Margaret Mead: Human Nature and the Power of Culture
Samoa: The Adolescent Girl

Shortly before Mead departed for Samoa, Franz Boas wrote her a letter with final instructions on her research project. She was to examine “the psychological attitude of the individual under the pressure of the general pattern of culture” and discover whether or not Samoan adolescent girls possessed the same “rebellious spirit” found in American adolescents. He warned her not to spend too much time studying Samoan culture generally at the expense of this particular problem.

Boas begins and ends the letter with paternal reminders to safeguard her health. Mead, who was thin and frail as a young woman, went through frequent bouts of poor health, including chronic pain from neuritis in her arms and severe menstrual cramps. During her time in Samoa, Mead suffered not only from these ailments, but also an infected foot, conjunctivitis (which made reading difficult), tonsilitis, and toothaches.

Some critics of Mead's Samoan field study have objected to her choice of housing on the island of Ta'u, where she conducted her study of adolescent girls. She chose to live in the naval dispensary with an American family rather than in a Samoan household. In this previously unavailable letter to Ruth Benedict, Mead explains her decision and expresses concern that she may be “coddling” herself by not living in a Samoan household.

On Ta'u, Mead lived in the household of the U.S. Navy's chief pharmacist and his family. Her room occupied half of the porch of the naval dispensary. A bamboo lattice separated her bed from the rest of the porch. Living in a western-style house instead of an open-sided Samoan house allowed Mead extra privacy, but her room was also easily accessible from the outside. Young visitors stopped by to socialize at all hours, dancing and singing and providing her with information for her research.

This page is from one of the six field notebooks Mead kept in Samoa. This notebook contains material from her stay in Fitiuta, a village at the eastern end of Ta'u island, about eight miles away from her home base in Luma, on the west coast. Her notes here refer primarily to the material culture of the village, including a diagram of a “porch built out at end of house.”

In this previously unavailable letter, Mead explains how she approached her Samoan note-taking. She states that she is preserving general ethnological materials carefully so that they can be used by anyone with a knowledge of Polynesia. Her incomplete notes on the problem assigned her by Boas would be of no use to anyone else, however, “so I'm being as cryptic and illegible and brief as I like.” The materials in the Library's Mead collection support this distinction.

Mead did not keep a field diary in Samoa. While she wrote a series of field bulletins for family and friends, the most intimate view of her time there comes from her almost-daily letters to Ruth Benedict. These letters chronicle her activities and varied emotional states in great detail. These three photographs were enclosed in a letter Mead sent Benedict dated February 10, 1926. In the accompanying text, Mead has written of her appearance: “I look very prim and proper and unpolynesian.” In these photographs, Mead is wearing a wedding dress woven by Makelita, last Queen of Manu'a. Mead's Samoan name was also Makelita.

During her field trips, Mead customarily wrote detailed field bulletins, which were circulated among her family and friends at home. She wrote this bulletin near the end of her time in Samoa, a day before departing for Ofu, one of the other two islands in the Manu'a group. Derek Freeman later claimed that Mead was not very far along in the work for her adolescent study when she departed for Ofu. Mead, however, reports here that her work on her problem is “practically completed.” An abridged version of this bulletin was included in Mead's Letters from the Field (1977).

Beginning with her Samoan materials, Mead sought to convey her findings to a wide audience. Her publisher, William Morrow, counseled her to be careful about publishing in popular publications, lest it damage her scholarly and scientific reputation among her peers. Morrow thus foresaw the dilemma Mead would face in being both a public figure and a scientist and the impact her popular success would have on her professional career.

One of the most prominent critics of Coming of Age in Samoa was New Zealand-born anthropologist Derek Freeman (1916–2001). In 1964, Mead and Freeman met in Australia and discussed disparities in their research. They continued to correspond until her death. In this letter, Mead answers some of Freeman's criticisms, addressing his concerns about seeming anomalies in the appendices to the book, and explains that she changed some identifying characteristics of people and households in order to protect the privacy of her subjects.

Based on her study of 68 girls in three villages in the western part of Ta'u island, Mead reported that adolescence was not a stressful time, compared with the expectation of adolescent “storm and stress” in Western societies. She attributed this difference to cultural factors. She argued that, living in a homogenous culture, Samoan adolescent girls did not face numerous conflicting personal choices and demands. Because Mead only had a few months to conduct her study, she developed a cross-sectional approach, looking at girls of different ages to compensate for not being able to follow them over time.

Mead later accounted for the book's phenomenal success by saying that she wrote it “in English.” She targeted the book at an educated public and to those who worked specifically with children. At the suggestion of her publisher, William Morrow, Mead revised her original manuscript to focus on the implications of her findings for American child-rearing and education and to urge the creation of an educational system that would prepare American youth for life in a society filled with abundant choices.

While the book was generally lauded upon publication, there have been various objections to it over the years, including criticism of Mead's ahistorical approach and her decision to apply her findings to American life. Despite its flaws, Coming of Age in Samoa has been an enduring popular success. It has been reprinted more than a dozen times in a variety of languages and editions.

As she prepared to leave for the field, Mead was asked by the director of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu to gather ethnological information for them in Samoa. Though Boas in his farewell letter cautioned Mead about spending too much time on other questions at the expense of her specific problem, she found time to collect information for the Museum as well as to carry out her study on adolescent girls. Near the end of her time in American Samoa, Mead estimated that the extra research had taken no more than “three weeks—concrete solid.” In 1930 the Bishop Museum published Mead's technical monograph on Samoan culture, Social Organization of Manu'a.