Margaret Mead was twenty-three when she embarked on her first expedition to Samoa where she studied the development of adolescent girls. Between 1925 and 1939, she made five field trips to the South Pacific and studied eight different cultures, publishing works on most of them.
The first of her ground-breaking books, Coming of Age in Samoa was published in 1928 followed by Growing up in New Guinea in 1930. Through these best-sellers, written in a highly accessible style, Margaret Mead brought anthropology to ordinary people for the first time. She was passionate about what she believed the western world could learn from developing societies and in 1944 she established the Institute for Intercultural Studies. Her daughter Mary Catherine was born in 1940 and delivered by Dr Spock.
