Coming of age : the sexual awakening of Margaret Mead / Deborah Beatriz Blum.
Material type:
TextPublisher: New York : Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2017Edition: First editionDescription: x, 322 pages : illustrations ; 24 cmContent type: - text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9781250055729
- 1250055725
- 301.092 23
- GN21.M36 B58 2017
| Item type | Current library | Collection | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Book
|
Bedford Public Library Biography | Biography | BIO MEAD BLU | Available | 32500001730564 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
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 Mead's life, before she became famous, revealing the story that she hid from the world - during her lifetime and beyond.
Includes bibliographical references (pages [267]-312) and index.
"Focuses on five years in Mead's young life when she began to question the traditional attitudes toward sex, courtship and marriage that dominated the early 20th century. The story begins in 1921, when Mead is a young woman of twenty and a student at Barnard College in New York City. Conventional enough to accept the role society has handed to her, and defiant enough to rise up against it, she struggles to find her own path. Life begins to change as she experiences new friendships and many firsts, including marriage and an affair. In 1925, following her interest in anthropology, Mead takes a step that shocks both family and colleagues. She decides to go alone to Samoa to study how girls in this very different culture mature into women. There on a tiny island in the South Pacific, with an ocean between her and the people she loves, she begins to understand how the invisible chains of society can imprison one's body and mind. Mead's voyage of self-discovery is both painful, exciting and enlightening. She returns from her fieldwork ready to do something no woman before her has dared to do: write with frankness and clarity about the sexual awakening of young girls. And America, it turns out, is ready to hear what she has to say. Drawing on letters, diaries and memoirs, Blum reconstructs the colorful and dramatic life of one of the most provocative thinkers of the 20th century"-- Provided by publisher.