Under the direction of her mentor, the anthropologist, Franz Boaz, Margaret Mead sought to study whether adolescence was a "period of mental and emotional distress for the growing girl as inevitably as teething is a period for the small baby? Can we think of adolescence as a time in the life history of every girl which carries with it symptoms of conflict and stress as surely as it implies a change in the girls' body." Many contemporaries believed that the "storm and stress" of adolescence was biologically determined following a three-volume study of largely male adolescents by American psychologist G. Mead's work had taken shape against a backdrop of broader anxieties about American youth generally and female adolescents specifically who were openly challenging social and sexual mores. In Mead's book that became a best seller and unleashed a storm of controversy, she argued that it was cultural factors rather than biological forces that caused adolescents to experience emotional and psychological stress. In 1928, Martha Mead published Coming of Age in Samoa, an anthropological work based on field work she had conducted on female adolescents in Samoa.
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