Margaret Mead, a woman I admire

Margaret Mead was an American anthropologist born on December 16, 1901 in Philadelphia and died in 1978. In her ethnographic research of the 1920s and 1930s, she challenged the sexist biologist view that prevailed in the social sciences according to which the sexual division of the work in the modern family was due to an innate difference between the behavior of men and women. In his comparative study Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies Mead (1935) she introduced the revolutionary idea that the human species is enormously malleable, sexual roles and behaviors vary according to socio-cultural contexts. It was thus a precursor in the use of the concept "gender" widely used later in feminist studies.