Book Review of *Margaret Mead: A Twentieth-Century Faith*

Arguably the twentieth century’s most well-known American anthropologist, Margaret Mead has been the subject of numerous biographies, including a few memoirs by those close to her, as well as by Mead herself. In Margaret Mead: A Twentieth Century Faith, historian Elesha J. Coffman offers something new by looking at an aspect of Mead that has been little examined: her Christian faith.Right away, Coffman states that Mead’s faith is an inconvenient truth for scholars and biographers, one “better left unmentioned to preserve her anthropological credibility” (v). This biography seems to be a response to Mead’s daughter Mary Catherine Bateson’s observation that the public was more fascinated with her mother’s love life than her faith.By resurfacing Mead’s spirituality, Coffman aims to present a fuller picture of the anthropologist and to make a case for how faith wended its way into Mead’s work and love affairs.

The first two chapters look at Mead’s childhood, education, and marriage to Luther Cressman, while the third turns to Coming of Age in Samoa and Mead’s fateful meeting with Reo Fortune, her second husband. Mead’s sexuality and love life are further explored in Chapter 4, which focuses on Mead and Ruth Benedict’s decades-long relationship. Throughout these chapters, Coffman offers ample evidence of Mead’s religiosity, from the young Mead’s decision to join the Episcopal Church to how faith figured into her romantic relationships. Chapter 4 reveals, for example, that Mead and Benedict wrote to each other using religious metaphors, with Mead likening herself and Benedict to Martha and Mary, respectively, while Benedict saw them as Ruth and Naomi (61). Faith was also point of connection for Mead and first husband Cressman, who was in seminary during their engagement, ordained into the Episcopalian priesthood the year they married, and left the faith shortly after their divorce.

Of these chapters, Chapter 1 “Choosing Church,” is the most crucial in establishing Mead’s formation as a person of faith. Coffman describes Mead’s parents’ academic and religious backgrounds to set up how Mead’s early home life would shape her intellectual and spiritual path. Though the elder Meads, both social scientists, came from Unitarian and Methodist stock, as parents they were decidedly non-religious. Nonetheless, their outlook and values had a Protestant cast; both passed on to their brood the ideals of service and making the world a better place, the expression of which are abundantly clear in Mead’s career.

In spite of her parents, Mead joined the Episcopal Church shortly after her eleventh birthday. For her baptism, the young Mead chose as her godparents two women, Lucia Bell, who had helped bring Mead into the church, and Isabel Lord, a friend of Mead’s mother. In Mead’s selection of Bell and Lord as godparents (Mead herself found it notable that she had no godfathers), Mead’s incipient feminism and spiritual and scholarly aspirations are detectable. Mead, for example, saw in Bell the embodiment of Christian behavior (5), while in Lord she saw a woman of “great erudition and authority who built herself a complete life, elegant, book-filled, and sophisticated” (7).

What was it about church that Mead chose, and what did Mead’s faith consist of? Coffman writes that Mead was drawn to ritual and the aesthetic experience of worship. She preferred liturgy over sermon and valued sacred spaces. Yet ritual alone did not lead Mead to church. In reflecting on her decision to join the Episcopal Church, an older Mead wrote that she sought a church that could give “expression to an already existing faith”—a church that could house her larger, transcendent feelings, rather than a church aimed at making her follow a certain set of beliefs (5). While Mead had her own religious beliefs, Coffman does locate Mead’s faith within the liberal Protestant, modernist Christian tradition. Looking at the year Mead spent at DePauw as an undergraduate, Coffman shows how, despite the Methodist-founded school’s poor fit for Mead, its Mendenhall Lecture series were influential in giving Mead a modernist Christian view.

Throughout the biography, Coffman reveals that Mead’s faith was worldly, centering on service rather than salvation. Guided by a “sense of God’s immanence in all creation and people” (vii), Mead directed her efforts towards making the world a better place. Mead’s idiosyncratic understanding of Christan faith provides insight into why Mead saw no conflict between her Christianity and her bisexuality. Per Coffman, Mead saw her love for Benedict as a true, pure, and God-given form of love  (65-66).

Chapters 5 and 6 look at Mead’s work during World War II and the early postwar years, and in these chapters, Mead appears first and foremost as a secular social scientist, as she was decidedly distanced from the church during the 1940s. Not only was she no longer attending worship, in part out of deference for the Episcopal Church’s then-views on the divorced, but more importantly, she was also less eager to profess her faith in public. Her writings in the 1940s even garnered her criticism that she was hostile to religion. Religion touched her work somewhat in And Keep Your Powder Dry (1942), and in her efforts to promote religious tolerance in the United States after the war, but on the whole, Mead was not eager to identify herself as a practicing Christian during the 1940s.

