Although she had some differences with the leaders of the feminist movement, she spoke out strongly for the rights of women.

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Mead remained active until the very end of her life. In the summer of 1978 she organized a conference at which she, her ex-husband Bateson, and their daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, also an anthropologist, all gave presentations. Mead succumbed to cancer a few months later, on November 15. She was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Mead's Bisexuality and "the Isolation of Secrecy"

Such was the public persona of Margaret Mead. What only the people closest to her knew was that this very visible and highly respected woman who wrote extensively about aspects of behavior, including sexuality, was herself bisexual.

Among the most important relationships of her life was that with Ruth Benedict. In two books on Benedict, An Anthropologist at Work: The Writings of Ruth Benedict (1959) and Ruth Benedict (1974), and in her own autobiography, Blackberry Winter (1972), Mead represents her as an inspiring mentor and a dear and valued friend but says nothing of their romance. Furthermore, Mead, who edited Benedict's writings after the death of the latter in 1948, included examples of Benedict's poetry--without revealing that some of the love poems had been written for and about her.

Mead's only child, Mary Catherine Bateson, did write about the women's love in her 1984 memoir With a Daughter's Eye.

The relationship began during Mead's graduate school years and continued through her three marriages. Bateson calls Benedict and Gregory Bateson "the two people [Mead] loved most fully and abidingly, exploring all the possibilities of personal and intellectual closeness." She recalls that her mother always kept two special photographs on display, one of Benedict on her mantel and one of Gregory Bateson on her bureau.

Bateson further notes that "through the major part of her adult life, [Mead] sustained an intimate relationship with a man and another with a woman. This double pattern must have been very satisfying and sustaining, but at the same time it created a kind of isolation, an isolation of secrecy."

Although Mead was known as an outspoken person, it is not surprising that she chose to remain silent on the subject of her bisexuality. As a young woman planning a career in academia in the 1920s, she was entering what was still largely a man's world in which obstacles to progress for women were already numerous.

Even after achieving prominence, however, Mead still worried about the effect of scandal on her career. Bateson recalls telling her mother about a girl who had had a crush on her during a high school year abroad. Mead responded by giving Bateson a copy of Rosamund Lehmann's novel of bisexual love Dusty Answer (1927), but also warned her against becoming involved in a scandal since it could harm Mead professionally.

For the January 1975 issue of Redbook Mead wrote an essay entitled "Bisexuality: A New Awareness" (reprinted in Aspects of the Present, 1980). Mead spoke with the voice of a dispassionate observer, but her words take on poignancy when one knows that she was in fact writing about herself.

Mead begins her article with the statement, "The time has come, I think, when we must recognize bisexuality as a normal form of human behavior." She goes on to assert that "a very large number of human beings--probably a majority--are bisexual in their potential capacity for love."

Mead supports her argument with references to the cultures of Asia and ancient Greece, the use of gender confusion as a device in Elizabethan plays, the "frankly bisexual" associations of creative people such as members of the Bloomsbury Group and the artistic community of the Left Bank in Paris around the time of World War I, and to the marriage of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson.

Mead calls for everyone to have "the right to be a person who is unique and who has a social identity that is worthy of dignity and respect" and to be able "to elect single blessedness, to choose companionship with a member of their own or the opposite sex [or] to decide to live a fully communal life."

That Mead, one of America's best known and most admired women, chose to write from the "isolation of secrecy," however, clearly reveals her fear that the hoped for time when bisexuality is recognized as normal had not yet come, at least in her own culture.

Anthropology, the first of the social science disciplines to take sexuality--and particularly homosexuality--seriously as a field of intellectual inquiry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has achieved a new impetus in the post-Stonewall era.

Although until recently rejected by most sexologists as a distinct sexual identity, bisexuality is gradually becoming recognized and studied as such.

The Bloomsbury circle's open acceptance of erotic license and hostility toward social convention are important elements in the history of homosexuality among the English upper classes in the first half of the twentieth century.

Homosexuality is writ large in English Renaissance literature, but its inscription is only rarely direct and unambiguous.

Ethnography, the description of indigenous non-European peoples by Euro-Americans, has been a safe way for writers to discuss homosexuality as a normal, non-pathological behavior.

Beginning in the 1960s increasing numbers of ethnographers have conducted research on glbtq issues, spurred by the premise that studies of diverse sexualities are crucial to understanding human behavior and culture.

The earliest etiologies--or theories of causation--of homosexuality date from European antiquity, but the search for a universal etiology has intensified as homosexual behavior has come under the scrutiny of science.

"Indigenous" is a concept important in the history of anthropology, particularly as it regards anthropology's treatment of same-sex sexual relations.

Glbtq prisoners are frequently victimized both by their fellow inmates and by the prison system itself, including indifferent or predatory guards and inequitable regulations.

Among the first American women to study anthropology, Ruth Benedict rose to the top of her profession; her "patterns of culture" theory explains human behavior and concepts of deviance as cultural constructs.

Best known for her relationship with Virginia Woolf and for her scandalous love affairs, Vita Sackville-West was a prolific author of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.

Finnish sociologist, anthropologist, and moral philosopher, Edward Westermarck wrote a number of classic books on sexuality and sexual mores.