Margaret Mead was born in Philadelphia. Her father was an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, and her mother a sociologist and feminist political activist. At 18, Mead began studying anthropology, met and married her first husband, a fellow student named Luther Cressman. After graduating, she continued her education at Columbia University, earning her Ph.D. in 1929. In 1925, Mead went to her first fieldwork in Samoa. Intrigued by the nature vs. nurture argument, she wanted to explore adolescent behavior – if this period in life is universally stressful or an outcome of cultural upbringing. She published her observations in the book, Coming of Age in Samoa, reviewing her believes in cultural determinism rather than the common conception at the time of genetic determinism. While in Samoa, she met Reo Fortune, a student from New Zealand. On her return, Mead divorced her first husband and re-married in the same year, though this marriage did not last long as well. In 1926, Mead joined the American Museum of Natural History in NYC as an assistant curator. Over the next 52 years, she served in various positions, including associate curator, curator of ethnology, and curator emeritus. Along with her work at the museum, Mead also took other responsibilities. She was a professor at Columbia University and at The New School, the Vice President of the New York Academy of Sciences, and chair of the Division of Social Sciences at Fordham University, where she founded their anthropology department. Mead was appointed president of the Society for Applied Anthropology in 1950, as president of the American Anthropological Association in 1960, and was elected as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1976, at the age of 72. In her research, Mead focused on the nonliterate peoples of Oceania, studying cultural and psychological aspects, such as natural character, culture change, and the cultural conditioning of sexual behavior. Mead is credited for changing the studying method of human culture. She was a pioneer in examining sexual behavior and claimed that personality characteristics, particularly the differences between men and women, are shaped by cultural conditioning. In her arguments, she laid the foundation of anthropological feminism and inspired the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Mead was ahead of her time not only in the anthropology field but also in her personal views. She was a loud advocate for many social issues, such as women’s rights, race relations, sexual morality, drug abuse, population control, world hunger, nuclear proliferation, and environmental pollution. She believed that motherhood and a career do not contradict. She claimed that people’s sexual orientation could change and evolve throughout life, and she was suspected to be involved in romantic relationships with women. Mead has died at the age of 77 from pancreatic cancer. Read more...

Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, the fifth of eight children of two former enslaved people. At the age of 3, the family moved to Eatonville, Florida – an all-black town. Later, Hurston will set many of her stories in Eatonville, describing it as a place where African-Americans live independently with no white oppression. She attended the local school until the age of 13, but after her mother had died and her father remarried, she was sent to boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida, for a few months. On her return, Hurston had to finance herself to complete her education, so she worked in a series of menial jobs, including a maid for an actress in the traveling Gilbert and Sullivan group. In 1917, at the age of 26, Hurston attended the high school division of Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, to resume her formal education. She presented herself as a 16 years old teenager, claiming that she was born in 1901. Afterward, she continued to claim she is ten years younger than she was. After receiving her high school diploma, she enrolled at Howard University and then moved to NYC to study anthropology at Barnard College under Franz Boas. Hurston arrived in NYC during the Harlem Renaissance, and her apartment was a popular gathering spot for artists such as the poet Langston Hughes and actress and singer Ethel Waters. Around that time, Hurston had her first literary success, publishing a play and a short story at the journal – Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life journal. At 37, after earning her Bachelor’s degree, Hurston continued to graduate studies at Columbia University, where she researched the African-Americans in the South. For a few years, she traveled to Florida and Georgia, focusing on various forms of culture such as hoodoo, literature, folklore, and Negro music. By 1935, Hurston published several articles and short stories, a novel, and a folklore collection of her findings. In 1936, she traveled to Haiti and Jamaica, where she studied cultural and spiritual rituals, which she documented in the book “Tell My Horse.” In addition to her field research, Hurston worked for the Federal Writer’s Project as a faculty member of North Carolina College for Negroes, and on the staff of the Library of Congress. In the late 1940s, she lived in Puerto Cortés, Honduras, research the poly-ethnic African ancestry of the residence and their creole cultures. Hurston dedicated her life to documenting black culture, publishing dozens of folklore collections, novels, essays, plays, short stories, poems, and an autobiography. Sadly, she never received the attention or financial reward for her work. In her last decade, Hurston lived in poverty, working as a freelance writer and maid. She lived in a welfare home when she suffered a stroke and passed away when she is 69 years old. Her remains were buried in an unmarked grave. Read more...