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78-642: Lying-in is the term given to the European forms of postpartum confinement , the traditional practice involving long bed rest before and after giving birth . The term and the practice it describes are old-fashioned or archaic , but lying-in used to be considered an essential component of the postpartum period , even if there were no medical complications during childbirth . A 1932 publication refers to lying-in as ranging from two weeks to two months. It also suggests not "getting up" (getting out of bed post-birth) for at least nine days and ideally for 20 days. Care

156-490: A metonym for postpartum social visits. Women received congratulatory visits from friends and family during the period; among many traditional customs around the world, the desco da parto was a special form of painted tray presented to the mother in Renaissance Florence . The many scenes painted on these trays show female visitors bringing presents, received by the mother in bed, while other women tend to

234-402: A Daughter's Eye , Mary Catherine Bateson strongly implies that the relationship between Benedict and Mead was partly sexual. Mead never openly identified herself as lesbian or bisexual . In her writings, she proposed that it is to be expected that an individual's sexual orientation may evolve throughout life. She spent her last years in a close personal and professional collaboration with

312-602: A Western context. Despite its feminist roots, Mead's work on women and men was also criticized by Betty Friedan on the basis that it contributes to infantilizing women. In 1926, there was much debate about race and intelligence . Mead felt the methodologies involved in the experimental psychology research supporting arguments of racial superiority in intelligence were substantially flawed. In "The Methodology of Racial Testing: Its Significance for Sociology," Mead proposes that there are three problems with testing for racial differences in intelligence. First, there are concerns with

390-421: A celebration called 'Twelve mornings' (known as 十二朝). From this day onwards, Cantonese families with a new baby usually share their joy through giving away food gifts, while some families mark the occasion by paying tribute to their ancestors . When the "month is fulfilled" ( manyue ) after 30 days, the mother receives relatives and friends who bring special foods such as Chinese red eggs . In parts of India it

468-512: A close friend of her instructor Ruth Benedict . However, Sapir's conservative stances about marriage and women's roles were unacceptable to Mead, and as Mead left to do field work in Samoa , they separated permanently. Mead received news of Sapir's remarriage while she was living in Samoa. There, she later burned their correspondence on a beach. Between 1925 and 1926, she was in Samoa from where on

546-579: A cognate with the English word " quarantine "). It is practised in parts of Latin America and amongst in communities in the United States. It is described as "intergenerational family ritual that facilitated adaptation to parenthood", including some paternal role reversal . Margaret Mead This is an accepted version of this page Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978)

624-509: A different cultural pattern. In brief, her comparative study revealed a full range of contrasting gender roles: Deborah Gewertz (1981) studied the Chambri (called Tchambuli by Mead) in 1974–1975 and found no evidence of such gender roles. Gewertz states that as far back in history as there is evidence (1850s), Chambri men dominated the women, controlled their produce, and made all important political decisions. In later years, there has been

702-813: A diligent search for societies in which women dominate men or for signs of such past societies, but none has been found (Bamberger 1974). Jessie Bernard criticised Mead's interpretations of her findings and argued that Mead's descriptions were subjective. Bernard argues that Mead claimed the Mundugumor women were temperamentally identical to men, but her reports indicate that there were in fact sex differences; Mundugumor women hazed each other less than men hazed each other and made efforts to make themselves physically desirable to others, married women had fewer affairs than married men, women were not taught to use weapons, women were used less as hostages and Mundugumor men engaged in physical fights more often than women. In contrast,

780-803: A few minutes' walk from any house. In art, the immensely popular scene of the Birth of Jesus technically shows the Virgin Mary, who reclines on a couch in most medieval examples, lying-in, but in famously non-ideal conditions. More ideal images of lying-in in well-off households are represented in Birth of the Virgin and Birth of John the Baptist . These are generally given contemporary settings, and differ little from other images that are purely secular, especially those on desci da parto . Postpartum confinement Postpartum confinement refers both to

858-452: A positivist stance, Orans's assessment of the controversy was that Mead did not formulate her research agenda in scientific terms and that "her work may properly be damned with the harshest scientific criticism of all, that it is ' not even wrong '." On the whole, anthropologists have rejected the notion that Mead's conclusions rested on the validity of a single interview with a single person and find instead that Mead based her conclusions on

