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In jargon-free, almost lyrical prose, Coming of Age described how a cultural web of ritual, taboo, kinship and history formed the typical Samoan personality. Growing up is "so easy, so simple," she found, because "Samoa is a place where no one plays for very high stakes, suffers for his convictions or fights to the death. Caring is slight." The book became a bestseller and basic reading for introductory social-science courses; it is still in print. Though the work broke no theoretical ground, Margaret Mead's conclusion that the Samoan teen-ager was calm and free from trauma provided solid proof that "adolescence is not necessarily a specially difficult period in a girl's life" and, by extension, that so-called "human nature" is almost infinitely plastic.
By the time the book came out, Margaret Mead was at work on her second field trip, to the Admiralty Islands of New Guinea. She has made eleven visits to far-off South Sea islands,-first studying peoples relatively untouched by modern civilization, then returning to gauge their dramatic postwar changes. She was one of the first anthropologists to use still and motion pictures to record the customs and habits of primitive societies. She was also one of the first to develop the subscience of semiotics, or the study of how men communicate by gestures.
To the dismay of her more cautious peers, she has always been ready to apply her anthropological findings to the contemporary world. During World War II, for example, she wrote a booklet telling G.I.s how to get along with British girls (because of cultural differences, she warned, they were apt to think that an American's playful advances were meant more seriously than he intended). "Margaret sees herself as the mother of us all," says Child Psychologist Martha Wolfenstein, one of her longtime collaborators.
Fierce Women. Zestfully efficient, Dr. Mead regularly goes to Broadway plays and Sunday Episcopal Church services, advises nearly 30 young anthropological field workers, serves on some seven boards and committees, writes a monthly column for Redbook magazine, and keeps 15 assistants hopping in her crowded tower office at the Natural History museum, where she is curator of ethnology. For all the familiarity of her views, she remains an original, with a capacity to shock and surprise. An enthusiast of interdisciplinary studies, she has organized countless sessions that have brought anthropologists together with men of widely varying disciplines. Although not enamored of the S.D.S., she argues that "our colleges are 400 years out of date." A fighter for equal opportunity, she favors a coed draft, although she would not give guns to women because "they are too fierce." Recently she has been recommending that Americans accept their society's evolution toward two different types of marriage: "individual marriage" for young couples not intending to have children and "parental marriage" for couples desiring offspring.