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WORK TITLE: Coming of Age
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CITY: Los Angeles
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Not same as Deborah Leigh Blum in CANR 223: LRC says Deborah Leigh Blub wrote “Bad Karma,” but she did not. * https://www.amazon.com/Deborah-Blum/e/B00AQ15UDK/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0 * https://us.macmillan.com/author/deborahbeatrizblum * https://thelitbitch.com/2017/07/18/special-feature-and-qa-coming-of-age-the-sexual-awakening-of-margaret-mead-by-deborah-beatriz-blum/ * https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/margaret-mead-in-pursuit-of-fame-and-sex/2017/08/11/e1cd45a4-6590-11e7-9928-22d00a47778f_story.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; children: three sons.
EDUCATION:Attended University of California, Berkeley.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and filmmaker. Writer, producer, and director of documentary films for the television networks National Geographic, Discovery, and History Channel.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Deborah Beatriz Blum is a writer, producer, and director of documentary films for the National Geographic, Discovery, and History Channel television networks. She attended the University of California at Berkeley and lives in Los Angeles.
Bad Karma
Blum’s first book, Bad Karma: A True Story of Obsession and Murder, examines a notorious murder case that occurred in Berkeley in 1968 while the author was a student there. Prosenjit Poddar, a graduate student from India, became romantically involved with a younger junior college student, Tanya Tarasoff. The relationship was plagued with incompatibilities, not least of which were deep cultural misunderstandings. While Tanya saw Prosenjit as a casual boyfriend, she was unsophisticated and relatively immature, sending mixed messages about her interest in him.
Prosenjit, on the other hand, became increasingly obsessed with Tanya and was enraged by her rejections. He was convicted of stabbing Tanya to death at her parents’ home. His conviction was eventually overturned on appeal, after which he was deported. Reviewing Bad Karma in the Los Angeles Times, Peter Meyer praised Blum’s “near-flawless focus” on the chain of events in this tragic relationship.
Coming of Age
A brief encounter with anthropologist Margaret Mead in the early 1970s, when Blum was working at an office job in Cambridge, Massachusetts, inspired the author to learn more about Mead’s life; years later, she completed Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead. In an interview posted on Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb, Blum explained to Deborah Kalb that she focused on Mead’s early life because she sympathized with the anthropologist’s search, in her twenties, for her place in the world. “For me,” said Blum, “the most important time of a famous person’s life is before they become famous: for many, those are the times of utmost confusion.”
Mead’s independent nature and her determination put her at odds with dominant views of acceptable behavior for women in the early 1900s. As Blum explained in the interview, the assertive part of Mead’s personality and her deep thirst for a wide range of experience “pushed her to try to go after men and women who were out of reach.” Mead had intimate relationships with her mentor, Dr. Ruth Benedict; linguist Edward Sapir; archaeologist Luther Cressman, who became her first husband; and Reo Fortune, a fellow anthropologist who became her second husband. She later married anthropologist Gregory Bateman. But in Coming of Age, Blum focuses in particular on the love triangle that developed among Mead, Sapir, and Benedict during the early years of Mead’s career.
A writer for Kirkus Reviews found Coming of Age highly engaging but observed that its subjects are “narrowly portrayed through the span of their infatuations” and that its focus on Mead as a “self-absorbed, love-obsessed woman” does not do her justice. A Publishers Weekly reviewer, however, commented that the book provides “insight into the vulnerable girl’s heart behind the groundbreaking work” that Mead went on to produce.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2017, review of Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead.
Library Journal, June 1, 1986, Gergor A. Preston, review of Bad Karma: A True Story of Obsession and Murder, p. 134.
Los Angeles Times, July 6, 1986, Peter Meyer, review of Bad Karma.
Publishers Weekly, May 30, 1986, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of Bad Karma, p. 49; April 10, 2017, review of Coming of Age, p. 61.
ONLINE
Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb, http://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/ (January 8, 2018), interview with Blum.
Lit Bitch, https://thelitbitch.com/ (January 8, 2018), “Q&A with Author Deborah Beatriz Blum.”
Los Angeles Review of Books Online, https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/ (January 8, 2018), Megan Tusler, review of Coming of Age.
Washington Post Online, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (January 8, 2018), Roxanne Roberts, review of Coming of Age.
Special Feature and Q&A: Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead by Deborah Beatriz Blum
Though I have a Master’s in American History, I rarely read biographies. I don’t know if that’s because I’ve spent so much of my academic career reading history books and researching topics….but when I sit down to read I like reading fiction….preferably with history.
Now that said, I do on occasion read biographies or nonfiction if the subject sounds interesting etc. I was so sad that I couldn’t fit this book into my review schedule this summer because it sounds like one of those books that would be right up my alley! So instead I decided to do a special feature complete with a Q & A from the author so be sure to keep reading!
The startling coming-of-age story of famed anthropologist Margaret Mead whose radical ideas challenged the social and sexual norms of her time.
The story begins in 1923, when twenty-two year old Margaret Mead is living in New York City, engaged to her childhood sweetheart and on the verge of graduating from college. Seemingly a conventional young lady, she marries, but shocks friends when she decides to keep her maiden name.