Chapter 7 looks at Mead’s return to the Episcopal Church in 1955, following her third divorce and a research trip to Manus Island, New Guinea. Along with her renewed church membership, the mid-1950s and early 1960s saw Mead writing for Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christianity and Crisis and joining several interdenominational councils, committees, and religious conferences.

The last three chapters look at Mead as a popular figure, public intellectual, and activist in the 1960s and 70s. In Chapter 8, Coffman pays special attention to Mead’s Redbook column, particularly with an eye for Mead’s thoughts on religion, such as prayer in schools and the ordination of women, as well as Mead’s relationship with Rhoda Metraux. Mead’s involvement in the revision of the Book of Common Prayer, her Yale sermon, and her collection of essays on religion, Twentieth Century Faith: Hope and Survival, are discussed in Chapter 9. Chapter 10 concludes the biography, following Mead to the end of her life; here Coffman looks at Mead’s involvement in anti-nuclear activism and environmental causes, her engagement with the women’s liberation movement, her refusal to stop work despite her cancer diagnosis, and her turn towards faith healing.

Margaret Mead: A Twentieth-Century Faith was written for Oxford University Press’s Spiritual Lives series. However, it is not a biography that solely looks at Mead’s spiritual life, and in depicting Mead as an anthropologist, working mother, public figure, romantic partner, and a Christian, Coffman should be applauded for centering the whole of an individual’s life. In so doing, we see the multiple, intersecting realities, identities, and concerns that marked Margaret Mead. The close attention to the many other aspects of Mead’s life and career, however, causes the biography to veer at times from its thesis of the centrality of Mead’s faith to her becoming.

Additionally, there are questions that could still use more definitive answers as well as claims that could use more inquiry and expansion. The biography is light on how faith shaped Mead’s ethnographic work, though it does suggest that field work changed Mead’s views on faith. As Coffman notes, in Coming of Age in Samoa Mead wrote that the great amount of choice teenagers had when it came to choosing religion in the United States was perhaps one cause of their angst. Coffman writes in Chapter 3 that “Mead’s words in Coming of Age about the shortcomings of Christianity hinted at her growing doubts” (50), but the rest of the chapter does not explore this shift in Mead’s faith. Doing so may help explain Mead’s later reticence about religion, which Coffman also does not fully explain. Another set of questions raised by this biography has to do with the relationship between religion and the academy. In Chapter 6, Coffman tantalizingly writes, “Mead belonged to both cosmopolitan academic and liberal Protestant traditions, but she struggled to reconcile them in the later 1940s” (110). Did Mead not struggle with being cosmopolitan academic and a liberal Protestant before? And if so, what was it about the late 1940s that made it difficult for her to reconcile these two identities? Coffman’s comment opens up an avenue for inquiry regarding crosscurrents between twentieth-century American Protestantism and American social science, but it is an inquiry that this biography does not take up.

The biography’s title, Margaret Mead: A Twentieth-Century Faith, a nod to Mead’s 1972 essay collection, also raises the question of what made Mead’s faith a twentieth-century faith, exactly. Coffman names major events in the twentieth century—World War I, World War II, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, Civil Rights—and their impact on Mead, but she is more successful in showing how they shaped Mead’s activism and professional concerns rather than how they interacted with her faith. One wonders if Mead can be a case study for how liberal Protestants approached the problems of their time, and if so, other lives, other points of comparison, would be useful. Coffman’s earlier monograph, The Christian Century, traced the rise of mainline Protestantism, and one almost expects a greater discussion in this biography of the debates within American Protestantism during Mead’s lifetime. How did Mead engage, for example, with the rise of fundamentalism? A few of the larger debates and questions that appear at the denominational and institutional level do appear in those chapters where we see Mead engaging the most directly with religion, but a stronger articulation of how Mead fit into those conversations—her place in the larger context of Protestantism’s evolution in the twentieth century—would help bring out what makes Mead’s faith especially telling.

Despite these lingering questions, it remains that Coffman’s reconstruction of Margaret Mead’s spiritual life is a commendable intervention in our popular understanding of Margaret Mead. Like her faith, Margaret Mead cannot be easily categorized, and readers will walk away from this biography not only with a reminder of Mead’s complex identity, but also with a view into what kinds of existences were possible within liberal Protestantism.