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936-649: A resting – a lengthy lie-in or lying-in period, a period of seclusion, as women need to rest in order to heal, yet it may mean that they are neglected. One meta-review of studies concluded, "There is little consistent evidence that confinement practices reduce postpartum depression ." Postpartum confinement is well-documented in China, where the tradition is known as "Sitting the month": 坐月子 " Zuò yuè zi " in Mandarin or 坐月 "Co5 Jyut2" in Cantonese. The earliest record of

1014-734: A very different light than they do in Freeman's work. Indeed, the immense significance that Freeman gave his critique looks like 'much ado about nothing' to many of his critics. While nurture-oriented anthropologists are more inclined to agree with Mead's conclusions, some non-anthropologists who take a nature-oriented approach follow Freeman's lead, such as Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker , biologist Richard Dawkins , evolutionary psychologist David Buss , science writer Matt Ridley , classicist Mary Lefkowitz . In her 2015 book Galileo's Middle Finger , Alice Dreger argues that Freeman's accusations were unfounded and misleading. A detailed review of

1092-470: Is a type of herbal medicine in which the steam from the boiled plants is inhaled. Ya dong involves herbal medicine taken internally. Thai immigrants to Sweden report using the steam bath to heal after childbirth, although the correct ingredients are not easy to find. Thai Australians who had had caesarian sections felt that they did not need to – in fact, ought not to – undergo these rituals. The term used in English, now old-fashioned or archaic ,

1170-527: Is also possible for the woman to be cared for her by her own mother or a hired female worker known as a "confinement nanny" (陪月). In Hong Kong and Taiwan, the mother and baby sometimes spend the month in special postpartum confinement clinics rather than at home. In ancient China , women of certain ethnic groups in the South would resume work right after birth, and allow the men to practice postpartum confinement instead. (See Couvade ). Traditionally in China,

1248-512: Is called jaappa (also transliterated japa ); in North India and Pakistan, sawa mahina ("five weeks"). Most traditional Indians follow the 40-day confinement and recuperation period also known as the jaappa (in Hindi). A special diet to facilitate milk production and increase hemoglobin levels is followed. Sex is not allowed during this time. In Hindu culture, this time after childbirth

1326-434: Is claimed to be important to dry their body immediately afterwards with a clean towel and their hair properly using a hair dryer. It is also claimed to be important for women to wrap up warm and minimize the amount of skin exposed, as it was believed that they may catch a cold during this vulnerable time. The custom of confinement advises new mothers to choose energy and protein-rich foods to recover energy levels, help shrink

1404-725: Is credited with the pluralization of the term " semiotics ". In 1948 Mead was quoted in News Chronicle as supporting the deployment of Iban mercenaries to the Malayan Emergency , arguing that using Ibans (Dyaks) who enjoyed headhunting was no worse than deploying white troops who had been taught that killing was wrong. In later life, Mead was a mentor to many young anthropologists and sociologists, including Jean Houston , author Gail Sheehy , John Langston Gwaltney , Roger Sandall , filmmaker Timothy Asch , and anthropologist Susan C. Scrimshaw , who later received

1482-422: Is featured in many dishes, as it is believed that it can remove the 'wind' accumulated in the body during pregnancy. Meat-based soup broths are also commonly consumed to provide hydration and added nutrients. In Shanxi, new mothers consume high-quality millet porridge and soup made from chickens at specific ages. In Guangdong province , new mothers are barred from visitors until the baby is 12 days old, marked by

1560-749: Is mentioned in her 1984 biography by Jane Howard . On Manus, she studied the Manus people of the south coast village of Peri. "Over the next five decades Mead would come back oftener to Peri than to any other field site of her career.' Mead has been credited with persuading the American Jewish Committee to sponsor a project to study European Jewish villages, shtetls , in which a team of researchers would conduct mass interviews with Jewish immigrants living in New York City. The resulting book, widely cited for decades, allegedly created

1638-599: Is still much cultural variation throughout Melanesia, especially in the large island of New Guinea . Moreover, anthropologists often overlook the significance of networks of political influence among females. The formal male-dominated institutions typical of some areas of high population density were not, for example, present in the same way in Oksapmin , West Sepik Province , a more sparsely-populated area. Cultural patterns there were different from, say, Mount Hagen . They were closer to those described by Mead. Mead stated that