After starting graduate school at Columbia University, she does the unthinkable: she first enters into a forbidden relationship with a female colleague, then gets caught up in an all-consuming and secret affair with a brilliant older man. As her sexual awakening continues, she discovers it is possible to be in love with more than one person at the same time.
While Margaret’s personal explorations are just beginning, her interest in distant cultures propels her into the new field of anthropology. Ignoring the constraints put on women, she travels alone to a tiny speck of land in the South Pacific called Samoa to study the sexual behavior of adolescent girls. Returning home on an ocean liner nine months later, a chance encounter changes the course of her life forever.
Now, drawing on letters, diaries, and memoirs, Deborah Beatriz Blum reconstructs these five transformative years of Margaret’s life, before she became famous, revealing the story that Margaret Mead hid from the world – during her lifetime and beyond (summary from Goodreads).
The book was researched through letters with Mead’s professional connections, lovers, diaries and memoirs to explore the college and early years of Mead in the 1920s. It is intensely personal to documentary filmmaker and acclaimed author Deborah Blum because of her chance meeting with Mead when she was a young woman.
Q and A with author Deborah Beatriz Blum
Tell us about Margaret Mead; why did she make history?
Margaret Mead was a firecracker. She was born in 1901, at the end of the Victorian era and raised in a world in which women had few opportunities. Young ladies were expected to marry early and were not encouraged to pursue any kind of work outside the home. Margaret became famous because she upended all the social and sexual constraints that kept women in their place. It’s fair to say that without her, the revolutions of the 1960s — including women’s liberation and free sex — would never have happened. She did all of this by being, of all things, an anthropologist. It’s remarkable really, when you think about the changes she was able to bring about.
Tell us a little about Mead as a passionate young woman discovering her own sexuality. How you think it effected what she chose to study?
When the story begins, Margaret, engaged to her childhood sweetheart, is living in New York City and about to start graduate school in anthropology at Columbia University.
Married life provides security, but is lacking in passion. When she is unexpectedly caught up in an affair with a brilliant older man, and then in a forbidden relationship with a female colleague, she begins to question the concept of monogamy.
She also begins to test the limits in her professional life.
As a graduate student in anthropology she is expected to do fieldwork with a Native American tribe. Over the objections of friends, family and professional associates, she insists on going to Polynesia. In August of 1925, she travels 9000 miles, first by train then by ocean liner, to a tiny island in the South Pacific called Samoa. Once there she investigates the way adolescent girls in a “primitive culture” differ from their counterparts back in America. The subject coincides with issues she’s wrestling with in her own life. She writes up her observations in a book called Coming of Age in Samoa, which is published in 1927 and becomes an unexpected bestseller.
By introducing the American public to the idea that unmarried couples can enjoy carefree sex, Margaret triggers a sexual awakening that is to continue for decades.
Why did you choose Margaret Mead as a topic?
My interest in Margaret Mead was triggered by a chance encounter. At the time, Mead was in her early seventies and world famous, I was a recent college grad, working as a receptionist at a small publishing company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Late one afternoon, while I was sitting at the switchboard and counting the minutes until closing time, I heard a noise in the foyer. Looking down the hall I saw an old woman struggling to get out of a heavy overcoat. Her hair was mousy gray, her shape squat and dumpy. Surprisingly, her mere presence was causing a commotion among the men. I asked a co-worker to tell me who she was. With great reverence she whispered, “That’s Margaret Mead.”
I’d never seen men behave that way around a woman who wasn’t beautiful. What gave this old woman so much power? Without my realizing it, a seed had been planted. I began to read about her, starting with her memoir. The ideas she floated had to do with finding one’s own unique path in the world and having the confidence to assert oneself. This resonated – it was the way I wanted to live my own life.
You indicate that Margaret Mead kept the personal details of her life secret, during her lifetime and beyond. What was she hiding and how did you uncover her secrets?
As a young woman, Margaret came to believe that she was incapable of maintaining “a single hearted devotion.” She questioned why love and intimacy need be limited to one person at a time, or, for that matter, limited to the opposite sex. She gave herself permission to live outside the norms of accepted society. For the time in which she lived, her behavior was extremely radical, if not downright taboo.
Margaret was, at the same time, anxious to safeguard her reputation. She knew if the details of her forbidden affairs ever came to light her career would be ruined. Her secrets were not laid bare until 2009, many years after her death, when her letters entered the public domain. I was able to make a digital copy of thousands of these letters. They provided a window into her mind during her formative years.
DEBORAH BEATRIZ BLUM
Deborah Beatriz Blum
Theron Herd
DEBORAH BEATRIZ BLUM is the author of Bad Karma: A True Story of Obsession and Murder. She has been a writer, producer and director working in the film business for most of her adult life. For the last twenty years she’s written and directed documentaries for National Geographic, Discovery Channel, and the History Channel.
Deborah Blum
Deborah Blum
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Deborah Beatriz Blum has written two books: COMING OF AGE: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead and BAD KARMA: A True Story of Obsession and Murder.
