Portal:Philadelphia/Selected biography/March 2008

Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the '60s and '70s. She was both a populariser of the insights of anthropology into modern American and western life, and also a respected, if controversial, academic anthropologist. Her reports about the purportedly healthy attitude towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures amply informed the '60s "sexual revolution". At the end of her career, her propositions were &mdash; albeit controversially &mdash; challenged by a fellow anthropologist and literate members of societies on whom she had long before studied and reported. Mead was a champion of broadened sexual mores within a context of traditional western religious life. Perhaps unexpectedly, in view of her famously unconventional views as to the desirability of adjusting traditional family patterns to suit modern times, she remained to her life's end a conventional Anglican Christian and indeed took a considerable part in the drafting of the 1979 American Book of Common Prayer.