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1716-510: Is still observed in parts of northern China, such as Shanxi province . After 100 days, the Hundred Days Banquet (百日宴) is held to celebrate the baby reaching 100 days old. In southern China, the confinement period is significantly shorter, and usually lasts 30 days. Because Chinese society is patrilocal , women observing postpartum confinement are traditionally cared for by their mother-in-law. Although in contemporary times it

1794-486: The American Museum of Natural History , New York City, as assistant curator. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1929. Mead was married three times. After a six-year engagement, she married her first husband (1923–1928), Luther Cressman , an American theology student who later became an anthropologist. Before departing for Samoa in 1925, Mead had a short affair with the linguist Edward Sapir ,

1872-624: The Arapesh people , also in the Sepik, were pacifists , but she noted that they on occasion engage in warfare. Her observations about the sharing of garden plots among the Arapesh, the egalitarian emphasis in child rearing, and her documentation of predominantly peaceful relations among relatives are very different from the "big man" displays of dominance that were documented in more stratified New Guinea cultures, such as by Andrew Strathern . They are

1950-544: The Jewish mother stereotype , a mother intensely loving but controlling to the point of smothering and engendering guilt in her children through the suffering she professed to undertake for their sakes. Mead worked for the RAND Corporation, a US Air Force military-funded private research organization, from 1948 to 1950 to study Russian culture and attitudes toward authority. As an Anglican Christian, Mead played

2028-560: The Society for Applied Anthropology in 1950 and of the American Anthropological Association in 1960. In the mid-1960s, Mead joined forces with the communications theorist Rudolf Modley in jointly establishing an organization called Glyphs Inc., whose goal was to create a universal graphic symbol language to be understood by any members of culture, no matter how "primitive." In the 1960s, Mead served as

2106-473: The uterus , and for the perineum to heal. This is also important for the production of breastmilk . Among the traditionally recommended galactogogues were rich porridge, fish soup, and hard-boiled eggs. Sometimes, new mothers only begin to consume special herbal foods after all the lochia is discharged. In Guangdong, a common dish is pork knuckles with ginger and black vinegar as pork knuckles are believed to help replenish calcium levels in women. Ginger

2184-565: The 1970s, standard NHS postpartum care involved 10 days in hospital, with the newborns taken to the nursery overnight, ensuring the mothers were well rested by the time they returned home. A caudle was a hot drink, well documented in British cuisine , particularly in Victorian times, as suitable for invalids and new mothers. So much was it associated with the visits of friends to see the new baby that "cake and caudle" or "taking caudle" became

2262-615: The 1985 Margaret Mead Award for her research on cultural factors affecting public health delivery. In 1972, Mead was one of the two rapporteurs from NGOs to the UN Conference on the Human Environment. In 1976, she was a key participant at UN Habitat I , the first UN forum on human settlements. Mead died of pancreatic cancer on November 15, 1978, and is buried at Trinity Episcopal Church Cemetery, Buckingham , Pennsylvania. Mead's first ethnographic work described

2340-564: The Arapesh were also described as equal in temperament, but Bernard states that Mead's own writings indicate that men physically fought over women, yet women did not fight over men. The Arapesh also seemed to have some conception of sex differences in temperament, as they would sometimes describe a woman as acting like a particularly quarrelsome man. Bernard also questioned if the behaviour of men and women in those societies differed as much from Western behaviour as Mead claimed. Bernard argued that some of her descriptions could be equally descriptive of

2418-764: The Axis powers to try and foster peace between the two sides. She was curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History from 1946 to 1969. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1948, the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1975, and the American Philosophical Society in 1977. She taught at The New School and Columbia University, where she

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2496-526: The Chinese custom of postpartum confinement dates back over 2,000 years ago in the Book of Rites , where it was known as y uè nèi (月内). Postpartum confinement is based on traditional Chinese medicine , with a special focus on eating foods considered to be nourishing for the body and helping with the production of breastmilk . Women are advised to stay indoors for recovery from the trauma of birth and for feeding