Blum's interest in other cultures and far-away lands began when she traveled the world as a writer on the television series In Search Of…. Her first book, Bad Karma: A True Story of Obsession and Murder, took her on an extended journey through India. Since then she has sold story ideas for feature films, producing several, including Clean and Sober, and has worked as a writer-director of documentaries for National Geographic, the Discovery Channel, and the History Channel. She makes her home in Los Angeles with her husband and three sons.
Both of Blum’s two books have been based on life-long interests.
Her most recent book COMING OF AGE: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead was inspired by a chance encounter Blum had with Margaret Mead many years ago. At the time, Mead was in her early seventies, world-famous as an anthropologist, a social commentator and an agent of change. Blum was a twenty-two year-old college graduate, mostly unemployed, aimless, and desperate to find work. The encounter led Blum to start reading and finally, in 2009, when Mead's correspondence was released into the public domain, to begin compiling her letters. The result is an exploration of Mead's own coming of age, an up-close exploration of the sexual awakening that inspired so much of Mead's later work.
Blum’s first book BAD KARMA: A True Story of Obsession and Murder was based on a murder that occurred in 1969, in Berkeley, while Blum was student at the University of California. Although Blum didn't know the murder victim or the young man who killed her, she recalls feeling that she could relate to both. Years later, when the case - which became known as Tarasoff - became a California Supreme Court landmark ruling concerning confidentiality between therapist and patient, Blum’s interest was renewed. Her book traces the fateful infatuation that led a therapist to break his oath of confidentiality with his patient, in an attempt to save a young girl's life.
Deborah Beatriz Blum
Deborah Beatriz Blum is the author of Bad Karma: A True Story of Obsession and Murder. She has been a writer, producer, and director working in the film business for most of her adult life. For the last 20 years she’s written and directed documentaries for National Geographic, Discovery, and the History Channel.
Monday, September 4, 2017
Q&A with Deborah Beatriz Blum
Deborah Beatriz Blum, photo by Theron Herd
Deborah Beatriz Blum is the author of the new book Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead, which focuses on the anthropologist as a young woman. Blum also has written the book Bad Karma, and has been a writer-director for programs on the National Geographic Channel, the Discovery Channel, and the History Channel. She lives in Los Angeles.
Q: You write that you had a chance encounter with Margaret Mead many years ago. How did that lead into the idea for this book?
A: From that time when I had a brief encounter with her, I became interested. I started to read her memoir and other biographies about her. I kept coming back to the early years, her coming of age.
There were a couple of reasons. I thought about when I met her, that it was a challenging time for me to figure out my own place in the world--especially in my 20s, that was very hard. I looked at her. She struggled with that herself; she had all these adventures. I wondered, how did she do it?
The other thing is that my own career involved working on television documentaries, many of them biographies. For me the most important time of a famous person’s life is before they become famous; for many, those are the times of utmost confusion…
With television documentaries you’re stuck in the format, having to cover the person’s entire life. The story peters out after they become famous. I wanted to break the mold, and write a biography of someone very famous without any mention of the fact that they did become famous.
That disturbs some of my readers. For me, it’s a breakthrough to stop the story there. Out of the darkest moment come ideas that perhaps shape and form an individual.
Q: You begin by discussing the importance of letters. Were those letters between Mead and her correspondents the main focus of your research?
A: Absolutely. Even though I had read other biographies [of Mead] and biographies of other individuals depicted in the book, when I realized I wanted to focus on [these] five years, in Margaret’s memoir Blackberry Winter it whitewashed that period of time. I realized I would have to do as much as I could. In her letters, I could see she was maddeningly circumspect, very withholding in certain kinds of ways.
When I found out there were lots of letters at the Library of Congress, I was lucky enough to find a researcher who could go in there. She took high-resolution digital photographs of thousands of letters.
These people were indefatigable letter-writers. They spilled out their guts, except Margaret, who was somewhat withholding. It was exhausting to go through them. Very often they were difficult to decipher. I would have to go to members of my family [for help].
The great thing was that I had these in my computer to reference any time I wanted. I was able to piece together day by day, [including] what the weather was like.
Q: How well known is this early period in her life?
A: Her main biographer, Jane Howard, did a wonderful biography, Margaret Mead: A Life, published in 1986. She spent six years interviewing hundreds of people about Margaret Mead, and she never knew Margaret and [anthropologist] Ruth [Benedict] had this affair. She sensed Ruth loved Margaret, but she never knew about it.
Since 2009 when the letters were released into the public domain, there have been some biographies written about these relationships, in an academic style.
I feel the story itself is so interesting that I wanted—I’m not an academician—to do it in the only style I’m able to do it in, to bring it to life in such a way that people who maybe hadn’t heard of Margaret Mead could read and enjoy it, and read it like a novel. I felt this was the most suitable way.
Q: How would you describe the interactions among her and the other main characters in the book?
A: First, I would say about Margaret Mead that she was a very determined and ambitious young lady at a time when that kind of behavior was almost unheard of. Those kinds of women can be difficult to like even now, i.e. Hillary Clinton—so focused, so ambitious, it’s in one sense difficult to accept her in that way.
