mead, the expert on social change, couldn’t predict the rapidity with which worlds would disappear in our last century. But Mead didn’t go to Samoa just to study Samoans. Rather she wanted to understand the whole human race. She used her work in Samoa to examine big questions: How does culture shape individuals? What is the role of biology in human behavior? There are no more interesting questions.
In an era of specialization, Mead was a synthesizer, a connector of dots. She was bold, open-hearted, and timely. She wanted her writing to change the world. Her ideas have a relevance and resonance with issues of today. Her analysis of the problems of teens is curiously modern. At root, Mead believed the problems for American teens were too many choices, too much pressure, and too little exposure to real-world phenomena, such as birth and death. She believed in teaching children how to think, not what to think, and in the importance of intentionality in decision making. Her conclusions, that adolescence need not be a time of stress and strain and that growing up could be freer and easier than we make it in America, are still being discussed in the beginning of a new century.
Sophisticated scientists with the benefit of decades of hindsight may pick at Mead’s work. She was, after all, a steamboat anthropologist who sailed to Samoa when President Harding was in office. But the questions she examined and inspired others to examine are the best questions we have. Her vision of a good society with tolerance, justice, joy, individual freedom, and communal pleasure beams out to us as the best vision we have. Her belief that we could change human nature, while hard for us to sustain after our troubled twentieth century, is still what motivates many of us to do good work.
In significance, Coming of Age in Samoa is right up there with the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, the political activism of Eleanor Roosevelt, the poetry of Mary Oliver, the Vietnam War memorial by Maya Ying Lin, and The Diary of Anne Frank. This small book written about teenage girls captured a moment in a particular place and time and became one of our most important cultural products. America in the twentieth century couldn’t have had a better grandmother.
—Mary Pipher, Ph.D.