2574-517: The Samoan islanders whom Mead had depicted in such utopian terms were intensely competitive and had murder and rape rates higher than those in the United States. Furthermore, the men were intensely sexually jealous, which contrasted sharply with Mead's depiction of "free love" among the Samoans. Freeman's book was controversial in its turn and was met with considerable backlash and harsh criticism from

2652-792: The Vice President of the New York Academy of Sciences . She held various positions in the American Association for the Advancement of Science , notably president in 1975 and chair of the executive committee of the board of directors in 1976. She was a recognizable figure in academia and usually wore a distinctive cape and carried a walking stick. Mead was a key participant in the Macy conferences on cybernetics and an editor of their proceedings. Mead's address to

2730-459: The ability to validly equate one's test score with what Mead refers to as racial admixture or how much Negro or Indian blood an individual possesses. She also considers whether that information is relevant when interpreting IQ scores. Mead remarks that a genealogical method could be considered valid if it could be "subjected to extensive verification." In addition, the experiment would need a steady control group to establish whether racial admixture

2808-418: The anthropologist Rhoda Metraux with whom she lived from 1955 until her death in 1978. Letters between the two published in 2006 with the permission of Mead's daughter clearly express a romantic relationship. Mead had two sisters, Elizabeth and Priscilla, and a brother, Richard. Elizabeth Mead (1909–1983), an artist and teacher, married the cartoonist William Steig , and Priscilla Mead (1911–1959) married

2886-617: The anthropology community, but it was received enthusiastically by communities of scientists who believed that sexual mores were more or less universal across cultures. Later in 1983, a special session of Mead's supporters in the American Anthropological Association (to which Freeman was not invited) declared it to be "poorly written, unscientific, irresponsible and misleading." Some anthropologists who studied Samoan culture argued in favor of Freeman's findings and contradicted those of Mead, but others argued that Freeman's work did not invalidate Mead's work because Samoan culture had been changed by

2964-588: The author Leo Rosten . Mead's brother, Richard, was a professor. Mead was also the aunt of Jeremy Steig . During World War II, Mead along with other social scientist like Gregory Bateson and Ruth Benedict, took on several different responsibilities. In 1940, Mead joined the Committee for National Morale. In 1941, she also contributed to an essay that was released in the Applied Anthropology, which created strategies to help produce propaganda with

3042-515: The baby. Equivalent gifts in contemporary culture include baby showers and push presents . No fixed term of lying-in is recommended in Renaissance manuals on family life (unlike in some other cultures), but documentary records suggest that the mother was rarely present at the baptism , which in Italian cities was usually held within a week of the birth at the local parish church , normally

3120-465: The biggest problem of all. Similarly, Stephen J. Gould finds three main problems with intelligence testing in his 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man that relate to Mead's view of the problem of determining whether there are racial differences in intelligence. In 1929, Mead and Fortune visited Manus , now the northernmost province of Papua New Guinea, and traveled there by boat from Rabaul . She amply describes her stay there in her autobiography, and it

3198-427: The community. Mead also found that marriage is regarded as a social and economic arrangement in which wealth, rank, and job skills of the husband and wife are taken into consideration. Aside from marriage, Mead identified two types of sex relations: love affairs and adultery. The exceptions to these practices include women married to chiefs and young women who hold the title of taupo, a ceremonial princess, whose virginity

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3276-573: The controversy by Paul Shankman, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2009, supports the contention that Mead's research was essentially correct and concludes that Freeman cherry-picked his data and misrepresented both Mead and Samoan culture. A survey of 301 anthropology faculty in the United States in 2016 had two thirds agreeing with a statement that Mead "romanticizes the sexual freedom of Samoan adolescents" and half agreeing that it

3354-413: The foreword to Coming of Age in Samoa , Mead's advisor, Franz Boas , wrote of the book's significance: Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, very good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways. In this way, the book tackled