But she obviously had a charisma about her that she was able to attract these four other people in the book who fell in love with her. With the ménage a trois at the center of the story, Margaret wanted something she couldn’t have. At the end, she ended up getting it, but didn’t want it.
That part of her personality that was so assertive and wanted to experience life to the fullest pushed her to try to go after men and women who were out of reach. That was a driving force in her life, as it is in a lot of people’s lives but it’s hard for many of us to admit that.
In a way, Margaret was on a quest to experience as many things in her life as she could—in a personal sense, to have relationships with people who were inaccessible. Then when she got them she didn’t know what to do with the relationships.
And also [she wanted] to see as much of the world as she could, and that’s what she ultimately brought back to America, and what changed the social landscape.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Of course when you finish one project it’s like being an empty nester. Everybody said, aren’t you excited? Actually, I said, no, I don’t like the promotion part! But I’m happy I found another story I’m starting to research. I’m excited about it.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Because of the kind of story it is, about anthropologists, because I’m just focusing on that short five years and I wanted to get an intimate look at her life, I had to tell the story from three other points of view.
It gave me the opportunity to explore the early years of anthropology in the United States. It was a really fascinating time. They were like adventurers. It was the only field women could go into where they could be adventurers.
Because it was anthropology, I wanted to give a sense of the culture and the landscape the people were visiting. As a documentary writer and director for many years, I’m used to telling a story in a visual way—I had to bring to life the way things looked and felt. I was lucky to have the letters. What I read about anthropologists doing their work—very few give that sense. I’m hoping to do that with this book.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Blum, Deborah Beatriz: COMING OF AGE
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Blum, Deborah Beatriz COMING OF AGE Dunne/St. Martin's (Adult Nonfiction) $26.99 7, 11 ISBN: 978-
1-250-05572-9
Blum (Bad Karma: A True Story of Obsession and Murder, 1986) reconstructs the five-year period of
Margaret Mead's life leading up to and including her transformative trip to Samoa in 1925.Throughout her
long and respected career, Mead was seldom a stranger to controversy, either in her progressive views about
sex and relationships or in her approach to research. Her provocative reputation was further bolstered by her
memoir, Blackberry Winter (1972). Since her death in 1978, she has been the subject of several biographies
as well as Lily King's acclaimed novel Euphoria (2014), which explores the sexual tensions that arise
between a group of anthropologists on a tribal expedition; the characters are loosely based on Mead, her
second husband, Reo Fortune, and future husband, Gregory Bateson. Sexual tensions are also at the heart of
this latest biographical exercise, and Blum provides a structure more akin to fiction. Drawing from letters,
diaries, and memoirs, she weaves a dramatic tale around the intimate relations of the individuals who were
central to launching Mead's career. The key players were Mead's instructor at Columbia, Dr. Ruth Benedict,
linguist Edward Sapir, her first husband, Luther Cressman, and, in later chapters, fellow anthropologist
Fortune. Though the author tracks Mead's career pursuits, they remain peripheral to the emotional drama as
the heated love triangle among Sapir, Benedict, and Mead takes center stage. Cressman was also along for
the journey, as their marriage was continually in jeopardy and finally collapsed under the strain of Mead's
attraction to Fortune. Though the narrative is a frequently absorbing, occasionally breathless page-turner,
the individuals are narrowly portrayed through the span of their infatuations and come across as flat. The
brilliant writer and thinker that Mead would become is hardly evidenced by the self-absorbed, loveobsessed
woman depicted here. A minor effort for readers interested in learning more about Mead's early
life.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Blum, Deborah Beatriz: COMING OF AGE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A493329086/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c68f862a.
Accessed 17 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A493329086
12/17/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1513557623307 2/2
Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of
Margaret Mead
Publishers Weekly.
264.15 (Apr. 10, 2017): p61.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Coming of Age: The Sexual
Awakening of Margaret Mead
Deborah Beatriz Blum. St. Martin's/Dunne,
$26.99 (336p) ISBN 9/8-1-250-05572-9
Blum (Bad Karma) gives a novelistic retelling of the major events and relationships preceding and
including anthropologist Margaret Mead's 1925 trip to Samoa, using letters to reconstruct scenes and
dialogue among Mead's family, friends, and three early loves: Luther Cressman, her first husband; Ruth
Benedict, her mentor; and famous linguist Edward Sapir. While points of view alternate among these four
leads, Mead is the central character, and she comes across as impetuous, determined, intense, high-strung,
ambitious, and very vain. Period detail about travel, clothing, illness, and the budding fields of
anthropology and psychology bring the story to life, making Mead's notions of women's independence stand
out against the conventions of the time. After Mead's passionate meeting with her future lover, Reo Fortune,
the story fizzles to an uncertain end, leaving it unclear what these early experiences contributed to Mead's
later life and work. The most engaging character is the revered but aging Franz Boas, head of anthropology
at Columbia, who gives Mead her topic of study. Blum's vivid and personal reimagining is an entertaining
addition to the constellation of work on this important figure, giving insight into the vulnerable girl's heart
behind the groundbreaking work. Agent: Harvey Klinger, Harvey Klinger Agency. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead." Publishers Weekly, 10 Apr. 2017, p. 61.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490319286/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5c0cc205. Accessed 17 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490319286
Margaret Mead in pursuit of fame and sex
By Roxanne Roberts August 11
Roxanne Roberts is a feature writer for the Style section.
