The explosively curious and acerbic Margaret Mead was born in 1901 and brought up by a tough academic family in Pennsylvania. And in The Closing of the American Mind (1987), the philosopher Allan Bloom trashed Mead as a “sexual adventurer.” In his Letters to a Young Conservative (2002), the splenetic pseudo-thinker Dinesh D’Souza accused Mead, as many others have done, of wounding “Western culture” by introducing some kind of noxious, destabilizing relativism. In 1999, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a group that promotes conservatism in colleges, ranked Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) as the single worst nonfiction book of the 20th century. What’s more, Mead has become a target of vitriolic dislike for a particular kind of cultural conservatism.
In the popular mind, Mead’s name has all but vanished, her reputation whittled down to an apocryphal quote found on coffee mugs and dorm-room posters: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
Within anthropology, Mead is still revered but mostly as a way to understand the discipline’s origins. It’s difficult to defend oneself after death, and the years wear away a name, eventually reducing it to dust or mere “influence.” Issues change, standards shift, new thinkers rise: few names last forever. In her obituary, The New York Times called her “a national oracle.”īut posthumous reputation is a brittle thing. The tensions in public opinion were hers too. In some two dozen books and countless articles, she gave a forceful voice to a sturdy if cautious liberalism: resolutely antiracist, pro-choice open to “new ways of thinking” yet wary of premarital sex and hesitant about the pill. Her ascent seemed to mirror the societal ascent of American women.
In 1978, after 50 years at the pinnacle of American opinion, the anthropologist Margaret Mead died with a secure reputation and a lustrous legacy.
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