The Public Anthropology of Margaret Mead: Redbook, Women�s Issues, and the 1960s

• Autores: Paul Shankman
• Localización: Current anthropology: A world journal of the sciences of man, ISSN 0011-3204, Nº. 1, 2018, págs. 55-73
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Margaret Mead was anthropology�s most significant public voice during the twentieth century. Her monthly columns in Redbook magazine (1962�1978), which had a subscription base of more than 3 million women in the 1960s, were perhaps her most important public forum. These columns, coauthored with Rhoda Métraux, were sometimes in brief question-and-answer format but more often were lengthy thought pieces. An analysis of these longer columns on women�s issues from 1962 through 1970 reveals Mead�s thinking about women�s roles during this era of change. Mead was an advocate of abortion rights and no-fault divorce, yet on other issues she was not an opinion leader, supporting public norms on premarital sex, motherhood, and marriage while criticizing feminists of the period. She was also reluctant to discuss discrimination against women as a group until 1970. To understand Mead�s views, her Redbook columns can be read in tandem with the broader history of public opinion during this period and her own personal career. This article concludes with a discussion of Mead�s success as a public intellectual in this forum and why her kind of public anthropology is unlikely to be replicated by anthropologists today.