Roxanne Roberts is a feature writer for The Washington Post.
As a general rule, I’m not all that interested in the sex lives of famous people — or unfamous people, for that matter. Be responsible, have fun, and don’t frighten the horses.
But there’s a case for literary voyeurism when the famous person is famous for writing about sex. “Coming of Age,” a new biography of Margaret Mead, with the provocative subtitle “The Sexual Awakening,” peeks under the covers in the name of academic research: How did a young woman from Pennsylvania become one of the world’s experts on sexual mores?
Before reading this book, I knew three things about Mead. She was America’s best-known anthropologist. She studied the sex lives of adolescent tribal girls. And she was short.
[Review: ‘Euphoria,’ a novel based on Margaret Mead, by Lily King]
“Coming of Age” by Deborah Beatriz Blum. (Thomas Dunne Books)
Author Deborah Beatriz Blum, who was a graduate student when she met Mead in 1972, promises a tale of sexual discovery. The book is based on five years of Mead’s life — from a 20-year-old student at Barnard in 1921 to 1926, when she was a 25-year-old researcher in American Samoa.
Now I know all about Mead’s early romances, flings and ambitions. I know when she lost her virginity and when she cheated on her husband and lovers, male and female. Turns out her trip to the South Pacific, despite Blum’s poetic narrative, did little to change her beliefs about sex.
Mead didn’t take no for an answer, in life or in love. “I’m going to be famous someday,” she explained to her father when she told him she intended to use her maiden name after her marriage in 1923. “And if I’m going to be famous, I’m going to be known by my own name.”
Plenty of famous men and women achieve great things because of their single-minded focus, although Mead took it to another level. On her wedding night, she insisted that her groom sleep in a separate room. “I have a seminar paper to write,” she told him.
By the end of the book, I didn’t much care for Mead as a person or as a scholar. It’s surprising to read such a detailed biography without finding something to like about the subject. I got through it without finding a single real example of unselfishness or generosity. Mead, it seems, was brilliant, charismatic and a spoiled brat.
Blum tells her story through thousands of letters and memoirs written by Mead, first husband Luther Cressman, mentor and lover Ruth Benedict, and fellow academic and lover Edward Sapir. Luther loved Margaret. Ruth loved Margaret. Edward loved Margaret. Margaret loved Margaret.
Poor Cressman. The seminary student fell in love with Mead when she was 16, and the two, both still virgins, married six years later. He was her best friend and a lifelong afterthought, someone Mead had no guilt leaving back home while she pursued other loves.
One was Benedict, a young anthropologist in New York. Blum never explicitly addresses the issue of Mead’s bisexuality but makes it clear that Benedict, a loving mentor and confidante, became something much more. “Once under the sheets together they began to explore each other’s bodies, Ruth stroking every part of Margaret and Margaret quivering with pleasure under the touch,” writes Blum.
And then there was Sapir, the brilliant protege of Franz Boas, head of Columbia’s anthropology department. Benedict and Sapir were close friends — she was half in love with him — but Mead decided she wanted the recent widower for herself. The two embarked on a passionate, tortured affair: Sapir obsessed, Mead annoyed by his jealousy, and Benedict stuck in the middle as they both poured their hearts out to her.
But for all the sex, there’s not much of the promised “awakening.” Blum writes that Mead believed in polygamy but doesn’t explain how a young woman from a seemingly conventional family developed that view. A bitter Sapir called it “a mere rationalization. Having made her erotic life a mere tentacle of the ego, she could not possibly allow herself to pay the price of love.”
Nor does Blum tell us much about what Mead thought of her exploits. Did the earth move? Did her affairs change her sense of her own sexuality, or of women or men? Did it inform her research in the field? We don’t know.
So the sex, which is the reason most people will pick up the book, is kind of a purple-prose “meh.” The real shocker? Mead’s research in American Samoa.
Shrewd and strategic, Mead understood that she needed to explore an unknown culture to make her professional mark. At Barnard she had studied tribal tattoos in Polynesia and wanted to continue her research overseas. Boas had a different idea: He suggested she focus on adolescent girls instead; the nature vs. nurture debate was a hot topic in the academic world, and Boas thought his young student might bring back some interesting results from a non-Western culture. With a research grant in hand, Mead left for the South Pacific in the fall of 1925.
I naively assumed that Mead spent years living among the indigenous tribes to learn their culture and mores before writing “Coming of Age in Samoa.” She actually spent just nine months: the first two living on an American naval station while taking language lessons, then moving in with an American family on a nearby island.
It took three months for Mead to compile a list of 66 local girls she hoped to interview, but a hurricane badly damaged the island and prevented her from spending time with them. By January, she wrote to Boas, saying her fieldwork was “too short to justify even tentative conclusions.”
Just two months before she was scheduled to return home, Mead spent a few days with two young Samoan girls who told her what she wanted to hear: that tropical adolescents were sensual and carefree, just as she had imagined. That, along with a newlywed who told her that young Samoans had sex up to 15 times a night, convinced Mead she had enough evidence for her theory.
