Margaret Mead Papers and the South Pacific Ethnographic Archives ...

1974 Ruth Benedict (New York: Columbia University Press. 180 pp.)
1975 Published with Ken Heyman World Enough: Rethinking the Future (Boston:
Little, Brown. 218 pp.)
1977 Letters from the Field, 1925-1975 (New York: Harper & Row. 343 pp.)
1980 Published with Rhoda Bubendey Métraux Aspects of the Present (New York:
Morrow. 320 pp.)
Scope and Content Note
The papers of Margaret Mead span the years 1838-1980, and bulk largest from about 1911, when
her earliest writings begin, to 1978, the year of her death. Mead's personal and professional
activities are documented by correspondence, field data, research material, office files,
publications, papers of colleagues, and other matter. The collection is divided into twenty-two
series, which reflect, as far as possible, Mead's own filing order. Similar material may be found in
more than one series and inconsistencies in filing are not uncommon due to the complexity of
Mead's schedule and the frequency with which her office assistants (mostly students) came and
went over a span of nearly fifty years.
Mead's early life, education, and interests can be traced in diaries and notebooks, 1911-1920, and
in other material included in the Family Papers series. Papers from her college years at DePauw,
Barnard, and Columbia, 1919-1925, include class notes, exercises, writings, memorabilia, and
yearbooks. Correspondence with her immediate family, which included Mead's paternal
grandmother, Martha Adaline Ramsay Mead, indicate the cultural environment in which Mead was
raised. Exchanges with her parents, Edward Sherwood Mead and Emily Fogg Mead, are frequent
and informative, focusing on family matters and occasionally on contemporary events. Writings,
research material, teaching files, general correspondence, clippings, and other items exist for these
and other family members. The earliest material in the Family Papers, dated in the 1830s, consists
primarily of the correspondence of Mead's ancestor Fanny Fogg Clary. Other significant
nineteenth-century family letters are found in the papers of Mead's grandparents, Giles F. Mead
and Martha Mead, both of whom were educators. For later years, there is correspondence with
many other family members including Mead's husbands Luther Sheeleigh Cressman, Reo Fortune,
and Gregory Bateson, daughter Mary Catherine Bateson, sisters Priscilla Mead Rosten and
Elizabeth Mead Steig, brother Richard Ramsay Mead, and aunt Fanny Fogg McMaster.
The Special Correspondence series, 1914-1979, includes letters sent and received primarily from
professional colleagues who were also associated with Mead on a personal level. Collaboration on
projects and publications or shared interest in anthropological field areas often characterized these
relationships. Among the correspondents are Jane Belo, Ruth Benedict, Edith Cobb, Wilton Dillon,
Marie Eichelberger, Milton H. Erickson, Erik H. Erikson, Lenora Foerstel, Lawrence K. Frank,
Geoffrey Gorer, Barbara Honeyman Heath, Margaret Lowenfeld, Rhoda Bubendey Métraux, G.
Frederick Roll, Lola Romanucci-Ross, Theodore Schwartz, and Martha Wolfenstein. Additional
papers of many of these individuals are found elsewhere in the collection, notably in the South
Pacific Ethnographic Archives or the Papers of Colleagues series described below.
Mead's own arrangement of the General Correspondence series, 1909-1979, has been retained so
that readers can follow her work chronologically while being able to locate letters from specific
correspondents in the alphabetical file within each year or group of years. Some correspondents
of particular relevance to Mead's life and work were college roommates and friends such as Léonie
Adams, Leah Josephson Hanna, Eleanor Pelham Kortheuer, Louise M. Rosenblatt, and Katharine
Rothenberger; important contacts in anthropological fieldwork such as Sir Frederick Beaumont
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