Editing Margaret Mead (section)

==Personal life==
[[File:Margaret Mead 1951 SLNSW FL16371554.jpg|thumb|Dr. Margaret Mead, Australia, September 1951]]

Mead was married three times. After a six-year engagement,<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.gregbryant.com/grogbrat/steens79/cressmanmead.html|title = Luther Cressman on Margaret Mead}}</ref> she married her first husband (1923–1928), [[Luther Cressman]], an American theology student who later became an anthropologist. Before departing for Samoa in 1925, Mead had a short affair with the linguist [[Edward Sapir]], a close friend of her instructor [[Ruth Benedict]]. However, Sapir's conservative stances about marriage and [[gender role|women's roles]] were unacceptable to Mead, and as Mead left to do field work in [[Samoa]], they separated permanently. Mead received news of Sapir's remarriage while she was living in Samoa. There, she later burned their correspondence on a beach.<ref>{{cite book| last = Darnell| first = Regna| title = Edward Sapir: linguist, anthropologist, humanist| publisher = University of California Press| year = 1989| location = Berkeley| page = 187| isbn = 978-0-520-06678-6}}</ref> Between 1925 and 1926, she was in [[Samoa]] from where on the return boat she met [[Reo Fortune]], a New Zealander headed to [[Cambridge]], England, to study [[psychology]].<ref>{{Cite web | url=https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mead/field-manus.html | title=Manus: Childhood Thought – Margaret Mead: Human Nature and the Power of Culture &#124; Exhibitions – Library of Congress| website=[[Library of Congress]]| date=November 30, 2001}}</ref> They were married in 1928, after Mead's divorce from Cressman. Mead dismissively characterized her union with her first husband as "my student marriage" in her 1972 autobiography ''Blackberry Winter'', a [[sobriquet]] with which Cressman took vigorous issue. Mead's third and longest-lasting marriage (1936–1950) was to the British anthropologist [[Gregory Bateson]] with whom she had a daughter, [[Mary Catherine Bateson]], who would also become an anthropologist. She readily acknowledged that Bateson was the husband she loved the most. She was devastated when he left her and remained his loving friend ever afterward. She kept his photograph by her bedside wherever she traveled, including beside her hospital deathbed.<ref name="Howard" /> {{rp|428}}

Mead's [[pediatrician]] was [[Benjamin Spock]],<ref name="libraryofcongress"/> whose subsequent writings on child rearing incorporated some of Mead's own practices and beliefs acquired from her [[ethnology|ethnological]] field observations which she shared with him; in particular, [[breastfeeding]] on the baby's demand, rather than by a schedule.<ref>Moore 2004: 105.</ref> 
[[File:Margaret Mead (1972).jpg|thumb|Margaret Mead (1972)]]

Mead also had an exceptionally close relationship with [[Ruth Benedict]], one of her instructors. In her memoir about her parents, ''With a Daughter's Eye'', Mary Catherine Bateson strongly implies that the relationship between Benedict and Mead was partly sexual.<ref name="MCBateson">Bateson 1984; Lapsley 1999.</ref>{{rp|117–118}} Mead never openly identified herself as [[lesbian]] or [[Bisexuality|bisexual]]. In her writings, she proposed that it is to be expected that an individual's [[sexual orientation]] may evolve throughout life.<ref name="MCBateson" />

She spent her last years in a close personal and professional collaboration with the anthropologist [[Rhoda Metraux]] with whom she lived from 1955 until her death in 1978. [[Love letter|Letters]] between the two published in 2006 with the permission of Mead's daughter<ref>Caffey and Francis 2006.</ref> clearly express a romantic relationship.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2016/03/02/the-greatest-lgbt-love-letters-of-all-time/|title=The greatest LGBT love letters of all time|website=pinknews.co.uk|date=March 2, 2016}}</ref>

Mead had two sisters, Elizabeth and Priscilla, and a brother, Richard. Elizabeth Mead (1909–1983), an artist and teacher, married the cartoonist [[William Steig]], and Priscilla Mead (1911–1959) married the author [[Leo Rosten]].<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=QegaBoxPOrsC&q=leo+rosten+william+steig&pg=PA88|isbn=978-0-307-77340-1|title=Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle|last=Banner|first=Lois W.|publisher=Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group|year=2010}}</ref> Mead's brother, Richard, was a professor. Mead was also the aunt of [[Jeremy Steig]].<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=6d4N9PLu2JIC&q=Mary+Catherine+Bateson+jeremy+steig&pg=PA131|isbn=978-0-7914-5334-6|title=Understanding Early Adolescent Self and Identity: Applications and Interventions|last1=Brinthaupt|first1=Thomas M.|last2=Lipka|first2=Richard P.|publisher=SUNY Press|year=2002}}</ref>