“The neuroses accompanying sex in American civilization are practically absent, such as frigidity, impotence and pronounced perversions,” Mead wrote excitedly to Boas: “I feel absolutely safe in generalizing from the material I have.”
Notebooks filled, Mead set sail for home in May 1926. On the six-week voyage to France, where she was to reunite with her husband after nine months apart, she met and fell in love with Reo Fortune, a handsome psychology student headed to Cambridge.
Fortune refused to sleep with her during the trip, which of course made Mead desperate to have him. Shortly after landing in Marseilles, she told Cressman she was in love with another man and planned to continue the affair. She also broke the news to Benedict, who had sailed to Europe to spend two months alone with Mead.
[Americans are having less sex than they once did]
And then the book . . . stops. The epilogue explains that Mead returned to New York and divorced Cressman, married and divorced Fortune, married and divorced anthropologist Gregory Bateson, and finally settled down with yet another anthropologist, Rhoda Metraux.
But first, she decided to write her research for a general audience instead of fellow scholars. “Coming of Age in Samoa,” published in 1928, was an academic miss (British anthropologist A.C. Haddon dismissed Mead as a “lady novelist”). Even allowing for the kind of pervasive sexism from older male colleagues toward a young female graduate student, Mead’s methodology was a conclusion looking for facts, not the other way around.
But the book was a popular sensation for the “Flapper of the South Seas” and launched Mead’s career as a public intellectual, social critic and feminist hero until her death in 1978. Blum’s book ends when Mead was just 25 years old, so we don’t learn how her views on love, marriage and sex may have evolved over the years.
Which is just fine — one book on Mead is enough to last a lifetime for me.
COMING OF AGE
The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead
By Deborah Beatriz Blum
Thomas Dunne. 322 pp. $26.99
On “Coming of Age”: Margaret Mead’s Correspondence and the Biographical Problem
By Megan Tusler
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SEPTEMBER 23, 2017
WITH THE PUBLICATION of Coming of Age in Samoa, Margaret Mead brought to her audience in 1928 a readable vision of adolescent sexuality derived from nine months of fieldwork on the island of Ta’u. The work begins, “The life of the day begins at dawn, or if the moon has shown until daylight, the shouts of the young men may be heard before dawn from the hillside. Uneasy in the night, populous with ghosts, they shout lustily to one another as they hasten with their work.” Mead opens her work with a twist: she describes the men of Ta’u hastening to their work, but what she’s really describing is a Morning After scenario, a Walk of No Shame, because these men are returning from al fresco sexual adventures of the night before: “As the dawn begins to fall among the soft brown roofs and the slender palm trees stand out against a colorless, gleaming sea, lovers slip home from trysts beneath the palm trees or in the shadow of beached canoes.” Her titillating glance into the evening habits of her Indigenous subjects provides the material for her first ethnography, written for a general reader, that detailed the sexual habits of adolescent girls in Samoa. She hoped, in this work, to demonstrate that the rigid sexual strictures of American society weren’t “natural” or right — and that they could be overcome to the betterment of society more generally.
It almost certainly goes without saying that Mead’s work has been plagued with criticism since its publication. One spectacular example is the so-called Mead-Freeman controversy, in which anthropologist Derek Freeman refuted Mead’s findings by retrying them in the court of the culture wars, arguing that she had been “hoaxed” by her Samoan informants who had been only too happy to play up the life imagined by their visitor. These claims have been put to rest, at least to some degree, by works like Paul Shankman’s The Trashing of Margaret Mead (2009), which argued that the attack on Mead’s work was highly personal and itself indebted to settling an ideological score, as Freeman insisted on a sociobiological approach to anthropology to the exclusion of considerations of social environment. There’s also a frothy right-wing dismissal of the “social construction” argument that has found its way to Mead’s work, as some researchers in fields like evolutionary psychology contest the very idea that developmental stages like adolescence are affected by environment at all; this, despite the many comparative studies that have demonstrated the diverse range of adolescent experience across both time and space.
Deborah Beatriz Blum’s new biography, Coming of Age: The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead, is primarily concerned with providing a narrative for understanding how Mead’s interests, friendships, and intellectual training led to Coming of Age in Samoa. In Blum’s account, Mead’s early 20s as a pioneer, provocateuse, and sexually liberated intellectual powerhouse shaped the famous anthropologist in ways that would exert tremendous influence on the social sciences as the century lurched forward. Coming of Age focuses primarily on the period of Mead’s educational life in the social and cultural ferment of the 1920s, leading up to her fieldwork in Samoa. The characterization of Mead and her cohort relies almost exclusively on Blum’s archival mining: she reads Mead’s letters, as well as those by fellow anthropologist (and Mead’s lover) Ruth Benedict, anthropologist-linguist (and Mead’s lover) Edward Sapir, and archaeologist (and Mead’s first husband) Luther Cressman in order to outline the social circle that influenced Mead’s methods and findings in Samoa.
