Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead studied under Franz Boas at Columbia University and carried his central claim, that adolescence and gender are shaped by culture rather than fixed by biology, into fieldwork of her own. Her 1925 to 1926 fieldwork on the island of Tau in American Samoa became Coming of Age in Samoa, published in 1928, a bestselling account of Samoan adolescence used to argue that the emotional turmoil American teenagers experienced was not a universal fact of human development. She spent most of her career as a curator at the American Museum of Natural History and served as president of the American Anthropological Association in 1960. Her Samoa fieldwork was later challenged by Derek Freeman; the dispute is recorded on that fieldwork's own page.