3432-942: The general public. Orans points out that Freeman's basic criticisms, that Mead was duped by ceremonial virgin Fa'apua'a Fa'amu, who later swore to Freeman that she had played a joke on Mead, were equivocal for several reasons. Mead was well aware of the forms and frequency of Samoan joking, she provided a careful account of the sexual restrictions on ceremonial virgins that corresponds to Fa'apua'a Fa'auma'a's account to Freeman, and Mead's notes make clear that she had reached her conclusions about Samoan sexuality before meeting Fa'apua'a Fa'amu. Orans points out that Mead's data support several different conclusions and that Mead's conclusions hinge on an interpretive , rather than positivist , approach to culture. Orans went on to point out concerning Mead's work elsewhere that her own notes do not support her published conclusive claims. Evaluating Mead's work in Samoa from

3510-530: The gifts presented to the new mother in Renaissance Florence was a desco da parto , a special form of painted tray. Equivalent presents in contemporary culture include baby showers and push presents . Special foods included caudle , a restorative drink. "Taking caudle" was a metonym for postpartum social visits. In Latin American countries, it is called la cuarentena ("forty days,"

3588-409: The globe, including in high-income countries in the recent past. The length of time a woman is secluded or rested varied across different countries and the principles underpinning this isolation (to heal vs. being unclean) also seem to differ greatly. After the period of seclusion there is often a ceremony to purify women to publicly accept them back into daily life. The literature supports the concept of

3666-659: The inaugural conference of the American Society for Cybernetics was instrumental in the development of second-order cybernetics . Mead was featured on two record albums published by Folkways Records . The first, released in 1959, An Interview With Margaret Mead , explored the topics of morals and anthropology. In 1971, she was included in a compilation of talks by prominent women, But the Women Rose, Vol. 2: Voices of Women in American History . She

3744-558: The integration of Christianity in the decades between Mead's and Freeman's fieldwork periods. Eleanor Leacock traveled to Samoa in 1985 and undertook research among the youth living in urban areas . The research results indicate that the assertions of Derek Freeman were seriously flawed. Leacock pointed out that Mead's famous Samoan fieldwork was undertaken on an outer island that had not been colonialized. Freeman, meanwhile, had undertaken fieldwork in an urban slum plagued by drug abuse, structural unemployment, and gang violence. Mead

3822-551: The intent of raising national morale. In 1942, Mead served as the executive director of the Committee on Food Habits of the National Research Council, which served to gather data on American citizens ability to get food and their overall diet during the war. During World War II, Mead also served on the Institute for Intercultural Studies (IIS), whose prime objective was to research the “national character” of

3900-452: The life of Samoan girls and women on the island of Tau in the Manu'a Archipelago in 1926. The book includes analyses of how children were raised and educated, sex relations, dance, development of personality, conflict, and how women matured into old age. Mead explicitly sought to contrast adolescence in Samoa with that in America, which she characterized as difficult, constrained, and awkward. In

3978-404: The mother and child were kept separate from the rest of the household. The mother was not permitted to bathe, wash her hair, or weep, because these activities were believed to put the mother at risk of falling ill by catching cold and affect the quality of her breast milk. Nowadays, however, new mothers may wash their hair or take a bath or shower infrequently during the postpartum period, but it

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4056-464: The mother and the baby. Human newborns are so underdeveloped that pediatricians such as Harvey Karp refer to the first three months as the "fourth trimester". The weeks of rest while the mother heals also protect the infant as it adjusts to the world , and both learn the skills of breastfeeding . Almost all countries have some form of maternity leave . Many countries encourage men to take some paternal leave , but even those that mandate that some of

4134-456: The new mother by unburdening her of responsibilities and ensuring she rests and eats shows up in wildly diverse places". These customs have been documented in dozens of academic studies, and commonly include support for the new mother (including a release from household chores), rest, special foods to eat (and ones to avoid), specific hygiene practices, and ways of caring for the newborn. Martha Wolfenstein and Margaret Mead wrote in 1955 that

4212-403: The newborn baby. The diets and traditions involved with postpartum confinement greatly vary across different Chinese cultural regions. The length of Chinese postpartum confinement ranges anywhere between 28 to 100 days. Although medical opinion in China today generally recommends a confinement period of at least 42 days. In ancient China, the confinement period lasted for 100 days. This custom

4290-432: The past, during the samchil-il period, geumjul (taboo rope) made with saekki and various symbolic objects, such as chili peppers (for a boy) and coal (for a girl), was hung over the gate to denote the childbirth and restrict visitor access. New mothers used to be encouraged to lie in a warm bed near the fire for 30 days, a practice known as yu fai . This has been adapted into a form of Thai massage . Kao krachome