Blum’s book is an exercise in historical dramatization. The primary characters circulate through romantic entanglements that arise from the plot of Mead’s early career, the letters among the four leads serving as gossipy documents animating their lives. The method makes for accessible reading — with the letters reimagined into novelistic scenes, the book keeps a brisk pace. But it also makes it difficult for the author to critically evaluate Mead and her colleagues, primarily because the book unfurls its narrative almost exclusively from within the minds of its subjects. Mead’s interiority dominates here, even with the inclusion of the three other voices, and the view from within her mind induces a troubling biographical tunnel vision.
This marks an unfortunate aspect of Blum’s biography because, while the less-convincing criticisms of Mead limned above have perhaps unfairly pilloried her work, there are legitimate critiques that her biographer might have taken up. Among these are questions about whether “objectivity” is even possible in ethnographic methods. Despite her avowed interest in plumbing Mead’s archive, Blum refrains from thinking reflexively about methodology, hers or Mead’s. By doing so, she neglects to engage with the important shifts in ethnographic methods since the 1990s that have allowed the social sciences to denaturalize the relationship between Objective Researcher and Primitive Subject in qualitative research, a change that necessarily reflects critically on Mead’s approaches. Blum’s methodology also shows its weaknesses in its nonreflexive stance; by taking letters as the gold standard for an individual’s historical significance, Blum risks positioning the subject as an objective expert on herself.
Further, Blum’s treatment of both Mead and her friend and lover Ruth Benedict remind the reader of the extent to which feminism’s first wave is characterized by a political ideology that elevates liberal, individuated personal sovereignty above a common good (as opposed to the collectivist vision of the early socialist feminisms articulated by Emma Goldman and other leftists). As Louise Michele Newman argues in White Women’s Rights (1999), Mead’s work “helped foster a liberal feminist critique of U.S. society, which attacked patriarchy for placing restrictions on women’s expression of sexuality and conceptualized a ‘free’ society as one that permitted women ‘choice’ in how they lived their sexual lives.” In other words, Mead’s achievement might be reframed as allowing white women, to the exclusion of their “primitive” counterparts, to imagine and access a sexually liberated future. Blum takes Mead’s sexual exploits — which do seem like a lot of fun, but also don’t liberate anyone except Mead herself from Protestant social strictures — as a gesture of prescient radicalism toward a sexual revolution instead of what they are: a 23-year-old woman banging all her friends.
A methodological critique of Mead (and of early Western-liberal feminism more generally) centers on the degree to which the ethnographic researcher can consider herself “objective” in any sense. It also rethinks how research on the “primitive” Global South might take Indigenous practices and ways of knowing out of context, and describes how these methods may underappreciate the degree to any given society is hybridized. Mead is explicit that this work is qualitative, based on interviews, and particular to Samoa. But in Blum’s book, early anthropologists’ obsession with “owning” groups of people is never given critical reflection, and this is, at least in part, a problem of both Blum’s method — her overreliance on letters as historically and personally factual — and the genre of biography in which she operates. Describing Mead’s first talk at the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1924, Blum recounts the young researcher’s reaction to the luminaries in the room:
She was eager to see, with her own eyes, the men who were considered the most renowned anthropologists in the world: A. C. Haddon, an expert on the cultures of Melanesia and the author of Head-hunters: Black, White and Brown; and Charles Seligman, the Africa scholar, who used his knowledge of physiology to identify the Bushmen, Pygmies, Negroids, and Hamites, the four distinct races that inhabited the African continent.
[…]
More and more, it was sinking in that each one of these anthropologists had a “people.” Margaret, too, wanted to have a people on whom she could base her own intellectual life.
The form that Blum’s book takes in such moments demonstrates the potential failure of a incautious archival analysis, and of a biographer who too easily accepts Mead’s version of herself, perhaps the hazard of embedding oneself in the correspondence of such a charismatic historical figure. Drawn from Races of Africa (1930), Seligman’s racial phyla described above are hierarchical and emphasize the “Hamitic hypothesis,” which asserts that the major African civilizations are founded by the “Hamites” instead of arising from “Negroid” peoples. The substitution here is marked by an imperialist agenda that appears more coded to us today; early 20th-century readers would have understood “Hamite” to mean “more white” than other African groups. Such racial categories and hierarchies were crucially important to early anthropology as both methodology and object of inquiry, and Mead was very much indebted to a tradition that invented new genres of racialization. Writing uncritically in Mead’s voice, Blum doesn’t reflect on the appalling effects of separating, for example, the “African races” or of simultaneously rewriting history to discount the contributions to civilization of groups considered “black” by early 20th-century readers.
That omission has significance for the feminist politics of Mead’s work, as well as Blum’s biography because these genres of racialization, which have demanded continual renewal at a structural and sociopolitical level across the centuries, emerge in the peculiar sentimentalism of early 20th-century feminist works that sometimes advance the larger imperialist cause. As Laura Wexler recounts in Tender Violence (2000), the work of women photographers, journalists, and anthropologists helped to erase “the violence of colonial encounters in the very act of portraying them.” These portrayals sentimentalized and romanticized their subjects in order to erase the violence of the imperial project. The dominance of this approach can be seen in Mead’s romanticization of her subjects and in her belief that their example might liberate constructions of sexuality for white feminists.
