Coming of Age in Samoa

The groundbreaking classic detailing Margaret Mead’s first field work at age 23, establishing Mead’s core insights into childhood and culture that challenged and changed our view of life.  Rarely do science and literature come together in the same book.  When they do — as in Charles Darwin’s  On the Origin of Species,  for example — they become classics, quoted and studied by scholars and the general public alike.
Margaret Mead accomplished this remarkable feat not once but several times, beginning with  Coming of Age in Samoa.  It details her historic journey to American Samoa, taken when she was just twenty-three, where she did her first fieldwork. Here, for the first time, she presented to the public the idea that the individual experience of developmental stages could be shaped by cultural demands and expectations. Adolescence, she wrote, might be more or less stormy, and sexual development more or less problematic in different cultures.  Mead’s revolutionary book, dedicated to the girls of Tau, was one of the first studies to pay attention to girls’ lives. Her keen observations contain many ideas that are still powerful today—that sexuality is culturally-shaped, that adolescence need not be stressful, and that the lives of adolescent girls are worthy of attention and respect.
Now this groundbreaking, beautifully written work as been reissued for the centennial of Mead’s birth, featuring introductions by Mary Pipher, Ph.D. ( Reviving Ophelia ) and by Mead’s daughter, Mary Catherine Bateso ( Composing a Life ).