4368-476: The postpartum period meant a "woman can be cherished and pampered without feeling inadequate or shamed". The 2016 review that quoted them cites customs from around the world, from Biblical times to modern Greece: From the data it seems that women were housebound for a number of days after the birth and the length of this period of seclusion varied by caste or ethnic group [in Nepal]. This is a phenomenon found across

4446-502: The question of nature versus nurture, whether adolescence and its associated developments were a difficult biological transition for all humans or whether they were cultural processes shaped in particular societies. Mead believed childhood, adolescence, gender, and sex relations were largely driven by cultural practices and expressions. Mead's findings suggested that the community ignores both boys and girls until they are about 15 or 16. Before then, children have little social standing within

4524-419: The return boat she met Reo Fortune , a New Zealander headed to Cambridge , England, to study psychology . They were married in 1928, after Mead's divorce from Cressman. Mead dismissively characterized her union with her first husband as "my student marriage" in her 1972 autobiography Blackberry Winter , a sobriquet with which Cressman took vigorous issue. Mead's third and longest-lasting marriage (1936–1950)

4602-506: The rituals of the Episcopal Church to fit the expression of religion she was seeking. Mead studied one year, 1919, at DePauw University , then transferred to Barnard College . Mead earned her bachelor's degree from Barnard in 1923, began studying with professors Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict at Columbia University , and earned her master's degree in 1924. Mead set out in 1925 to do fieldwork in Samoa . In 1926, she joined

4680-422: The shared parental leave must be used by the father (" father's quota ") acknowledge that the mother needs time off work to recover from the childbirth and deal with the postpartum physiological changes . A 2016 American book describes the difficulties of documenting those "global grandmotherly customs" but asserts that "like a golden rope connecting women from one generation to the next, the protocol of caring for

4758-667: The sum of her observations and interviews during her time in Samoa and that the status of the single interview did not falsify her work. Others such as Orans maintained that even though Freeman's critique was invalid, Mead's study was not sufficiently scientifically rigorous to support the conclusions she drew. In 1999, Freeman published another book, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research , including previously unavailable material. In his obituary in The New York Times , John Shaw stated that Freeman's thesis, though upsetting many, had by

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4836-435: The time of his death generally gained widespread acceptance. Recent work has nonetheless challenged Freeman's critique. A frequent criticism of Freeman is that he regularly misrepresented Mead's research and views. In a 2009 evaluation of the debate, anthropologist Paul Shankman concluded: There is now a large body of criticism of Freeman's work from a number of perspectives in which Mead, Samoa, and anthropology appear in

4914-679: The village of Peri, the film records how the role of the anthropologist has changed in the forty years since 1928. After her death, Mead's Samoan research was criticized by the anthropologist Derek Freeman , who published a book arguing against many of Mead's conclusions in Coming of Age in Samoa . Freeman argued that Mead had misunderstood Samoan culture when she argued that Samoan culture did not place many restrictions on youths' sexual explorations. Freeman argued instead that Samoan culture prized female chastity and virginity and that Mead had been misled by her female Samoan informants. Freeman found that

4992-469: Was Benjamin Spock , whose subsequent writings on child rearing incorporated some of Mead's own practices and beliefs acquired from her ethnological field observations which she shared with him; in particular, breastfeeding on the baby's demand, rather than by a schedule. Mead also had an exceptionally close relationship with Ruth Benedict , one of her instructors. In her memoir about her parents, With

5070-495: Was 24 hours. Many Indian subcultures have their own traditions after birth. This birth period is called Virdi (Marathi), which lasts for 10 days after birth and includes complete abstinence from puja or temple visits. In Pakistan, postpartum tradition is known as sawa mahina ("five weeks"). In Persian culture it is called chilla , i.e. " forty days ". Korean women spend samchil-il (three seven days, 21 days) in confinement, receiving sanhujori (postpartum care). In