It is important to note that this sentimentalism and the degree to which it was determined by the ethnographic genre in which she chose to work has historical specificity. For this reason, it’s difficult to read Mead as a singular historical figure or even as the trailblazer that Blum fashions for the reader. That Mead believed she could evaluate human subjects without causing any effects at all is a startling claim now rightly seen to be breathtakingly naïve. The practice of field research that Mead undertook in Samoa contributed to a discipline responsible for recordings of Indigenous languages that have been crucial to the language revitalization efforts happening now. The wax cylinder recordings made by anthropologists and housed at the National Museum of the American Indian contribute to the ongoing renewal of languages like Menominee and Omaha. But the anthropological field has had to reflect on its origins, particularly after a series of controversies over whether its methods had negatively impacted “primitive” groups that it studied.
If Mead thought that she could perform research without impacting the groups that she studied, Blum’s reading of Mead’s letters indicates that she also thought she could make her way through any social environment without negatively impacting it. At such moments, Blum’s reading makes Mead seem remarkably callous, insensitive to her friend and lover Ruth Benedict as well as to her first husband Luther Cressman. Blum unknowingly illustrates this midway through the book, when she recreates a scene between Edward Sapir and Benedict. Sapir is the first speaker.
“Margaret and I are lovers,” he said. “No doubt she will tell you. She tells you everything.” […]
When Ruth still didn’t say anything, Edward said, “I don’t understand, though. Just what is her relationship with Luther [Cressman]?”
“Luther?” Ruth paused. “She loves Luther.”
“With you I can be utterly frank,” Edward said. “I do not believe in the love of Luther and Margaret, nor do I think that most observers who know them sincerely believe in it.”
But “Margaret” does believe in it, and strings Sapir along until his attentions become too intense for her. In Blum’s archival imagination, Benedict is devastated by Sapir’s revelation:
Edward’s talk of making love to Margaret was unbearable […] Not that long ago she — Ruth — had loved Edward, wanted him for herself. Margaret knew that. But that’s not what hurt. What hurt was that Edward had experienced the erotic side of Margaret that she, Ruth, had only fantasized about, and lately, at night, those fantasies had come unbidden.
In the logic of the biography, these are Mead’s lovers’ responses to an adventurous woman, a sexual revolutionary. It’s no wonder that the book’s subtitle is “The Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead,” although this could use the addendum, “at the expense of nearly everyone she knew,” or “through interpreting Indigenous sexual practices as she liked.” Mead so clearly found herself to be living the most adventurous life that she might imagine.
This attachment to Mead as a “radical” subject is a part of the cult of personality she developed around herself. She also strongly advocated a notion of individualist liberal politics that allowed her to be insignificant, and even powerless, when she wanted to be. Speaking at a special event with James Baldwin in 1970 (the conversation is transcribed in A Rap on Race) the two argue over the individual’s “responsibility” in the context of social events:
MEAD: Did you bomb those little girls in Birmingham?
BALDWIN: I’m responsible for it. I didn’t stop it.
MEAD: Why are you responsible? Didn’t you try to stop it? Hadn’t you been working?
BALDWIN: It doesn’t make any difference what one’s tried.
MEAD: Of course it makes a difference what one’s tried.
BALDWIN: No, not really.
MEAD: This is the fundamental difference. You are talking like a member of the Russian Orthodox Church … “We are all guilty. Because some man suffers, we are all murderers.”
BALDWIN: No, no, no. We are all responsible.
MEAD: Look, you are not responsible.
Mead prioritizes making the individual insignificant in a scene like the South Seas, where she seeks to “minimize” her own presence. Disputing Baldwin, she lauds the sentiment of individual exception whereby a person can be innocent of the actions of her society. An individual agent can be exceptional for Mead, but she can also be deliberately invisible, as small or as significant as she chooses.
Coming of Age: the Sexual Awakening of Margaret Mead thus leaves us with a number of problems about the status of the individual historical figure, the contested history of anthropology, and the genre of biography. On one hand, in keeping with the tendencies of its form, the biographical representation of Margaret Mead relies, necessarily, on the singularity and virtuosity of its subject. Blum underserves Mead in producing a subject that feels individuated, special, uniquely courageous, and genius. Mead’s behavior, research, and work all have a historical context — Blum, for example, makes much of Mead’s retaining her family name upon her marriage to Luther Cressman in 1923. But the Lucy Stone League, which advocated women keeping their last names at marriage, had been founded in New York in 1921 and, while women rarely used their family name after marriage in the 20s, there was a cultural precedent for it. A number of other famous women — Anita Loos, Isadora Duncan, Edna St. Vincent Millay — had done it as well. Mead, again, isn’t a singular figure, she’s a historical one — but Coming of Age wants only historical sprinklings devoid of the richness of full historical context. The individual emerges as the primary object of a historical inquiry rather than as an actor on a much larger stage, a tendency only exacerbated by studying someone who prioritized the individual as the primary unit of liberation.
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Megan Tusler received her PhD in English from the University of Chicago in 2016, where she worked on American literature, comparative ethnic studies, photography and literature, and critical theory.