Coming of age : the sexual awakening of Margaret Mead / Deborah Beatriz Blum.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Blum, Deborah, 1954- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Mead, Margaret, 1901-1978.

Women anthropologists--United States--Biography.

Women anthropologists.

United States.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

x, 322 pages : illustration ; 25 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Thomas Dunne Books, 2017.

Summary:

"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, she has a chance encounter that 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."--Jacket.

Contents:

Shooting star

One for my lady love

Girls, unmarried as yet

A course in old maids

The promise of his birth

A glass full of cyanide

Paper dolls

Hell's Kitchen

A cottage on Cape Cod

A woman of spare effects

The Rideau Canal

They dance for rain

Her head was spinning

Guardian angel

The old king must die

A second honeymoon

Ariel

Hotel Pennsylvania

A need for secrecy

Quicksilver love

The telegram

A ceremonial virgin

A bonfire on the beach

A practical joke

Stranger from another planet

The arena has always been about blood

A hopeless muddle.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [309]-312) and index.

ISBN:

9781250055729

1250055725

OCLC:

947146085