5148-496: Was a professor of finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania , and her mother, Emily (née Fogg) Mead, was a sociologist who studied Italian immigrants. Her sister Katharine (1906–1907) died at the age of nine months. That was a traumatic event for Mead, who had named the girl, and thoughts of her lost sister permeated her daydreams for many years. Her family moved frequently and so her early education

5226-450: Was actually affecting intelligence scores. Next, Mead argues that it is difficult to measure the effect that social status has on the results of a person's intelligence test. She meant that environment (family structure, socioeconomic status, and exposure to language, etc.) has too much influence on an individual to attribute inferior scores solely to a physical characteristic such as race. Then, Mead adds that language barriers sometimes create

5304-449: Was an American cultural anthropologist , author and speaker, who appeared frequently in the mass media during the 1960s and the 1970s. She earned her bachelor's degree at Barnard College of Columbia University and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia. Mead served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975. Mead was a communicator of anthropology in modern American and Western culture and

5382-616: Was an adjunct professor from 1954 to 1978 and a professor of anthropology and chair of the Division of Social Sciences at Fordham University 's Lincoln Center campus from 1968 to 1970, founding their anthropology department. In 1970, she joined the faculty of the University of Rhode Island as a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Anthropology. Following Ruth Benedict's example, Mead focused her research on problems of child rearing, personality, and culture. She served as president of

5460-570: Was careful to shield the identity of all her subjects for confidentiality, but Freeman found and interviewed one of her original participants, and Freeman reported that she admitted to having willfully misled Mead. She said that she and her friends were having fun with Mead and telling her stories. In 1996, the author Martin Orans examined Mead's notes preserved at the Library of Congress and credits her for leaving all of her recorded data available to

5538-512: Was directed by her grandmother until, at age 11, she was enrolled by her family at Buckingham Friends School in Lahaska , Pennsylvania. Her family owned the Longland farm from 1912 to 1926. Born into a family of various religious outlooks, she searched for a form of religion that gave an expression of the faith with which she had been formally acquainted, Christianity. In doing so, she found

5616-753: Was ideologically motivated. Mead's Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies became influential within the feminist movement since it claimed that females are dominant in the Tchambuli (now spelled Chambri ) Lake region of the Sepik basin of Papua New Guinea (in the western Pacific) without causing any special problems. The lack of male dominance may have been the result of the Australian administration's outlawing of warfare. According to contemporary research, males are dominant throughout Melanesia . Others have argued that there

5694-571: Was often controversial as an academic. Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution . She was a proponent of broadening sexual conventions within the context of Western cultural traditions. Margaret Mead, the first of five children, was born in Philadelphia but raised in nearby Doylestown, Pennsylvania . Her father, Edward Sherwood Mead,

5772-646: Was once used to name maternity hospitals , for example the General Lying-In Hospital in London. A 1932 Canadian publication refers to lying-in as ranging from two weeks to two months. These weeks ended with the re-introduction of the mother to the community in the Christian ceremony of the churching of women . Lying-in features in Christian art , notably Birth of Jesus paintings. One of

5850-442: Was provided either by her female relatives (mother or mother-in-law), or, for those who could afford it, by a temporary worker called the monthly nurse . These weeks ended with the re-introduction of the mother to the community in the Christian ceremony of the churching of women . When lying-in was a more common term, it was used in the names of several maternity hospitals , for example the General Lying-In Hospital in London. Until

5928-406: Was required. Mead described Samoan youth as often having free, experimental, and open sexual relationships, including homosexual relationships, which was at odds with mainstream American norms around sexuality. In 1970, National Educational Television produced a documentary in commemoration of the 40th anniversary Mead's first expedition to New Guinea. Through the eyes of Mead on her final visit to

6006-488: Was to the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson with whom she had a daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson , who would also become an anthropologist. She readily acknowledged that Bateson was the husband she loved the most. She was devastated when he left her and remained his loving friend ever afterward. She kept his photograph by her bedside wherever she traveled, including beside her hospital deathbed. Mead's pediatrician

6084-425: Was traditionally considered a period of relative impurity ( asaucham ), and a period of confinement of 10–40 days (known as purudu ) was recommended for the mother and the baby. During this period, she was exempted from usual household chores and religious rites. The father was purified by a ritual bath before visiting the mother in confinement. In the event of a stillbirth , the period of impurity for both parents

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