Letter, Margaret Mead to her grandmother Martha Ramsay Mead discussing her decision to retain her maiden name, 7 December 1923

Reproduction number: A66 (color slide; page 1)
Margaret Mead (1901-1978) was a prominent twentieth-century educator, writer, and lecturer. An anthropologist by occupation, she studied the lives of natives of Samoa, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea. Her first book, "Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization" (New York: Morrow, 1928), which compared the seemingly care-free adolescent years in Samoan culture to this stressful period of development for American teenagers, catapulted her to instant fame. As she went on to research and write about other cultures, she used her anthropological studies as a framework to discuss and analyze American society.
Mead was greatly influenced by the highly educated women in her family, especially her grandmother and mother. In this letter to her grandmother, Martha Ramsay Mead, written shortly after Mead's marriage to her first husband Luther Sheeleigh Cressman (1897-1994) in 1923, Mead mentions her decision to keep her maiden name, a practice she followed through three marriages. In her autobiography, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years, Mead wrote that she made the decision to retain her name based on her "mother's belief that women should keep their own identity and not be submerged, a belief that had made her give her daughters only one given name, so that they would keep their surnames after marriage." (Margaret Mead, "Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years" (New York: Morrow, 1972), 117.)
The papers of Margaret Mead were bequeathed to the Library of Congress upon her death in 1978. The entire collection comprises approximately five hundred thousand items and includes thousands of photographs, more than a thousand pieces of recorded sound tapes and cassettes, and over five hundred reels of motion picture film. The Library of Congress is presently working on a project to digitize and make available over the Internet approximately thirty-two thousand photographs and twenty thousand pages of selected field notes that document her field expedition to study the Balinese in Indonesia and the Iatmul people of Papua New Guinea from 1936 to 1939.